The Avant-Garde for Beginners

My colleague Josh Corey has been temporarily felled by some dread illness, and I've just been told I'm going to be pressed into service tomorrow to cover a class session introducing the idea of the avant-garde.  Thank god I'm an old bastard, now, and have a general storehouse of notes on all literary topics.  I'll be bodging something together out of sections of two old essays of mine, "The Death of the Critic" (from Louis Armand's book Avant-Post, now viewable in its entirety online) and "The Avant-Garde in Babel," which appeared in Action Yes (you can find it online, along with the much-superior essay to which it responds).

I've cut down some passages and done some re-arranging of bits and pieces. Here, in the event you're interested, they are.

Modified Passages from "The Death of the Critic"


1. The Avant-Garde as Linguistic Skepticism

A classic definition of avant-gardism, one that seems to serve as a kind of accepted folk-wisdom among experimental poets in our time, was articulated by Renato Poggioli in his 1968 study The Theory of the Avant-Garde.  Poggioli’s idea of the avant-garde, which is essential but not sufficient for my purposes, proposes that avant-gardism proceeds from the assumption that languages and systems of expression are, by their nature, entropic.  Avant-garde writing is, in this view, an inevitable reaction to “the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communication spoils the quality of the expressive means.”  For Poggioli, the “conventional habits” of expression in a bourgeois, capitalist society are subject to a “degeneration,” and the role of the avant-garde must be renewal.

This idea does not originate with Poggioli, but derives from a long tradition of thinking about experimental art, much of it from the era of the historical avant-garde itself.  Much of what Poggioli has to say, for example, was already present in Victor Shklovsky’s seminal article of 1917, “Art as Technique.”  Here, Shklovsky presents the problem of linguistic entropy as a problem of ever-decreasing experiential returns: “If we start to examine the general laws of perception,” he writes,

we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.  Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us.

In this view, ordinary life in modern society is inherently a matter of alienation, not merely from one’s labor, but from one’s every action: “...life is reckoned as nothing.  Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”  If, as Shklovsky claims, “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” then the technique of art must be “to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception...” 

2. Historical Examples of Linguistic Skepticism Predating the Avant-Garde

One irony of Victor Shklovsky’s status as a kind of patron saint of the avant-garde is that the examples he chooses to illustrate his idea of art as the defamiliarization of experience are not drawn from the powerful currents of avant-garde practice that flowed through Russia in 1917. Instead, Shklovsky derives his most extended and convincing examples from classic nineteenth-century Russian writers such Tolstoy and Gogol.

Also, skepticism about language’s ability to remain fresh and retain meaning was already present in the late eighteenth century (ix), the period in which Schiller and Goethe wrote:

All dilettantes are plagiarizers. They sap the life out of and destroy all that is original and beautiful in language and in thought by repeating it, imitating it, and filling up their own void with it. Thus, more and more, language becomes filled up with pillaged phrases and forms that no longer say anything...

3. The Avant-Garde as Institutional Skepticism


Some thinkers hold that if the avant-garde is to be understood as something distinct from the artistic and literary traditions that preceded it, it must possess some quality or propose some project other than defamiliarization and linguistic regeneration.  Jochen Schulte-Sasse follows the Peter Bürger of Theory of the Avant-Garde when he maintains that this quality is to be found in the avant-garde’s questioning of the institutions of art.  Schulte-Sasse begins with the premise that the late-nineteenth century Aesthetic movement was predicated on notions of aesthetic disinterest and autonomy.  While the movement constituted a kind of critique of the bourgeois, utilitarian world, it was a dead-end in that it removed art from the world of power.  Art became otherworldly, incapable of intervening in civil society, and its critique of capitalist values became a matter of an impotent refusal rather than a force for active intervention.  As Schulte-Sasse puts it,

Aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect on the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience permitted the avant-garde to clearly recognize the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art ...  For [Peter] Bürger, then, the development of the avant-garde has nothing to do with a critical consciousness about language… [F]or him the turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, its comprehension of its own social status.  The historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution “art” and the mode in which autonomy functions. 

The avant-garde, in this view, turned against the institutions of art (literary forms of publication, art galleries, museums, good taste and conniseurship, etc.) and the theory of art (autonomous art for art's sake) that underwrote those institutions.  It is in this respect, Schulte-Sasse says, that the avant-garde differed from Modernism:

Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter the institutionalized commerce with art.  The social roles of the modernist and the avant-garde are, thus, radically different.

The carefully unpurchasable, deliberately unbeautiful nature of much avant-garde work can be taken as signs of the Bürger/Schulte-Sasse thesis in action.

A Passage Adapted from "The Avant-Garde in Babel" 

The Bäckström Schema

The four or five terms for experimental art and literature that Per Bäckström refers to in his essay on the different forms of experimental art and literature in different national traditions are modernism, avant-gardism, vanguardia (and its variants in the different Romance languages), and postmodernism.

Bäckström sees modernism as a term used in the Germanic and Anglo-American traditions to indicate an aesthetically experimental kind of art that defines itself by its rejection of popular culture’s kitschiness and clichés.

The avant-garde, in the precise usage of German theorists like Peter Bürger, refers to a movement that combined aesthetic and political radicalism, seeking to regenerate life by eliminating the boundary between art and life.  In this view the avant-garde is less worried about maintaining a distance from popular culture than is modernism.

Although there has been much ink spilled in arguing over the definition of postmodernism, Bäckström finds its most useful definition to be one based on its complex relationship to modernism and popular culture.  Postmodernism contains within itself the formal experimentalism of modernism, but it also refutes modernism’s distaste for pop culture.

Vanguardia and its variants are terms from the Romance languages that refer to a range of experimental literary and artistic activity, including both anti-pop-cultural forms and politicized forms.

The overall field depicted would be that of artistic experimentalism in general, and one could plot the co-ordinates of the movements designated by the Bäckström’s terms thusly:

Wit and Experimental Poetry

Nester’s Complaint

Daniel Nester first became a minor god in my pantheon back in 2003, when his book of poems about the legendary glam/anthemic rock band Queen came out.  Last year he blew off the dust that had been collecting on his angelic wings, when his essay about getting out of the (fucking awful) New York poetry-scene came out in The Morning News.  A couple of days ago, he further burnished those wings when he complained on his blog about the narrow range of topics discussed in the demimonde of contemporary American poetry, a list that includes, among a few other things, “the literary feud news peg editorial” and “MFA hand-wringing."  “Can we all assign ourselves a topic to write about?” he asked, yearning for a little range and variety in discussion. 

When I read Nester’s post, I’d just emerged from a seminar room where I’d been talking about Coleridge’s aesthetics, which meant, among other things, that I’d been tossing around some of those grand old aesthetic categories — the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque.  One of my students had observed that no one seems to talk about poetry in terms of the particular kinds of beauty it pursues, a comment that rang true.  So I dropped an idea into Nester’s comment stream — why not talk about some of the effects of contemporary poetry in terms of some of the old aesthetic categories?  The ones that seemed appropriate to the dominant poetic modes of our time didn’t seem like the big ones (beauty, the sublime), and while I’m convinced there’s a huge body of work that is, essentially, picturesque, this isn’t really a body of work I can get excited about.  But another set of terms — Joseph Addison’s categorization of the different kinds of verbal wit — seemed pertinent enough to some of the more interesting currents in contemporary American poetry.  Why not see how contemporary poetry looks through the old Addisonian telescope?  There followed a comments-stream silence, people (perhaps unsurprisingly — I mean, one thing you can kind of count on in contemporary poetry is people not caring about the history of literary criticism and theory before, say, the middle of the twentieth century).  But I’m intrigued enough to give it a try myself.

True, False, and Mixed Wit

Addison sketched out his schema of the varieties of  wit in the the May 11^th,  1711 issue of  The Spectator.  Addison took inspiration from a distinction he stumbled across in the writings of John Locke between judgment and wit: judgment, for Locke, was the capacity for discerning fine differences, whereas wit was a capacity for finding similarities.  Hence, Locke concluded, the tittering wits of London were unlikely to have much good judgment; while the sage and sober men of judgment were unlikely to crack a smile at a bon mot — the latter being a prospect I find just a little bit terrifying.  Addison praises Locke, then elaborates on the notion of wit as the capacity to find similarities, telling us that there’s more to it than just noticing that one’s mistresses’ eyes, being bright, are like the sun:

his is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader. These two properties seem essential to wit, more particularly the last of them. In order therefore that the resemblance in the ideas be wit, it is necessary that the ideas should not lie too near one another in the nature of things; for where the likeness is obvious, it gives no surprise. To compare one man's singing to that of another, or to represent the whiteness of any object by that of milk and snow, or the variety of its colors by those of the rainbow, cannot be called wit, unless, besides this obvious resemblance, there be some further congruity discovered in the two ideas that is capable of giving the reader some surprise. Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit.

It’s a pretty good definition, as Addision himself isn’t too shy to mention, saying it “comprehends most of the species of wit, [such] as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams, visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion: as there are many other pieces of wit (how remote soever they may appear at first sight from the foregoing description) which upon examination will be found to agree with it.”  John Donne’s famous extended comparison of two separated lovers as the two arms of a compass, in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” certainly fits the bill as a poem of wit.  Here, the center, unmoving arm of the compass represents the woman left behind, and the other arm represents the man who returns.  The surprising resemblance is that found between the compass and (shall we say) a certain physiological effect of the prospect of reunion on the returning, male lover.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as it comes home.

The Motion Picture Association of America might label a film of the poem PG-13, but Addison would apply the far more civilized label “wit.”  Or, more precisely, he’d label Donne’s poem a piece of “true wit,” since wit, for Addison, can be either true or false.

True wit, in this view, involves a substantial resemblance of ideas (the drawn-in compass really does have a similarity to the man’s anatomy), while false wit involves only a resemblance of words, or other verbal elements.  “As true wit consists in the resemblance and congruity of ideas,” says Addison, false wit takes many forms: “sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggerel rhymes; sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes of whole sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars.”  So: if the John Donne of “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” is a true wit, the George Herbert of “Easter Wings” is just some kind of asshole.  So are punsters.  I think I’m with Addison on puns — I mean, no one likes the guy who steps to you at the coffee machine and says “You know why mountains hear all your secrets? Huh huh?  Because they have mountaineers! Get it? ‘Mountain’ ‘ears’? Mountaineers! Haw haw haw!”  (This actually happened to me, and no jury would have convicted me if I’d hurled a cup of scalding java at the man).

There’s a middle ground, too, of middling worth, as far as Addison is concerned.  Between the resemblance of ideas in true with and the verbal resemblances of false wit lies “mixed wit,” a species of wit combining resemblance of ideas with verbal resemblance.  Such wit, says Addison, “is a composition of pun and true wit, and is more or less perfect as the resemblance lies in the ideas or the words: its foundations are laid partly in falsehood and partly in truth: reason puts in her claim for one half of it, and extravagance for the other.”

Wit and the English Compromise

Why, one wonders, does Addison, in 1711, hold up a wit based on ideas, reason, and resemblance of things in life over a wit based on verbal or phonetic cleverness without reference to the truth of the resemblance in life.  Long story short, one can find the explanation in the social role of journals like The Spectator in eighteenth century England.  More so than in any other European nation (with the possible exception of the Netherlands), the English were seeing a rise in trade, commerce, and finance, and a consequent rise of a bourgeois class without ties to the old landed aristocratic families.  At the end of the seventeenth century England was developing a mercantile society as vibrant as any in Europe, with fortunes being made in the trade of textiles, paper, and metals, but it was the Financial Revolution of the 1690s that really allowed a new elite group, based on trade and finance rather than land, to emerge.  The 1690s saw the founding of the stock market, the Bank of England, and the national debt, the last of which gave unprecedented power and influence to investors in public credit.  There was a new branch of the elite out there, a sober bunch of people who’d clawed their way up through prudence and calculation.  In this, they were unlike the bon-vivant aristocrats, inheritors of privilege.

Fortunately for England, there were no real legal barriers to the mixing of this new elite with the established one, and soon enough an amalgamated elite of bourgeois and aristocrats were in mixing together (what happens when such a mixing doesn’t occur, and the vital interests of new and old elites clash, can be seen in the events in France at the end of the eighteenth century).

The role of Addison’s various journals in this context was, essentially, to find a cultural ground in which these different elites could forge something like a common identity.  This is why so much of Addison’s energy is spent defining taste (and why the eighteenth century is sometimes called “the age of taste”): if bloodlines no longer marked out elite status, something else had to, and taste was eminently suitable: it was exclusive, but could be acquired with effort and expense.  Despite its gatekeeper-of-elite-status function, taste seemed neutral enough with regard to what had been the divisive issues of history.  I mean, the essays on Milton in The Spectator are all about form, and tasteful lines — they’re devoid of mention of the whole Puritan/Anglican/Catholic contretemps that so animated Milton's imagination.  In this context, the idea of true wit can be seen as a kind of compromise between the rational, hard-nosed, distrusting-of-mere-play viewpoint of the early commercial and financial bourgeoisie, and the more playful and aesthetic world of the hereditary landed classes.  It’s all more complicated, but that’s the basic outline, and I’m guessing no one really wants to hear much more about the amalgamating social elites of England circa 1711 anyway.  So: on to contemporary poetry and the forms of wit!

Wit and Experimental Poetry

I’m really in no position to make a claim as large as I’m about to make, but that’s not going to stop me from making it.  The claim is this: the more likely a poet is to be identified with experimentalism, or linguistic innovation, the more likely he or she is to be a poet of what Addison would call false or mixed, rather than true, wit — because the poet is more likely to be drawing attention to language as language, and less likely to be oriented toward statements about the resemblance of things in the world.  (Mixed wit points in both directions at once).  I don’t mean to say that I take Addison’s valuation of one kind of wit over another at face value.  In fact, I think most mixed wit tends to excite me a lot more than most of what Addison would call true wit, in the form of metaphors and the like.

One poet I admire immensely, Harryette Mullen, is often described as both experimental and as witty (by, among others, me).  But what would Addison think?  Surely he’d look at many of her lines as examples of false wit, as word play with no larger point behind it.  The line “as silverware as it were,” say, from the poem “Wipe that Simile Off Your Aphasia” gives a witty phonetic resemblance between “silverware” and “was it were,” but doesn’t make much of a statement about anything in particular.  But what about the verbally playful prose-poems for which she is best known?  Here’s one, in its entirety:

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.

So what have we got, wit-wise?  Well, there’s the pun on petticoats “giving him the slip” — where slip refers to lingerie and to a kind of escape.  This is followed right away by the reference to “loose lips,” which is bound to the previous statement loosely, with only the similarity in sound between “slip” and “ship” (an absent but implied word here, as it is loose lips that sink ships).  We then get another bit of verbal play in the reference to the place “where she was kissed, and told,” in which we can hear a reference to the old saying “don’t kiss and tell.”  This is reinforced by the notion of the “Pillow talk-show,” a kind of portmanteau-ing of “pillow talk” and “talk show.”  So we’ve got quite a bit of verbal resemblances between phrases in the poem and platitudes/sayings outside it.  But does is there anything that Addison would see as a resemblance in idea, anything like Donne’s compass arms?  There’s some sort of implied statement lurking here about the making public of private eros, but the poem isn’t really referential enough to deal strongly in those resemblances in ideas that Addison thought of as essential to true wit.

Another one of Mullen’s prose poems, “Denigration,” takes on weightier issues, and does so with wit, for sure.  But what kind of wit?  Here it is:

Did we surprise our teachers who had niggling doubts about the picayune brains of small black children who reminded them of clean pickaninnies on a box of laundry soap? How muddy is the Mississippi compared to the third longest river of the darkest continent? In the land of the Ibo, the Hausa and the Yoruba, what is the price per barrel of nigrescence?

The verbal resemblance between “niggling” and “nigrescence” (and, for that matter, of the title word “denigration”) and the most denigrating term for African-Americans is clear enough, and there’s the play on “picayune” and “pickaninny” — so we’re reminded, by analogy with the resemblance of words, of how racism manifests itself even in those places where we least expect it.  The comparison of the Mississippi to the Niger river (the river near which the tribal groups Mullen mentions live) is important in this context, in that it reminds us that there are places where Africans are identified by tribe, not by race, and are certainly not identified by the denigrating American term for their race (the “price per barrel” business brings in the whole question of the Nigerian oil economy and the neo-colonialism it fosters, so the poem’s world is more complex than a simple Edenic Africa/fallen America dichotomy).  Here, the verbal play is the most noticeable part of the poem, but it connects more strongly to issues beyond the poem than does the “Of a girl, in white” prose poem.  In Addisonian terms, we’re in the realm of mixed wit — a rather politically pointed mixed wit.

But Why?

The emphasis on false and mixed wit, as opposed to true wit (loaded terms, but I try to see them as neutral, descriptive concepts) in experimental poetry cries out for some kind of explanation.  My guess is it’s to be found in the very different situation poetry inhabits now, compared to the Eighteenth century.  In Addison’s time poets were part of a general discourse about things, and published their work side-by-side with all kinds of prose.  No such thing as a poetry magazine existed.  The writers of poetry weren’t even poets, in the sense of having a professional specialization, still less in the sense of being special, sensitive souls in the mode of Wordsworthian Romanticism.  One wasn’t a poet, really, the way one is today, bearing credentials to certify the fact. Poetry was an activity, not an identity.  It was something one did, not something that defined who one was.  I mean, gossip for a guy like Addison — who wrote plenty of poetry, as well as the play, Cato, that made him famous in his day, and the essays by which we know him — wasn’t literary gossip, because there really wasn’t a literary world separate from other spheres, not in the way we know it today.  You have to wait for the nineteenth century for that (you can still get the cream of nineteenth century literary gossip from the journals of the Goncourt brothers — no similar document exists for the eighteenth century).

This, of course, brings us back full circle, to the world about which Daniel Nester complains, where the poets spend too much time talking about themselves and their feuds, and where wringing one’s hands about the ongoing dominance of professionalization and the MFA programs is a disease and contagious and pervasive as the common cold.  And try as we might to run from it, into fields as seemingly remote as eighteenth-century aesthetics, it catches up to us eventually.

Nietzsche and the Hipsters

So there I was, people, in the lobby of one of Our Fine College’s academic buildings, slouching against the wall by the vending machines while waiting for my man Parksie to drag himself down from his office and head off with me to our usual dive for drinks with the mad scientist and whoever else might wash ashore at our table. As usual, Park had left a 45-page printout job until the last minute, so I had time to kill and nothing to read but the student paper. The article that caught my attention was a student journalist’s angry blast at hipsters. The gist of the argument was that hipsters were hypocrites: they craved social interaction as much as anyone, but acted as if they were too cool for it, sitting at the sidelines of events and looking on ironically. The best image in the article was of hipsters sitting on the benches near Chicago’s North Avenue Beach, looking on and commenting snarkily as the square community frolicked, preened, posed, and beach-volleyballed the summer away in a spectacle of glistening bodies, shimmering eros, and casual athleticism.

It’s an interesting theory, and probably has something to it, although I think, in the end, the hipster position on group social interaction is more complicated than the article made out. I think the best way to get at what’s going on with the hipster standoffishness vis-à-vis big partying crowds is to take a look at what Nietzsche had to say about similar issues in The Birth of Tragedy.

Apollo and Dionysus

Nietzsche begins The Birth of Tragedy with his famous distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ways of experiencing the relationship between the self and the other. “Let us think of them,” says Nietzsche, as the “worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.” For Nietzsche, the world of Apollonian experience is like the world of the dream — although it’s important to note that Nietzsche thinks of dreams in a different way than many of us do. He doesn’t mean immersion in a strange, intense reality — he means quite the opposite. He thinks of the experience of a dream as an experience that we know isn’t real, and that we watch at a distance, knowing it can’t really touch us. “For all the most intense life of this dream reality,” says Nietzsche, “we nevertheless have the shimmering sense of their illusory quality: That, at least, is my experience.” So the Apollonian experience of the world beyond us, is one in which we have a clear sense of boundaries: I stand over here, the other stands over there, separate from me. It is a spectacle I watch, and if I’ve had enough, all I have to do is close my eyes, or turn away. Nietzsche elaborates the point by referring to Schopenhauer’s great book The World as Will and Idea, and invoking the Hindu notion of Maya (very roughly, the world of individual phenomena, which the enlightened see through, in order to grasp the fundamental unity of all things):

…concerning Apollo one could endorse, in an eccentric way, what Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Maya: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis” [principle of individuation]

So there’s Apollonian experience: one feels separate from the world, safe in the little inflatable lifeboat of unsinkable selfhood as it floats above all the otherness — all the things and forces and people — of the stormy world around that little yellow boat.

It is the rupturing of the sense of selfhood and separateness — the sinking of the rubber dinghy — that leads us to Dionysian experience, which Nietzsche defines as “the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature.” That is, we experience the Dionysian when we feel the collapse of the barrier between ourselves and the other. It’s no surprise, then, that Nietzsche calls this an intoxication: it’s a trippy, puddle-of-people at a Manchester rave from the Factory Records era kind of thing he means to get at. Social barriers collapse, the idea of personal space is destroyed, and everyone is not only equal, but united as one (if you’ve ever been in the crowd at a football game when it crosses the invisible line between “a bunch of people in one space” to “a crowd that cries out as one” you’ve been in the presence of Dionysus). Here’s how Nietzsche puts it:

Now the slave a free man; now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power … have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures.

Think about all those face-painted, howling Bears fans: by day they’re mild-mannered desk jockeys, toiling in cubicles as members of the lonely crowd. But at the game, they’re free to act in broader, more ecstatic gestures, and they’re relieved of self-consciousness, since in some significant way they’ve been relieved of selfhood, having been immersed in a crowd. Chanting together, dressing alike in their fan gear, probably drunk, and responding to the same plays with the same emotions: the pleasures of Dionysus are the pleasures of the ecstatic release from selfhood, and the dissolving of the self/other distinction.

If you’re out to retain a sense of self-identity, you’re only going to see the Dionysian crowds with something like horror. As Nietzsche says:

…the servant of Dionysus will be understood only by someone like himself! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him! With an amazement which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all this might not be really so foreign to him, that, in fact, his Apollonian consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him.

Apollo Recoils

Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness provides an example of the complex recoiling of the Apollonian man at the sight of a Dionysian crowd. It’s too bad the whole racial aspect of the passage (white Apollo, black Dionysus) makes this kind of dicey as a classroom example of Apollonian reaction to the spectacle of Dionysian experience — but if we can put that aside, and put aside the idea that Apollo is somehow better than Dionysus, which isn’t really present in Nietzsche or Conrad, the passage really does get at the psychology of the phenomenon. Here Conrad’s character Marlow looks at a tribal gathering from the deck of a steamer heading up-river into mysterious territory:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there 
was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

Chinua Achebe rips Conrad pretty hard for this passage, and you can read the detailed descriptions of the socio-religious meaning of tribal rituals in his novel Things Fall Apart as a kind of writing-back against Conrad. Achebe’s got a point. But for now I want to concentrate on something else: the way the Apollonian subject, Marlow, floating down the river in his steamship (one wishes the boat were named the Principium Individuationis ), feels very much outside the group that is clearly experiencing, for itself, a kind of Dionysian unity. He’s repelled by the spectacle. To some degree, this is because it is strange, and makes no sense to someone who stands apart from it (just as bare-chested, face-painted, bellowing football fans often seem like flabby, gesticulating asshats to people who aren’t into football). But there’s more: there’s the creeping fear that he, the Apollonian subject, isn’t entirely unlike those Dionysian revelers. There’s a fear that he may in fact be like them, and this is a threat to his sense of identity. He doesn’t want to disappear as an individual, he doesn’t want to give up his selfhood to the mass, but he feels, when he sees and hears the Dionysian spectacle, that it just might be possible. His sense of separate, self-contained subjectivity trembles.

Hipster Apollo

But what, you ask, does this have to do with hipsterism? I suppose it’s this: that image of the bench-sitting, snark-making hipsters at North Avenue Beach is really an image of Apollonians looking on at a kind of semi-Dionysian crowd. Hipsters standing on the edge of parties with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, too cool to dance and howl with the rest of the partiers are, in their way, figures much like Conrad’s Marlow. Their sense of distinction — of being, well, hipper than the masses, is an Apollonian phenomenon, a manifestation of the principium individuationis.

I don’t mean that this is a bad thing. In fact, there is a lot to be said for Apollonianism. Critical thinking, the questioning of widely-held opinions, the cultivation of dissent, and such immunity as we have to propaganda, advertising, and mass hysteria all depend on the cultivation of Apollo. When I teach Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy in my seminar on literary theory, I always end up saying that the seminar room itself, with its emphasis on critique, analysis, and informed opinion, is a temple of Apollo, just as surely as Soldier Field (that’s where the Bears play, oh football-disdaining Apollonian intellectual) is a temple of Dionysus.

I’m sure social class enters into this somehow. Hipsters, as a rule, are either the products of, or bound for membership in, the professional wing of the American middle and upper-middle class — or, more likely in this age of decreased social mobility, they find that the professional class is both their origin and their destination. It is in these classes — among the lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers, academics, policy analysts, consultants, and the like — that critical thought is most prized. This is not to say that such classes have a monopoly on critical thought, just that they often tend to hold it up as a primary virtue, and consider it an essential part of their identity, and put it ahead of such group-oriented virtues as rootedness, patriotism, and group identity. Hipsters will sometimes simmer with resentment at the implication that their critical, individualist subjectivity is a product of membership in a group — to imply group identity is, after all, an affront to the principium individuationis itself.

Anyway: there’s nothing wrong with professional-classness, or at least nothing more wrong with it than with any other kind of class identity. And it is worth noting that those nations with the most developed professional classes are the least likely to fall into authoritarianism, though that can, and has, happened to bourgeois states in times of severe crisis — you know the examples. Generally, though, I’m glad the professional classes are there, and not just because I have a lawyer and a doctor and an accountant. I’m glad they’re around because they provide a pretty deep reservoir of critical thinking.

The Distrust of Crowds

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the virtues of Apollo is to haul out an old William Carlos Williams poem, “The Crowd at the Ballgame.”  It shows us one of the most benevolent crowds imaginable. I’m with George Carlin on the difference between baseball and football fans — baseball is much less conducive to the more violent outbreaks of Dionysus than is football.  But even here, there’s a menace inherent in the Dionysian unity of the home-team fans, one visible only to those whose particular identities keep them from being entirely absorbed into that unity.

Here’s how the poem starts:

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

all the exciting detail

of the chase

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty

the eternal—

So far, so good: the crowd is clearly Dionysian, in a gentle way (when they are “moved uniformly” they lose that standing-apartness that is the essence of Apollonian experience).  But watch out!  As the poem continues, the danger inherent in Dionysus becomes clearer:

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

for this

to be warned against

saluted and defied—

It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly

its words cut—

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—

This is

the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought

Okay! There it is!  The unity of the crowd is several things.  For one, it is “without thought.” That’s the intoxicated state of unity for you — indeed, to be free of selfhood, self-consciousness, and the need to think is one of the goals, and in some instances one of the virtues, of the Dionysian crowd.  I mean, who among us hasn’t left some sporting event or concert (I mean a rock concert, not the Apollonian silence and paralysis of the classical concert) refreshed and renewed, having hit the “reset” button on our individual subjectivity by losing it, for a moment, in a crowd?  But thoughtlessness is also dangerous, and this crowd, like all crowds, is about unity, not analysis.

Of course the thing about unity is that it isn’t really unity.  Unless the entire population were to enter into some universal rapturous state together, the unity has a border to it, and leaves some people out.  It’s significant that Williams gives this insight to three characters in the poem: the Jew, the “flashy female,” and that woman’s mother.  The reason the Jewish character would understand that crowds are not inclusive seems clear enough: the historical experience of Jewish people would render the character sensitive to the fact that crowds aren’t inclusive, and that those excluded by crowds are vulnerable.  But what about the “flashy female” and her mother?  I suppose their insight into the limits of a crowd come from objectification.  That is, a crowd is a kind of collective subjectivity, a single identity for multiple bodies (that’s why it can “mov[e] uniformly,” like one organism).  But if you are a “flashy female,” you’ve been objectified — seen as a body to be possessed, or acted upon — probably be whole groups of guys at once.  Imagine here some 1950s-era scene where the hot chick sashays past a lineup of Rebel Without a Cause tough guys, who leer and wolf-whistle collectively.  You’ve felt yourself not as part of the Dionysian collective subject, but as an object they might pursue.  You’re sensitive to what it’s like not to be in the group, but to be on the outside, and a bit vulnerable.  The mother of the “flashy female” knows all this too, and is protective of her daughter, probably feeling the daughter’s vulnerability more than the daughter herself does.

So, to haul all of this back to our neglected hipsters: I think there’s much to be said for the habit of alienation such people cultivate.  The world needs those who dissent from the pleasure of crowds.

The Distrust of the Outsider

Just as the Apollonian distrusts the crowd, the crowd distrusts the Apollonian, self-possessed outsider, with his refusal to join in the fun.  This crowd-friendly, outsider-distrusting mentality was, I think, behind the anti-hipster sentiment of the article I read in the student newspaper as I waited impatiently for my colleague to get his shit together.  But where does such sentiment come from?  Elias Canetti knows.  Consider a passage from his strange, rambling book Crowds and Power, which is composed of a giant set of riffs on the nature of Apollo and Dionysus.  Here, he tells us that crowds, in their Dionysian smashing-down of boundaries, can become destructive, and turn on those who have not joined (or cannot join):

Windows and doors belong to houses; they are the most vulnerable parts of their exterior and, once smashed, the house has lost all individuality; anyone may enter it and nothing and no-one is protected anymore.  In these houses live the supposed enemies of the crowd, those people who try to keep away from it.  What separated them has now been destroyed and nothing stands between them and the crowd.  They can come out and join it; or they can be fetched.

Yikes.  And there’s more!  The crowd can be particularly cruel to those whom it considers members, or whom it thinks ought to be members — if those people dissent, and refuse or renounce membership:

An attack from outside can only strengthen the crowd; those who have been physically scattered are more strongly gathered back together again.  An attack from within, on the other hand, is really dangerous….  Everyone belonging to a crowd carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone.  As long as he does all this on the quiet the crowd does not make too much fuss about it, the crowd allows him to proceed.  But, as soon as he makes a noise about it, it starts to hate him and fear him.

So: if a crowd thinks you ought to be a member, joining in the collective Dionysian loss-of-self, but you refuse, choosing to follow your individual desires and cultivate difference, you’re a threat.  It’s not that you could attack physically the crowd and win — the crowd is secure in numbers.  It’s that you propose that disunity is possible, and that membership in the crowd is somehow undesirable.  You threaten the idea of unity, and what’s more, you make one of the main pleasures of the crowd — unselfconsciousness — impossible.  If we all lose our inhibitions and borders, we can all behave in ways we generally feel too inhibited to behave.  We can go apeshit in an eroticized, boozed-out Mardi Gras blur, lifting our shirts and throwing up on the sidewalk, making out with passers-by and otherwise cutting loose from our individual inhibitions.  Or, at a football game, we can shout and leap around and feel camaraderie with people we don’t know as individuals, because we’re not at the stadium as individuals — we’re all there as fans together, wearing team colors and cheering for the same touchdowns.  But add someone who dissents, and looks on without joining, and you’ve added someone who, intentionally or not, judges the crowd.  And it takes a hell of a thick skin to remain unselfconscious while being judged (I owe this observation to my wife Valerie, who has to put up with me muttering about Crowds and Power when she’s trying to eat breakfast).

Which brings us back to the hipsters at North Avenue Beach.  If the cavorting beach crowd notices them, it surely notices them with some disdain.  Who wants to be gaped and snarked at?  Or consider those dancing and boozing at some party.  Why wouldn’t they be hostile to the snickering hipsters in the corner, whose very attire signals ironic distance from the crowd?

Contradictions of the Apollonian Hipster

Of course the very fact that there is recognizable hipster clothing, and known hipster neighborhoods, gathering points, and the like indicates a contradiction at the heart of hipsterism: in standing apart together, hipsters are both rejecting and seeking group identity.  They want to form that contradictory entity, a group of individuals, a Dionysian fusion of self-sufficient Apollos.  I imagine we’ve all seen the symptoms of this attempt to square the circle.  I can think of a few of examples off the top of my head.

—  I remember walking down the street near Myopic Books in a particularly hipster-saturated part of Chicago, on my way to give a poetry reading with the redoubtable Don Share.  As I passed a giant American Apparel store, two hipster-looking types (wearing what for all the world looked like American Apparel hoodies) looked into the store’s windows, snickered, and one, in full arch irony, said “oh, let’s go shopping at American Apparel.”  “Yeah, right” snickered the other, in reply.  These were people who belonged to a demographic that populated the area, a demographic that had supported a large American Apparel store.  But they’d be damned if they’d be considered part of that demographic.  I’m pretty sure they had moved to a hipster zone to be with the likeminded, but they wouldn’t want to lose their individuality and merely, you know, be with the likeminded.

— I remember chatting with an über-hip experimental poet with a pretty high-amp academic position.  She told me how much she hated the fact that the neighborhood where she had just moved was gentrifying.  I was (and probably still am) enough of a clod to point out that she was part of that gentrification.  I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me.  Why would she?  As a hipster, or demi-hipster, she wanted to live in an appropriately hip, edgy neighborhood — to point out that by doing so she was becoming a part of the gentrifying group she disdained was to assault the hip individualism she was cultivating.  I should point out that I have total disdain for the rich bastards who surround me in my glossy commuter town, but there are plenty of perspectives from which I, myself, appear as a rich bastard, so I’m no better than anyone else, really.  Hell, I’m fully prepared to admit I’m worse, since I’m the one who was a dick about someone else’s contradictions.

— One really need look no further than the Facebook group “Hipsters who hate other hipsters for being hipsters," a group with close to 40,000 members, to illustrate the contradictions of hipster consciousness.  I mean, the group embodies a wonderful self-reflexive knowledge of the clash between the Dionysian desire to be in a group with other hipsters, and at the same time to distance oneself from any kind of group identity (as a good Apollonian will do).

Can Hipsters Dance?

So, where does this leave us? As I stood there waiting for Parksie, student newspaper in hand, I was pretty sure that I knew: there was a fairly simple dichotomy between Apollonian hipsters and the Dionysian crowd, with a gulf of animosity between them, and a bit of irony about the phenomenon of hipsters dressing and acting like a group, but resenting each other for it. Hipsters stood at the edge of the party, snickering at the crowd, and wary of their own peers for being hipsters. The crowd danced the night away, happily unselfconscious until they noticed the hipsters standing by the wall, refusing to shake it to the music.

Later, though, after I’d laid my thesis down for Parksie, and we were driving home with the windows down and the new Grinderman album thumping away on his crappy car's savage speakers, he drew my attention to a new development, one that may shake the foundations of my argument. One of his students, a hipsterized DJ for the college radio station, had just tapped out an essay called “Hipsters Can Dance.” Next time we head out to the bar, I’ll ask Parksie to bring me a copy.