Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest!—Toward an Aesthetics of Camp

I recently had the privilege of looking over the proofs for the next (and, sadly, the final) issue of the great Prague-based journal VLAK, set to be unleashed on the world in 600-page splendor this September. It's a wonder: Charles Bernstein! Jerome Rothenberg! Lyn Hejinian! Vanessa Place! Rachel Blau DuPlessis! Clark Coolidge! Philippe Sollers of Tel Quel fame! And my own essay, "Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest! Toward an Aesthetics of Camp." Which begins like this:

Camp remains one of our most poorly theorized aesthetic categories. It has a certain status in queer theory circles, to be sure, but is rarely a part of a more general discussion of aesthetics—in effect, it is a ghettoized term. The continued centrality of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” shows how narrow the discussion of camp has been: her important but provisional notes remain the most authoritative poetics of camp we have. I don’t propose to offer, here, an aesthetics or poetics of camp. But if I may use a term so ponderous and out of keeping with the lightness of camp that it practically comes out the other side as camp itself—I do hope to offer a prolegomenon to such an aesthetics or poetics. If camp calls for fun and elegance, I fear I will provide precious little of either—and, since I am confessing shortcomings, I suspect I will provide less by way of evidence and argumentative coherence than one might wish. What I do hope to offer, though, is a rationale for understanding aesthetic experience in terms of camp, and a sense of what is at stake in camp as a category of aesthetics. It is through an aesthetics of camp that we can go beyond a dichotomy that has long divided the aesthetic field into a dominant Kantian tradition based on dispassionate, Apollonian contemplation and disinterest, and a reactive counter-tradition based on (to take some words from Asger Jorn) “fanaticism,” “intolerance,” and a Dionysian disavowal of disinterest. Both the dominant tradition and its other lie open to forms of ethical and political criticism from which an unlikely hero—camp—promises deliverance.

The essay  ends like this:

Camp, in the sense I intend it, is a kind of ludic and aestheticizing attitude that is also a kind of deep commitment. Christopher Isherwood, the first to use it in this sense, puts a good description of it into the mouth of a character in his novel The World in the Evening: 

High camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. 

Camp, seen this way, is a cousin of aesthetic autonomy, since it elevates play and beauty over utility and morality—an elevation well understood by Susan Sontag in her seminal “Notes on Camp” where she writes: 

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization. 

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical. 

Sontag goes on to add:  

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content, ’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’… 

So far, Sontag has framed camp as a form of disinterest—involving an Apollonian distance from its object. Framed in these terms, it lies open to the same sorts of criticisms Nietzsche, Jorn, and others have leveled at the tradition of Kant and Schiller. But even as camp involves a kind of Apollonian aesthetic distancing, it also—contradictorily—embodies the Dionysian impulse to break down the barriers separating self and object. “Camp taste is a kind of love,” writes Sontag, and it “identifies with what it is enjoying.”  The serious involvement of which Isherwood wrote is, in fact, an identification of self and object, a breaking down of the barriers of aesthetic distance, a Dionysian act of participation. 

What camp offers, then, is Apollonian and Dionysian, disinterested yet interested. It breaks past the pallid individualism of the dominant tradition of aesthetics, but at the same time provides a kind of distancing from the potentially dangerous enthusiasms of those who seek in art and play an expression of the general will and general desire. This play of distance and identification has been best documented when camp addresses gender, but one can see it in broader terms as well: the camp misanthropy of a Philip Larkin or a Frederick Seidel, to the camp patriotism of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and far beyond, camp creates a play of interest and disinterest that awaits its full analysis. Camp’s pioneering theorist, Susan Sontag, ends the opening essay of the book that contains “Notes on Camp” with a call for an “erotics of art.”  What aesthetics now cries out for is a poetics of camp.

In between those two parts there's a lot of Schiller, Adorno, and Situationism, and a note or two about the camp and the queer.

Frankfurt on the Farm: Southern Agrarianism Meets Adorno & Co.

The American south really is another country, or so I’ve thought from time to time.  And I thought it again earlier today, when a guy I know who recently took a teaching position in Mississippi told me how everyone at the university with a PhD insists on being called “Doctor,” and on signing emails with their full names followed by “PhD.”  It’s been my experience at my home institution, and at other colleges and universities in the north, that only a few professors insist on doing this, and that it tends to provoke a little behind-the-back eye-rolling on the part of their colleagues.  I’ve generally filed all this under the heading “cultural differences that don’t really matter but that probably reflect the more hierarchical social background of the south, with its roots in the agrarian world of the plantations” (the only other item in this slim file, with its elephantine heading, is “they do tend to call you sir or ma’am down there, don’t they?”).


The gentility I’ve encountered in the south probably is left over from a pre-industrial social order that would strike a Chicagoan, whose heritage is industrial mayhem, and whose future is the post-industrial unknown, as entirely alien.  But what about the intellectual traditions indigenous to the south?  What, more specifically, about the Southern Agrarians, that group of poets and literary intellectuals who made the 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand their manifesto?  They’ve often seemed distant to me: New Critical, conservative, and nostalgic for a vanishing social order based on the morally indefensible slave economy of the plantation — what could they have in common with the kind of left-wing, critical theory-devouring, Europhile with whom you and I sulk around the coffee joints and bookstores of big cities and college towns?


More than one might assume, it turns out.  While they certainly trafficked in nostalgia, when one looks at their actual writings, as often as not one finds significant overlap between what they believed and what the Frankfurt school critical thinkers — darlings of my sullen people, the liberal arts professoriate—believed.  I’m not saying that the two groups would want to amalgamate, but I do think they had many of the same ideas about what was wrong with the world in which they lived.


Consider a few examples.


Against Commodification and Exchange Value


“A farm is not a place to grow wealthy,” says Andrew Nelson Lytle in his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, “it is a place to grow corn.”  He is appalled by the notion that the individual qualities of the products of life on a farm can be erased and replaced by a numerical, and easily manipulated, dollar value.  This erases the true use-value of the object, but more than that, it destroys the individuality of objects, reducing them to exchange value, and turning them into commodities.  “What industrialism counts as the goods and riches of the earth the agrarian South does not, nor ever did,” said Lytle, taking aim against industrial capitalism’s emphasis on the commodity as the means of measuring true wealth.


One hardly needs to quote Marx or Adorno for the similarities in outlook to be apparent.  But if Dr. Lytle and Drs. Marx and Adorno agree on their diagnosis (“the patient has a bad case of commodification!”) they disagree radically on the nature of the proper treatment.  No critical theory for Lytle, still less any form of labor organizing.  Rather, he calls for an economic and cultural movement, in which the people of the south “return to our looms, our hand crafts, our reproducing stock.  Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall!”  It’s more like what one would find in the writings of William Morris than in the works of Max Horkheimer, but even so, we should remember Morris wasn’t just a great wallpaper designer and furniture maker: he was a committed socialist.


The Nature of Utopia


The Agrarians were famously backward-looking, but when we look at why they yearned for the past, we see that it was generally as a way of criticizing the industrial capitalism of the present.


Robert Penn Warren, at a 1956 reunion of the Agrarians, said the past is “a better rebuke” to the present “than any dream of the future,” because “you can see what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were achieved in the past by frail men." For other Agrarians, there was an even stronger emphasis on the critique of modernity over any positive vision of what Utopia ought to be. As Lyle Lanier put it not long before the reunion at which Warren spoke, “I don’t feel overly confident now that I can have anything to say about what I stand for in these dismal times.  As in 1930, what to stand against seems much easier to identify.”  And that enemy was modern industrial capitalism. Lanier claimed to read the Wall Street Journal only “to keep up with what the enemy is up to,” and the opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, attributed to all of the book’s contributors, says “it is strange…that a majority of men anywhere could even as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants.”  One might attribute some of this anti-modernity to the culture around the Vanderbilt Agrarians: Nashville was undergoing a belated but rapid industrialization, establishing a mode of life very much at odds with the Agrarian ideal: it was as if the poets were surrounded by countless versions of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes on the make.


Of course any orientation to the past is fundamentally at odds with the Frankfurt school, which made much of futurity. As Simon Jarvis put it, Adorno wanted “to resist the liquidation of the possibility of really new experience,” and saw Utopia as a necessarily unachievable aspiration, a yearning for a newer, better world, beyond exploitation and oppression. But here, too, the emphasis is on Utopia as a critique of the present, rather than as an achievable reality in some particular form. Utopia, in Adorno’s view, could never be fully embodied, nor even formulated.  Irreducible to concept, let alone to political realization, it was an absolute for which to yearn. But we must walk in fear of anyone claiming to have produced it, in blueprint or in actualization.


Moreover, even in the disagreement about whether to look forward or backward in time, we can see a certain similarity: both Robert Penn Warren and Theodor Adorno approach Utopia with caution, with an eye open to the frailty of the vision and the human costs paid in attempts to embody it.  There’s caution to both visions, Agrarian/reactionary and the Marxian/radical.  This puts both on a moral footing well ahead of many ideologues of the mid-century right and left.


Obligation to the Lost Cause


A strange mournfulness hangs, mist-like, over the essays of I’ll Take My Stand: a mournfulness over the sacrifices of so many soldiers in the Civil War. A good part of the nostalgia for the past, and the sometimes hard-to-read defense of the old plantation society (John Crowe Ransom writes of slavery as “humane in practice” if not theory), is a powerfully felt sense that the sacrifices of one’s ancestors must not have been in vain.  While, with the exception of an essay by Allen Tate, there’s little in I’ll Take My Stand by way of calls for violent political action, there’s a real sense that one must remain loyal to the past, and keep the flame alive until conditions once again become propitious for one’s cause.


This sense of one’s place in history is surprisingly close to some moments in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno speaks of the revolutionary moment predicted by Marx as having come and gone, contained and defused by capitalism. In 1966, the year Negative Dialectics was published, Adorno saw capitalism more dominant than ever, and felt that critical thinking was the best way to maintain a kind of critical consciousness that will be essential for any future action on behalf of the great cause.  Both Adorno and the Agrarians looked back at lost opportunities and failed causes, and saw themselves as keepers of the flame.


The Group and the Individual


The Frankfurt school was unexceptional in Marxist thought in being deeply skeptical of the claims of individualism and individual agency, emphasizing the power of large social and economic forces, and the actions of classes rather than charismatic individuals.  On the surface, the Agrarians seem to believe in very different things.  They make much of the term “individual,” and can at times sound almost like Margaret Thatcher when she claimed “society does not exist.”  The opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, for example, claims “the responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.”  But even in the rejection of the notion of society, we see something other than individualism at work: there’s a notion of mutual obligation in much Agrarian thinking, albeit one based not on class solidarity but on family and region.  Lyle Lanier, for example, despised industrial capitalism for creating “personal isolation, and a fractioning of life functions.”  He feared capitalism would dissolve the bonds of extended family which formed a kind of social support network, leaving people uprooted, deracinated, and subject to the “convulsions of a predatory and decadent capitalism.”


Agrarian talk of individualism often masked an emphasis on social forms larger than the individual.  These social forms were by no means egalitarian, and they were based on a system of racial oppression, but they were far from individualistic.  As the historian Paul V. Murphy put it, the old southern social order “demanded of members, white and black, not only conformity to written and unwritten rules but also loyalty to an often informal but clearly defined social hierarchy.  In return, the white southerner gained a deep sense of community, identity, and family connection.  Black southerners,” Murphy continues, in deep understatement, “gained quite a bit less.”  Be that as it may, it wasn’t an individualist order the Agrarians promoted, despite their love of the term “individual.”  It was a form of group-consciousness they wanted to protect, against the atomizing forces of capitalism.


Art, Alienation, and Social Life


Another way the Agrarians distanced themselves from individualism was in their view of the proper social position of art.  Donald Davidson, for example, demanded art be integrated into the social world around it, growing out of and contributing to the life of a community, rather than serving some private vision or languishing in the aesthete’s private garret of l’art pour l’art.  “What is a picture for, if not to put on a wall?” asked Davidson.  A true artist, in his view, doesn’t produce work in which “the aesthetic experience is curtained off” but rather makes work that will be “mixed up with all sorts of instruments and occupations pertaining to the round of daily life.”


I suppose one could try to work out some relation to the Frankfurt school insistence on the social nature of all art, perhaps invoking Adorno’s well-known claim, in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” that even the seemingly private form of expression that is the lyric poem, a form of expression at odds with any social pressure represents a kind of shared social experience.  “The lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface,” says Adorno, “is socially motivated behind the author’s back.”  But that’s not where the really striking connection is.  The really striking connection is between Davidson’s Agrarian thinking and the avant-gardism of Dadaist and Surrealist thinking. 


Consider this: Davidson wants to return art from its ivory tower to the world of daily, lived experience, integrating it into daily life.  While his particular paths to this goal differ from those of Tristan Tzara or André Breton, his general goal is exactly that of these considerably freakier figures.  Dada and Surrealism were dedicated to breaking down the barriers set up by aestheticism, and by institutions like museums, between art and daily life.  For Breton, this was the true path of revolution.  For Davidson, it was a return to a more genteel past.  But for both, the goal was to end the alienation of the poet or artist from society.


*


In the end, we can think of figures as diverse as Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, on the one hand, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, on the other, as people working in good faith with the different traditions they inherited to fight the excesses of the global system in which they found themselves.  Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that they have not only profound differences but very real similarities.


*


[Note that I am having a secret argument with myself here: an article I wrote some time ago, "Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism" begins with the claim "no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives with those of the Frankfurt School."  If you want to see that line of reasoning, it'll be out in 2012 in a book called Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John MacIntyre (Ohio State University Press)].

Small, Local Festivals: Calder's Mobiles and the Significance of Formalism

It's probably a sign of my irredeemable logocentrism that, when I started to think about how I could describe my recent experience visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art's show of Alexander Calder's mobiles, I thought not of any particular mobile, but of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Les Mobiles de Calder," from Situations III. The essay defines a mobile as "a small, local festival, defined by movement and nonexistent apart from it," which isn't a bad place to start. In fact, the word "festival" gets at a couple of important things about Calder's mobiles: firstly, it gives a sense of them as collections of individual elements, the way festivals are living collections of large and small events held together in some kind of relationship; and secondly, it gets at the joyfulness of the things — an emotion not prominent enough in discussions of art. The people at the MCA understand the joy of the mobiles — in fact, the name of the show is "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy." But one senses a little hesitation, maybe even a little condescension, in the way some art-types treat the notion of Calder's joy. "Some scholars," says Laura Pierson in her piece on the show in TimeOut Chicago, "have criticized [Calder's] works as too playful or simplistic and devoid of layered meanings."

The idea that playful joy is somehow beneath us makes me sad, since it's often just a sign of deep insecurity, of people afraid that lightheartedness might be taken as a sign that one is insufficiently cynical/worldly/critical of late capitalism/intelligent/full of deep sympathy for the wretched of the earth. (Trust me: I'm an art school brat, I've seen this kind of anxiety in artists, critics, profs, and especially grad students since I could first toddle along to gallery openings, gripping my mom's hand, in the early 70s). The other idea Pearson mentions — that Calder's art is somehow without meaning — points to a strange thing that's happened to art (or, at any rate, to prominent art, and the prominent discourse about art) over the course of the last few decades. If I had to name the phenomenon, I suppose I'd call it either a failure to understand the significance of formalism, or a return to some elements of Victorian aesthetics.

Let's come at it this way: consider Alexander Calder's father and grandfather. Each was a sculptor of some prominence in Calder's native Philadelphia. The grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, made some of the best-known pieces of Philly public sculpture, such as the statue of General Meade in West Fairmount Park, and the giant William Penn on top of City Hall. The father, Alexander Stirling Calder, also did statuary for City Hall, and made the Witherspoon Building Figures. In short, both of these Calders were creators of the kind of civic, commemorative sculpture that pigeons like to shit upon in public spaces everywhere. These guys were skilled in making forms, but they weren't formalists. Instead, they were informed by an aesthetics that said form should serve meaning (in this case, meaning of a pretty straightforward kind: "Billy Penn founded Pennsylvania, and you live in Pennsylvania: be proud of your state identity, and trust in Great Men like Penn and General Meade, whose like will guide us, the masses huddled beneath these great, dignified statues, in the future" and similar patriarchal/establishment bullshit). By the time the elder Calders were making their civic sculpture this kind of aesthetic was already being challenged in London and, to a much greater extent, in Paris, but the news hadn't really hit Philadelphia in a big way, at least not those circles willing to commission public sculpture. So the elder Calders were very much parts of what we think of as the Victorian way of thinking about art. The grand old critic Richard Altick gives a good, brief summary of this way of thinking when he writes (in Victorian People and Ideas):

The age's criteria of acceptable art are usually summed up in the term 'moral aesthetic.' The idea that art should teach and inspire as well as give pleasure was not new; it was, indeed, older than Horace's dulce et utile. But seldom had it been as established as it was in this period…. Poetry and painting supplemented the pulpit if they did not actually replace it. The early and mid Victorian emphasis was thus upon theme rather than expression, upon intention and substance rather than technique. The more pleasing a style was, the better; but style should never be so pleasing as to distract attention from content.

This is art at the service of morality — more specifically, it is art at the service of paraphrasable, specific moral messages. It certainly isn't the autonomy of art for it's own sake: rather, it's the heteronomy of art for the sake of something else (the moral message). But things, as I mentioned, had started to change, even as the elder Calders were scrubbing the pigeon shit off their newly-unveiled statues of generals. Aestheticism, and later some strands of modernism, were (for hugely complicated social reasons) freeing art to be for itself, taking the emphasis off message, and allowing the emphasis to settle on form. So the modernist tradition that young Alexander Calder, the Calder of the mobiles, found when he went to Paris as a young man was all about form, and this made all the difference.

Think about materials. Unlike his father and grandfather — who used Serious Materials like bronze and marble, because these were the materials suitable to Serious Civic Significance — our Calder was free to use anything that pleased him formally. "I like broken glass on stems, old car parts, old spring beds, smashed tin cans, bits of brass imbedded in asphalt," he said, "and I love pieces of red glass that come out of tail-lights." Of course none of this feels particularly liberating to us now, since art schools have been preaching about the infinitely variable materials for art for decades. But for Calder, the use of sheet metal, bits of broken glass, coiled wire, and the occasional coffee can was a step away from the practices of generations of family sculptors. It was a realization, long after Kant had claimed that an emphasis on prestige materials constituted "barbaric taste," that form could be primary, and that amazing form existed in the humblest of places. A broken wine glass is, after all, an elegantly incomplete and asymmetrical set of curves. I can think of a couple I wish I hadn't thrown out.

Just as the notion that form was primary set Calder free with regard to materials, it also set him free with regard to subject matter. Instead of weighty civic themes, he took to subjects that pleased him. Not coincidentally, these tended to be subjects of visual fantasticness, not moralistic seriousness: his early Calder Circus, for example, was just that: a small model of circus animals, performers, and sets, which he'd sometimes animate for his friends. And the sense of the primacy of form also set Calder, among many others, free from any bond to representation. Sometimes his stabiles look a bit like elephants or flamingoes (the big one on Chicago's Federal Plaza is even called "Flamingo") and the mobiles can look like seals or spiders, but ultimately they're nonrepresentational. As Sartre put it, Calder's mobiles represent nothing in the world, nor do they try to convey messages, "his mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are, they are absolutes."

It's this sense of signifying nothing and referring to nothing but themselves that seems to have put Calder in the doghouse of the art world in the decades since his death in 1976. Nathan Carter, one of the younger artists influenced by Calder whose work is also on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art show, tells us:

When I went to art school in the mid-’90s, having an interest in Calder or anybody from that particular generation was completely taboo. Most work at art schools is being made in relation to philosophy and psychology or things like that. You’re more likely to have a discussion about like, Hegel, than about the way something looks."

This is interesting, and it points to what I would call either a failure to understand the significance of formalism, or the return of elements of Victorian aesthetics. I think the neo-Victorianism is pretty obvious: when Carter was going to art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Art (Boston) and at Yale, art was as subordinated to its discursive meaning as it had been for the Victorians. A 'moral aesthetic' was all the rage, and just like the Victorians Altick describes, artists were oriented to "theme rather than expression, upon intention and substance rather than technique." Oriented, that is, to Hegel or psychology, not to how things look. Some things were different from the Victorian moral aesthetic — the particular themes, for example, were likely to be intended as challenges to norms of race, gender and (more rarely) class, rather than the kind of urge to be one's supposedly better self that were the substance of so many Victorian works. But the orientation to social message, and to discursive, paraphrasable, specific moral messages, and away from form, was similar. Think of someone like Barbara Kruger or Martin Firrell, and you'll get one idea of how this kind of new-moral-aesthetic-driven of art can work. (I am not saying Kruger and Firrell are bad artists, by the way — far from it — merely that they seem to operate under what Altick called a "moral aesthetic" rather than a formalist one).

I suppose one reason this kind of message-based art came about was out of a sense that formalism was somehow meaningless (that whole "devoid of layered meanings" thing), and that meaninglessness was somehow a bad thing. The "somehow" often seems to have to do with moral or political reasons: the idea being that formalism is, by virtue of its refusal to subordinate form to message-making, a kind of moral or political vacuity. Art, in this view, exists for critique. There's certainly an uptightness about inutility and beauty here, again reminiscent of the Victorians (not that such uptightness is always a bad thing — Victorian uptightness created much of the world we live in, for better as well as for worse).

Anyway. This view of formalism has always seemed to me a bit naïve. I mean, think about what Sartre says about Calder's mobiles. They "refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are, they are absolutes" — this is actually important stuff. If the mobiles don't serve any function except to be themselves, then they aren't means to any end, they aren't instrumental. They're autonomous — and this matters. It means they put us in a position where we aren't treating them as means to something else, some goal we want to achieve. We're distanced (relatively, if not entirely) from our normal habits of thinking of things in terms of how useful to us they are. This is a moral stance, and in some profound sense a political stance, too. In fact, it's a stance very much in line with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had to say in Dialectic of Enlightenment about the problem of modernity being the instrumentalization of everything, including ourselves. This kind of formalism works (because of and despite its unconcern with anything but itself) as an antidote to the instrumentalizing intelligence.

It's a different kind of moralism or politics than the message-based world of artists like Barbara Kruger and of the art culture that produced her. In a way, the 90s art-school/Barbara Kruger method accepts the premise that everything is rhetorical and instrumental, and tries to counter the rhetoric and instrumentalism of the powerful with rhetorical/instrumental messages of its own. That is, it counters one kind of propaganda with another. Formalism, in the Calder-as-seen-by-Sartre version, doesn't accept the idea of instrumentalism. Calder doesn't concede that everything is rhetorical, manipulative, and about achieving some end: he proposes a different way of experiencing the world, one where things aren't means, but absolutes in themselves.

So Calder's formalism is not without a moral dimension, though it is without a specific moralistic message. You could actually make a pretty strong case that the joyfulness of the work plays a role in the moral dimension of the work. Consider what Adorno says in his often-misunderstood essay "Is Art Lighthearted?" Adorno begins the essay with a quote from Schiller's Wallenstein about life being serious and art lighthearted. He then says that this attitude of Schiller's is typically bourgeois, in that it accepts the notion that most of life is alienating, but that we get compensated with free time where we can have some fun. The essay ends with the famous remarks about the difficulty of writing poetry after Auschwitz, and then makes a big claim that art in 1967, the year of the essay's composition, can only have very limited, qualified kinds of joyfulness, lest it show complicity with the culture industry's calculated, calculating high spirits ("the smirking caricature of advertising") or become merely "cynical" about the darkness of history. But there's a less-commented-upon middle bit, in sections two and three of the essay, in which Adorno makes the case for joyfulness in art. Check it out:

Still, there is a measure of truth in the platitude [from Schiller] about art's lightheartedness. If art were not a source of pleasure for people, in however mediated a form, it would not have been able to survive in the naked existence it contradicts and resists. This is not something external to it, however, but part of its very definition. Although it does not refer to society, the Kantian formulation "purposiveness without purpose" already alludes to this. Art's purposelessness consists in its having escaped the constraints of self-preservation. It embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom.

And he continues a little later:

What is lighthearted in art is, if you like, the opposite of what one might easily assume it to be: not its content but its demeanor… This confirms the idea expressed by Schiller, who saw art's lightheartedness in its playfulness and not in its stating of intellectual contents… art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings.

So: joyful form has a significance, as does the demeanor of the work of art, apart from any specific thematic content. The significance is the expression of an aspiration towards freedom from the ordinary constraints of life (including, I suppose, the constraint of treating everything in a utilitarian way, as a means to an end). I can't think of a better example of the kind of work being discussed here than Calder's mobiles.

We can even begin to see a further significance to the mobile's materials here. Consider Adorno's comments on Mozart from a little further on in the essay. Mozart, says Adorno, gives us a joyful, harmonious music, seemingly unconnected with the dark historical situation around him. But that very harmony is a kind of dissonance, precisely because it is out of whack with the unharmonious world around it. Mozart's "harmony sounds a dissonance to the harsh tones of reality and has them as its substance. That is Mozart's sadness. Only through the transformation of something that is in any case preserved in its negative form" does his music accomplish something significant, says Adorno. That is: the harmony of the music isn't saccharine, because we think of how unlike the world that harmony is. We don't only hear the joy of the music — the very joyfulness of the music reminds us of how the rest of the world doesn't live up to that joy.

Okay. On the one hand, we could concentrate on Calder's form here. That is, we could say that looking at the beautiful forms of the mobiles, and their graceful motions, provides us with a similar push-and-pull of harmonic joy and dissonant sorrow. We see the mobiles and are filled with their joyful harmony. But then we remember how the world is so rarely this happy and serene, and we can think of how heroically Calder works to overcome all of that unhappiness and give us this joy. But on the other hand, we could talk about the materials of the mobiles in this context. They're made, mostly, of sheet metal and rivets. These are materials we associate with industry, with factories and high-rises, as well as with the military, with warships and tanks. When we see them in the mobiles, we think of how Calder is out to negate the normal use of these materials as utilitarian means to gain money, or to kill. We see that he has accomplished what Adorno called "transformation of something [here, the military-industrial complex] that is in any case preserved in its negative form." It's all a matter of taking these specific materials and creating out of them joyful, harmonic forms.

This kind of significance of formalism seems pretty straightforward, but somehow it got lost in much of the thinking in art schools and in what we call the art world during those years when Calder and his generation were, in Nathan Carter's words, "completely taboo," and when the scholars to whom Laura Pierson points found Calder "devoid of layered meanings." And if you want layers, Calder's mobiles have got layers. I mean, we've barely scratched the surface in talking about a moral or political meaningfulness to the experience of their formal beauty. There are other kinds of significance, too.

Let's go back to Sartre for one of these other kinds of significance. Looking at a mobile as it moves slowly through the air, Sartre observes that "the movements of the object are intended only to please us, to titillate our eyes, but they have a profound, metaphysical meaning." This metaphysical dimension comes from the nature of the movement itself. As Sartre puts it,

In [Calder's] mobiles chance probably plays a greater part than in any other creation of man. The forces at work are too numerous and too complicated for any human mind, even that of their creator, to foresee all possible combinations. For each of them Calder establishes a general scheme of movement, then abandons it; the time, the sun, the heat and wind will determine each particular dance.

There's an order to the pieces, a harmony or dance, but it isn't a schematic one, or a predictable one. There is overt balance, but it is asymmetrical and ever-changing and not under the control of a guiding intelligence. The branches of the mobiles — sometimes setting one large object in balance with many small sub-branches and little objects, sometimes creating the illusion that things are connected where they aren't — are like systems opening up to little sub-systems, orders coming into being and then shifting into apparent disorders. Parts that seemed subordinate become important, elements that seemed to coalesce suddenly disperse. Sartre sees this as a kind of dialectic between arbitrariness and order, saying that while Calder's "one aim is to create chords and cadences of unknown movements" his mobiles are nevertheless

…almost mathematical combinations and the perceptible symbol of Nature, squandering pollen and abruptly causing a thousand butterflies to take wing and never revealing whether she is the blind concatenation of causes and effects or the gradual unfolding, forever deferred, disconcerted and thwarted, of an Idea.

Sartre sees the "metaphysical meaning" inherent to the pieces as a metaphysics that holds out the possibility of total disorder, or of total, Hegelian order. For me, though, the point of reference wouldn't be Hegel, but Gilles Deleuze. The evolving chords and cadences of the mobiles seem to echo Deleuze's rhizome, in that they create a structure in which things come together at odd angles, and in which we can follow lines of flight out of an apparently fixed order into something new. I mean, you could stand in the middle of the big room at the Museum of Contemporary Art and watch these combinations cohere and disperse with a big, open-mouthed smile on your face until the security guards begin to suspect you're tripping on something. The mobiles have that kind of metaphysics, layered on top of the moral or political significance that also comes in their joyful forms.

Since we're talking about metaphysics, I think the story Calder used to tell about one of the foundational moments of his way of seeing is important. One night, when Calder was a young man serving in the Merchant Marine, he found himself alone on deck at dawn, at precisely that moment when the sun and moon were balanced forces in the sky. On the one hand, the saw a dull, red disk of the sun, and on the other the bright, hard, cold whiteness of the moon. Around him was the featureless sea, becalmed, and on the deck beneath him nothing but a coil of rope. As he put it in his autobiography:

It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system.

Three circles, each balanced in visual significance, but each entirely different, and all of them in some kind of large motion in relation to the others. The moment struck him, and stayed with him, and we can see in the coiled wires, and in the colored circles and blunted triangles of his mobiles echoes of this moment, when he seemed to feel most keenly something about the asymmetry and motion-inflected temporary harmonies of the world. There's a visual epiphany, an insight into the structure of the cosmos, in that moment, and it's a metaphysical insight Calder explored again and again. I think it matters, too, that this was a ship made of rivets and sheet metal, devoted to commerce and war and power — because this is the world that (to use Adorno's words about Mozart) is "preserved in its negative form" in the mobiles.

It's sort of amazing to me that things as profound and beautiful as Calder's mobiles could become taboo in art schools, and dismissed as merely decorative objects without significance. You'd have to forget a lot about how to look at things to come to that conclusion.

Bang on the Drum: Adorno and Free Time

I think I must be undergoing some kind of Frankfurt School hangover from the panel on Adorno I attended down at the Modernist Studies Association conference last week, since I haven't been able to look at, read, or listen to anything all week without asking "What would Adorno Say?" For example: as I was brushing my teeth with my alarmingly overpowered electric toothbrush this morning, I flipped the radio on and caught the tail end of the Todd Rundgren classic "Bang on the Drum" (which, by the way, isn't a bad song to get down on your back molars to). And I think the sentiment Rundgren expresses is very much in line with what Adorno had to say about free time.

I suppose it's not really all that helpful to begin with Adorno's quip, in Minima Moralia about free time being nothing but "the reflex-action to a production rhythm imposed heteronomously on the subject." So let's move on immediately to Alex Thomson's gloss on the idea: "even when we are not working," says Thomson, summarizing Adorno, "our rest or relaxation is determined by our need to prepare for work, anticipate work, or simply work again." That is: we aren't really free in "free time," because free time isn't something that's there for us to be autonomous in. Rather, free time is time designated for our recovery from work, so that we can work again. Heteronomously (that is: not for ourselves, but for someone else's agenda. You know — for The Man.) If we're really autonomous in any meaningful measure, we don't think of ourselves as on or off the clock: we're doing our own thing. Such a blessed state is unalienated labor. And it's how I feel when I'm writing an article or book or poem: I can't really tell whether it's work or not, and I'm never really "off," since I end up writing notes with weird, often failed, ideas for the project all the time, on napkins or the insides of books or, more than once, on the side of a styrofoam coffee cup.

But this isn't the way most of us experience things most of the time: there's work, and there's free time, and they imply one another in a dialectical relationship. That is, the idea of free time implies unfreedom, for Adorno. It's only an officially sanctioned moment where we can adjust body and psyche so we can go back to work. I think this is what Adorno was getting at when he claimed that "free time is tending toward the opposite of its own concept." If the idea of free time is autonomy, then it's sadly ironic, because it's really just a compensatory moment that re-fits us to work on someone else's terms. It's not about autonomy at all: it's the shadow-self of alienation.

So that's Adorno. And here's Rundgren:

Every day when I get home from work
I feel so frustrated — the boss is a jerk
And I get my sticks and go out to the shed
And I pound on that drum like it was the boss's head
Because

I don't want to work
I just want to bang on the drum all day
I don't want to play
I just want to bang on the drum all day

So what happens after work? Well, play —the expression of spontenaity and freedom — isn't possible here. We're too frazzled and frustrated from the day job. The act of drumming isn't some outward expression of joy, here: it's a compensatory act for the frustrations of work, and in the end it serves work, in that it allows us to go back to work for our jerk of a boss, having let out (symbolically) the violent urges to which his jerkish bossery led us. So Rundgren isn't celebrating fun: he's crying out about the sad ironies of a system where even the things that should be fun are somehow linked to an alienating system of labor relations. Only he's doing it by rocking out, rather than laying down the kind of pseudo-leftist theory jive that is (I'm sad to say) all I've got to offer on the subject.

Adorno was famous for disliking popular music, and considered it a part of the nefarious culture industry. But I really do think there are significant areas where his point of view coincides with that of certain popular musicians. I remember Robert Kaufman saying, down at the Modernist Studies Association conference, that toward the end of his life Adorno was dragged to the movies, and urged to watch television, by his students. I kind of wish they'd made him tune in to a rock station, too.

Classical Music Between Adorno and Bourdieu

Richard Taruskin makes some big noise about classical music, or at any rate about the discourse around classical music, over at The New Republic. Long story (and I mean long story: it clocks in at about 12,000 words) short, Taruskin believes classical music's current crop of apologists does more harm than good. In a review of Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson, Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears, by Joshua Fineberg, and Why Classical Music Still Matters, by Lawrence Kramer, Taruskin argues that the crisis in classical music isn't all it's cracked up to be. What's particularly interesting to me are the parallels in the "classical music is doomed and we gotta do something about it now" debate and the whole "can poetry matter?" debate.

I urge anyone interested in the high culture / pop culture debate to read the article, which makes good use of Adorno and Bourdieu, and is well-written, too. But if you don't feel like scaling a 12,000 word mountain, the basic line goes something like this: Taruskin believes that the classical music he loves needs to be defended from its own defenders, who can't seem to write without (wait for it...) "recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery."

The article begins with an account of an experiment in which Joshua Bell, a leading classical violinist, was asked to go undercover as a busker. Bell was generally ignored, and the planners of the experiement took this as an opportunity to hurl curses from on high at the philistine churls of the public. Taruskin mercilessly points out the flawed methodology of the experiment (Bell had to stand in a place no self-respecting busker would have picked, for example), and argues that the experiment was no experiment at all, but a stunt with a pre-fabricated conclusion.

Taruskin goes on to tell people who lament classical music's loss of prestige that the rise of classical's prestige came about under conditions when the elite classes needed to distinguish themselves culturally from the huddled masses yearning to get down with popular songs. A return to that state ( a condition still present but not robust) is neither possible nor all that desirable. I mean do we really want to become like a snob like Milton Babbitt, who said in 1979:

We receive brilliant, privileged freshmen at Princeton, who in their first year of college are likely to take a philosophy of science course with [logical positivist] Carl Hempel, and then return to their dormitories to play the same records that the least literate members of our society embrace as the only relevant music.

"Pierre Bourdieu, were you listening?" asks Taruskin, after quoting this passage.

Taruskin also invokes the Adorno/Frankfurt school defense of high culture, a version of which one finds in the alt-poetry community to this day. He summarizes the Frankfurt position about as well as anyone can in a short paragraph:

The main tenet of the creed is the defense of the autonomy of the human subject as manifested in art that is created out of a purely aesthetic, hence disinterested, impulse. Such art is without utilitarian purpose (although, as Kant famously insisted, it is "purposive"), but it serves as the symbolic embodiment of human freedom and as the vehicle of transcendent metaphysical experience. This is the most asocial definition of artistic value ever promulgated. Artists, responsible to themselves alone, provide a model of human self-realization. All social demands on the artist--whether made by church, state, or paying public--and all social or commercial mediation are inimical to the authenticity of the creative product.

Going on to note how this position is variously trivialized, mangled, and dumbed-down in defenses of classical music, Taruskin shows the weakness of the position when it comes to accounting for the public's actual musical tastes.

The big wrap-up in the article defends classical music from a more modest and pluralist position, claiming that it can serve as one register — a rather formal one — among others; that it can function like a formal level of diction in the larger and more various musical language as a whole.

I was hipped to the article by D.L. LeMahieu, a historian who's written about the whole pop culture/high culture issue with real depth and the kind of careful research that puts people in English deparments to shame. Since everything LeMahieu says is worth printing in gold-leaf outlined letters on enduring parchment and hanging on the wall for contemplation, I asked him if he'd mind if I posted our correspondence about the article. He graciously agreed:

***
Dan,

Picked up a copy of the New Republic and gave the piece on classical music a read. I actually didn't find myself upset (as you’d predicted I would) at all: I think Taruskin's right about the disingenuousness of the Bell experiment; I think he gets his Adorno right; I'm sympathetic to his argument in general.

I do think he buys into the idea that there's a crisis in classical music a bit more than he should. For example, he downplays the fact that classical music is the main beneficiary of online sales (people who buy classical music tend to buy whole multi-movement works, unlike pop music buyers, who tend only to want the single, and being younger and poorer than the classical crowd, generally have no qualms about illegal free downloading). He also downplays the fact that more repertoire is available now than ever before, thanks to Naxos (a label he mentions very briefly, but a huge phenomenon in the music industry) and to online releases without major label support. He's right that classical radio is in decline, but he never mentions that fewer stations are needed, since one can listen to the better ones online anywhere in the world. So part of the perceived crisis isn't a crisis of the music but of the media. This, of course, is part of the whole internet shakeup, which effects everything from newspapers to (increasingly) television. Overall, I don't think many people would want to turn the clock back, even if it were possible.

Of course in many ways I'm both a romantic and a modernist — in fact, one reviewer of my work called me "An augustan sensibility trained as a romanticist and writing in a modernist idiom during the postmodern era" (talk about aufgehoben!). So when Tarushkin veers closest to the "blame modernism" thesis, or harps on the dark side of German Romantic nationalism, I get ready to pounce on him. But even here I think he's fair -- he doesn't shout "traison!" at les clercs of modernism, so much as he sees the evolution of their aesthetic as a property of a very particular history, a history linked to the rise of bourgeois self-definition via culture (as opposed to aristocratic self-definition via landholding and ancestry) and all the rest. Since these are the issues I've been trying to get at in the chapter I'm currently writing of a book called The Aesthetic Anxiety, I can't really take exception. [Shameless plug: an essay that contains a brief treatment of my book-in-progress' themes is about to come out in Art and Life in Aestheticism. It makes a great gift, so shop early...]

There's been a debate about poetry similar to the one Taruskin traces in the New Republic, with Adorno-influenced people proclaiming their purity and political potential from one corner, while the people at the another corner demand a kind of popularization. Many on both sides see themselves as besieged and on the defensive in an environment of general decline. Meanwhile, and quite un-remarked by either side, I’m told that one of the larger online poetry sites — salt — boasts 200,000 readers of its often avant-garde content every month, a readership comparable to that of Harpers'. Where it all goes is anybody's guess.

What's your take on the article? I'm glad you turned me on to it.

Best,

Bob


***
Bob,

I gave my copy away over a week ago so I will have to rely on memory. One objection to the article was the tone: it was a mirror image of what it pretended to refute. I was also disappointed that he cast the entire problem in terms of the high/low culture debate, about which I know a modest amount. When I researched A Culture for Democracy over 20 years ago, I read a great deal about the decline of "music" (as Classical was then called) in the 1920s and 1930s. I read the first twenty years of Gramophone, which constantly editorialized about the issue. In any case, the NR author says absolutely nothing new or interesting about High/Low, other than to presume the legitimacy of the Low, which is not the issue.

I wish the author had explored not only the technology issue, which you grasp, but also the audience issue: Classical appeals most to UMC (upper middle class) and the old, often many of whom were exposed to the music in their youth but only grasped it firmly as they aged.

Also, there is the damned issue of "art".

Dan

***
Dan,

You're right of course about the question of audience, and the aging of the classical audience. This is the elephant in the room that Taruskin doesn't discuss enough.

You're right, too, about how most of the article just wanders over well-trodden ground in the high/low culture debate. I'm not sure Taruskin presumes the legitimacy of the low, though. When he writes, at the end, of classical music as a formal idiom or register within music as a whole, he seems to say that genres aren't so much legitimate or illegitimate as they are appropriate or inappropriate for particular situations. This is interesting, I think — not because it represents any new conceptual blockbusting (it doesn't), but because it is representative of what I take to be the emerging attitude toward what we had thought of as commercial/autonomous or low/high culture. If there's anything newish in the article's take on high-low it's this embodiment of an attitude one sees emerging, a kind of non-hierarchical pluralism about culture. In this view, high culture has less special social prestige than it did in Bourdieu's France of the 1970s, nor does it have much of a special claim on Frankfurt school political/spiritual redemptiveness. But this doesn't mean (as it seemed to mean, in early postmodernism) that it is bad or irrelevant or to be chucked away in favor of a valorized low culture. Rather, high culture becomes one of the registers in which one can (culturally) speak. Sometimes it stands on its own, sometimes it is mixed with other registers for effect (as in speech that combines high and low diction). So the high culture tradition is absorbed into a largely post-hierarchical world.

20 years of Gramophone — I envy you that!

Best,

Bob

***
Bob,

Yes his pluralism is quite postmodern. But it eludes questions about cultural hierarchy that he presumes in other places within the article. His 'broadbrow" view was first articulated, by the way, by J B Priestley in the 1930s: at the time it was thought "middlebrow" and vulgar to assert such a view.

I devoted 12 years to thinking about this issue and I ended up asserting contradictions: an indication that the problem with judging "art" may have to do with a logic yet to be fully defined. Perhaps it dwells in cognitive psychology or Dilthey's "lived experience" which suggests inaccessibility to the views we assert, despite the best attempts at rationalization, including "disinterestedness."

Dan

***
Dan,

I admit to having failed to unravel the Gordian Knot that is the problem of art, and the judgement of art. I've been relying on a little dodge in which I treat questions of what is better by asserting that there is no better in the absolute sense, only better-for certain tasks. I suppose that's why I'm sympathetic to Taruhkin's ending sections.

As for self-contradictoriness and the inaccessibility of our own viewpoints: I'm sure you're right. I remember when the deconstructionists built their brief empire on that insight.

Mind if I put our little exchange in my blog? I'll let you have the last word...

Bob

***
Bob,

Your pragmatic view echoes that of Dewey, at least as I understand him.

The Deconstuctionist Empire may be decline, but the Cognitive Psychologists still rule.

On Fox, being given the last word means that you have already lost.

Dan

Why The Right Wing Can’t Do Comedy

Among all kinds of writing there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in humor, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel. It is not an imagination that teems with monsters... which is capable of furnishing the world with diversions of this nature...
— Joseph Addison, Spectator 35, 1711.

Darin Murphy has some interesting speculations up over at the Huffington Post about the failure of Fox News’ Half-Hour Comedy Hour, the show once trumpeted as the right wing’s answer to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Murphy sees the failure of the show largely in terms of the failure of the writers to grasp the nature of irony. There’s something to what Murphy has to say. But I think the waters run deep, here, and merit a little further investigation.

We could begin by asking why so few works of right wing comedy have been successful. The Half-Hour News Hour failed spectacularly. We can date the demise of Dennis Miller’s comedy career to the months after 9-11 when, understandably freaked out, he took a hard turn to the political right. Right wing attempts at comedy in the movies have done pretty poorly (remember P.C.U.? God, I wish I didn’t). Mike Judge’s King of the Hill can be pretty funny, and so can Penn & Teller in their show Bullshit, but I’m not sure you could call these conservative shows: they’re both kind of populist/libertarian hybrids. The right wing, which masters a lot of media formats in which even talented lefties tend to struggle (talk radio, say, or the personality-driven news commentary show) just can’t seem to do funny. And I don’t mean they can’t please irredeemably left-wing, egghead academic literary Green-party voters like, say, me. They can’t buy a win, even with a Fox News audience. What gives?

The answer can best be expressed in a syllogism, so dust off your notes to Logic 101 and check this:

Major Premise: Comedy is inherently subversive of authority.
Minor Premise: The right wing (at least in post-911 America) is deeply into authoritarianism.
Conclusion: Right wing comedy blows.

So, about that Major Premise — how do I know that comedy is inherently subversive of authority? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me call as witness Mr. Mikhail Bakhtin, the foremost theorist of comedy in Stalinist Russia (which qualifies as a contender for World’s Toughest Gig, right up there with coal miner and “Guy In Charge of Weeding Norman Mailer’s Ear Hair”). Maybe it was the deeply authoritarian world of gray apparatchiks and political purges around him that got Bakhtin thinking about humor as the antithesis of authority. Be that as it may, Bakhtin’s thinking certainly didn’t endear him to the powers-that-were, who gave him a bit of a rough ride. I suppose I can see why the apparatchiks didn’t like Bakhtin: he insisted that everything delightful and funny was in some measure subversive of hierarchies and authorities, famously tracing the history of laughter back to medieval carnivals, where all the established hierarchies were suspended:

The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling... and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.
—Rabelais and His World

Even something as low-grade and apparently apolitical as, say, the fart joke was in some measure transgressive for Bakhtin. Usually such jokes depend on a context where something we are meant to take seriously is dissed by being brought into association with despised and abject things like “the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs” or “to acts of defecation and copulation.” I mean, think of it: involuntarily unleashing a truly noxious and garlic-scented belch on your own in the privacy of your own living room isn’t particularly funny, but doing it at a moment when you’re supposed to be a figure of authority (while, say, delivering your lecture on Hegel’s aesthetics to your seminar) will get you giggled at by your students. Or, uh, so I’m told.

So okay. Humor is subversive of authority. Any snickering kid who ever stuck an “Kick me” post-it on the back of an unsuspecting school teacher knows that. But what about the second part of our syllogism, the bit with the somewhat more contentious premise that the American right wing is into authoritarianism lately? Since I’m probably going to get some nasty email about this one, I figure I’ll call several witnesses: Theodor Adorno, John Dean, and Jack Block.

Hard-core Adornonauts know where I’m going with this, I’m sure: straight to The Authoritarian Personality, the 1950 book he co-wrote with a group of sociologists. Here, he defines the authoritarian personality as that type of deeply insecure subjectivity that yearns to submit to authority, that seeks stability and security above all else, that dislikes divergence and longs for conformity. Such a personality sees the world as crawling with threats, and sees salvation from these threats in powerful, unquestionable authority figures. People like this are susceptible to political manipulation, often (though not always) by the political right.

Adorno, of course, didn’t have anything to say about the American right after 9-11. But John Dean does. A guy with impeccable right-wing credentials himself (in addition to serving under Nixon, he describes himself as a “Goldwater conservative”), he argues in his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience that the conservative movement he has been loyal to all his life has taken a wrong turn, in exploiting insecurity and appealing to authoritarian sentiment (the need for certainty, the fear of the alien, etc.). In a time of great uncertainty, the party rode a wave of fear by appealing to and cultivating the kind of authoritarian personality Adorno described, building a Republican coalition based on such people. (Dean draws on the research of Robert Altemeyer, who updates Adorno’s work with new data).

Other new research points in the same direction. In fact, a recent article by Jack Block in the Journal of Research in Personality traced the political evolution of a group of 95 children over several decades, and came to the conclusion that the kids who grew up to be conservative had more authoritarian personality traits from the get-go. As Block put it in the Toronto Star, "the whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity” while "the confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests." The research seems to indicate, however preliminarily, a correlation between the right wing and a yearning for authority.

So okay. If we buy the Bakhtinian argument about comedy as subversive of authority, and if we find the sociological and psychological research on a correlation between the contemporary American right wing and authoritarianism convincing, then we’ve got an answer as to why the right can’t seem to do comedy: it runs contrary to their nature. Asking them to do comedy is like asking a bunch of sumo wrestlers to excel at basketball. Whatever their other virtues, they’re just not going to be good at it, at least not very often.

The authoritarian thesis also helps explain why the left does so poorly at talk radio and at O’Reilly Factor style television (listening to Al Franken on Air America was like watching a great sumo champion struggle to shoot a basket; watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is like watching a sumo wrestler somehow, amazingly, dunk and hang off the rim, which even more amazingly supports his bulk). Lefty-types don't work well in those formats, but the fit between those formats and authoritarian thinking is natural. I mean, if what you’re into is all that authoritarian stuff — submitting to a strong personality, being told that people unlike you are not only wrong but bad — you’re going to gravitate to talk radio and O'Reilly-esque TV. The authoritarian imagination teems with monsters (in the form of illegal immigrants, shadowy terrorists, and treacherous ivory-tower liberals). As Joseph Addison said centuries ago, such an imagination isn’t going to be good at playing for laughs.

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago

It shouldn't surprise us that the latest round of internecine British cultural warfare has occurred on American soil. I mean, this country was founded by a bunch of disgruntled refugee British cultural dissidents with funny hats and a lot to learn about growing corn and trading beads for turkeys and real estate. So the Brits have a distinguished tradition of exporting their squabbles. They also have another distinguished tradition: one of arguing bitterly about the nature and value of avant-garde poetry over the last three decades or so (if you want to read about a particularly savage episode, check out Peter Barry's new book Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, out last summer from the good people at Salt Publishing). And the last few weeks have seen the two traditions collide, with the carnage splattered across the pages of the Chicago Review, and on the walls of Chicago's Elastic Arts Center.

Let me explain.

It all started quietly enough, with a review of a new book by the younger British poet Simon Jarvis by John Wilkinson, a fellow Brit recently transplanted to (God help him) South Bend, Indiana. The review itself begins with the not-all-that-hyperbolic assertion that Jarvis is an odd kind of poet. "It would defeat rhetoric to overstate the peculiarity of Simon Jarivis' book The Unconditional: A Lyric," writes Wilkinson, claiming that it "must be among the most unusual books ever published." How's that, you ask? Well, Wilkinson continues: "imagine if you can... a continuous poem of 237 pages mainly in iambic pentameter, in which whole pages pass without a full stop," a poem "dedicated to a high level of discourse on prosody, critical theory, and phenomenology; all this conducted in a philosophical language drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics" and "a narrative language that is the unnatural offspring of Wyndham Lewis and P.B. Shelley." Moreover, the book is filled with a particularly unusual cast of characters, a group resembling nothing so much as "refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking" with names like "=x" "Agramant" "Qnuxmuxkyl" and "Jobless," a group who start out on a Canturbury Tales-like trip, but wind up in a dingy pub displaying unlikely degrees of alienation and erudition.

(I can't be the only one to rush to Amazon.com immediately after reading that description, can I? Amazon's note on the status of the book, then and now — "currently unavailable" — indicates that Jarvis' American fan base is either so large that the book flies off the shelves like the latest Harry Potter, or so small that Amazon can't be bothered to keep the book around. I dream of a world where the former case prevails, but suspect otherwise...).

Anyway, after outlining the oddball parameters of Jarvis' book, Wilkinson lays down some heady lines about the goals of Jarvis' project, saying that Jarvis wants to invoke Adorno's notion of a negative utopianism, that is, "a redemptive utopianism that is understood to be impossible" but is nevertheless "the necessary horizon for art, philosophy, and political struggle." What Jarvis fears, says Wilkinson, is that "the extinction of a utopian horizon for the left leads necessarily to the installation of capitalism as an historical terminus." Instead of getting his Thomas More mojo on and laying out a specific utopia, though, Jarvis (in the story Wilkinson tells about him) refuses such a temptation (which could only lead to violence and dystopia). Instead, says Wilkinson, Jarvis wants to use difficult form, full of things that can't be glossed over or assimilated to our usual patterns of understanding, to set the reader "on edge" so he or she will not "float into a complacent sphere beyond all struggle." You know, the usual Frankfurt School, Langpo-ish stuff you learned from the local school marm while working on your M.F.A. Ah, how fondly I look back on those days, taking a crayon to the image of Max Horkheimer in my coloring book, and nervously standing before the class, my hair slicked down, my Hush Puppies freshly shined, as I recited Charles Bernstein's poems at prize day in the quaint old chapel by the soccer pitch. Oh, the fun we had in those salad days! But I digress.

So. When I first read Wilkinson's review, I admired his specific and clear description of Jarvis' book, which sounds unlike anything I've read. But I sort of blew off the big ideological claims Wilkinson made, since claims of that kind I have read before, in, I think, about every third review of experimental poetry I've come by over the past 15 years.


But Peter Riley did not stand by so idly and complacently in the face of these familiar claims for the political value of experimental poetry. Gird, did he, his loins for serious battle. Tap, did he, most vehemently into his laptop. Publish, did he, an open letter, in the next issue of the Chicago Review. And, judging by Wilkinson's response, wound, did Riley, his formidable foe. Check it out.

Riley begins with a genteel moment, praising the Cambridge/Prynne tradition embodied by Jarvis and polemically upheld by Wilkinson. But this feels sort of like the moment when two boxers "shake hands" by thumping their gloves together at the start of a match, and soon the blows begin to fall heavily. Riley's main target is the identification of formal innovation with political utopianism. As the first sentence in this paragraph of Riley's makes plain, he's going after Wilkinson here, for sure, but he's also going after all those other Frankfurterized reviews of avant-poetry:

For Wilkinson as for most other commentators on the forward side of things, to speak of poetical virtue is to speak of political virtue, there is no distinction. Poems and poetical thinking are politically good or they have no good in them. I guess we are used to that these days. The one big claim left to the poem, that it (rather “somehow”) holds the answer or counter to political harm by occulted inference. It’s more alarming to notice that in this particularly fervent British version the contrary also holds: political virtue can only be poetical virtue. “Aesthetically-founded politics” (which involves more than poetry of course, but): only the (poet) is qualified to be a politician. It is not just that the poet “knows better” than the working politician, indeed I don’t think that claim is made, but that only the poet has the spirit to inhabit the sphere of total oppositional negation which is the only political register to be tolerated. Doesn’t this mean that in a sense there is actually a withdrawal from politics, from the politics that happens and can happen into one that can’t possibly? An understanding of how politics works and how amelioration can be wrought through the science of it, of what the mechanisms are and so of what could be done – all this would be beneath us? To assume that you can go straight from aesthetics to ethics is worrying enough, but aren’t the two here fused into one substance?

Yow. Didja see where Riley landed that blow? Right smack on two of the Big Assumptions of avant-poetry: that formal radicalism is special because it is political radicalism; and that the total negation of current political reality is the only responsible position, and the rest is all complicity, all the time. Such assumptions, says Riley, leave "the entire non-poet population of the world (and most of the poets), condemned as criminals." Come on, admit it: you've encountered the very thing Riley's on about: the insistence that only a certain kind of poetry can be ethical, and the rest of the poets may as well all run off in their giant SUVs on their way to Dick Cheney fundraising events, spouting clouds of carcinogens from their tailpipes and tossing non-biodegradable burger wrappers out the window as they go.

Anyway, after this comes my favorite part of the piece, Riley's powerful cri de coeur directed toward the avant-garde community in which he himself has much standing: "How do we get to be so haughty?" It kind of hits home, really. I think of some of the haughty-ass theoretico-jive that's come out of my mouth at various conferences and coffeehouse readings over the years, and I shudder.

I think Wilkinson must have shuddered a bit, too, judging by his (not yet published) response. He begins with what seems like a kind of conciliatory statement, saying that he didn't mean to imply that Prynnite, Langpo-ish avant-postery was the only good or ethical kind of writing:

I reject the idea in Peter Riley’s letter that referring to a relatively small number of poets must imply an exclusivity in taste or could be used to impute an aesthetic or political programme. It is a mistake to assume that anyone necessarily worries away publicly at what he most loves; and this is especially misleading where writers rather than scholars are concerned, since generally writers write about two kinds of writer – those whom they feel fail to receive their due, to some extent a covert special pleading for their own work; and those whose work seems whether successfully or not to tackle ideas or technical problems which trouble them. But we all have different ways of reading in different circumstances, as musicians do of listening and painters of looking; what need to argue why merely to glance at certain poems by John Donne or Thomas Hardy or James Schuyler can bring tears to my eyes, any more than I have to justify to myself a preference for Lee Konitz over John Coltrane or for sea pinks over daffodils. It is typical that working life has left me too dependent on early-established taste, but teaching now shows me much to enjoy and admire in writers I once dismissed with youth’s arbitrariness.

(Many thanks to Wilkinson for letting me quote from this — you've got to admire I guy who'll let you quote unpublished material that you find intelligent but not always entirely convincing).

I'm not too keen on the "don't expect me to be fair, I'm a writer" argument. And I'm not sure how to feel about the "hey, I didn't get the chance to read around enough to have a broad taste because I had to work at a real job" line (Wilkinson was a mental health professional for many years). Had he directed the comment at me, I'd have assessed my career path so far in life (brief and inglorious military service, used bookstore clerk while a student, and standard-issue academic since), felt some kind of prof-caste guilt, and cut Wilkinson some slack. But he's directing this at Peter Riley, who scrambled to make a living as a rare book dealer for years (and may so scramble still, for all I know). So the ethical high ground falls away from beneath the Wilkinsonian sandals. That said, the embrace of ecumenical pluralism is encouraging.

Wilkinson goes on for a few pages, and, being both bright and combative, lands a few good blows of his own. But as I was watching the critical fisticuffs fly, I couldn't help thinking that what gets lost in his exchange with Riley about exclusive taste and pseudo-political haughtiness is the poetry itself. Then, as if on cue from whatever goddess reigns on Parnassus these days, a group of stangers appeared at the edge of town. They were Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Peter Manson, and if you wanted an actual exhibit of the kind of post-Prynne, Jarvis-y poetry Riley and Wilkinson were arguing about, you couldn't have asked for anything better. All three poets have work in the Spring '07 issue of the Chicago Review. But the poets themselves were making a Chicago stop on their trans-continental American tour, courtesy of Kerri Sonnenberg and her ever-amazing Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Center, so I hightailed it down to the city, disgracefully wolfed down enchilladas at El Cid with Kristy Odelius, Bill Allegrezza, and Jennifer & Chris Glomski, then made the scene. Which was really two scenes in one, since the usual Discreet crowd had been joined by tout le monde du Hyde Park, especially the Chicago Review crowd. I ran into Josh Kotin, Bobby Baird, Eirik Steinhoff, as well as Dustin Simpson and Josh Adams (who seem to be engaged in a Surrealism-versus-Oulipo debate of the sort that can only rage with such intensity in the rarified air of Hyde Park). Also Joel Craig. And I saw Chicu Reddy and Suzanne Buffam from across a much-crowded room of black turtlenecks and Amstel Light bottles. If Ray Bianchi hadn't been in Istanbul, and if Albert Goldbarth had descended upon us from his secret mountain fortress, we'd have had almost all of the main speakers from this year's Lake Forest Literary Festival on hand.

But I digress. I wanted to talk about the poetry, not the audience. For my money Keston Sutherland gave the strongest performance, and I've got to say this about his work: it was all the things Wilkinson said Jarvis' work was: formally strange, intriguingly metrical, and very much in the Prynne tradition. It even had a strong social component, addressing anxieties about capitalism (particularly incipient Chinese capitalism) and the ways it enters into our most intimate psychic spaces. Sutherland's work tries to get a handle on these anxieties not through making a statement about them (the mimetic and statement-oriented elements of language are only intermittently in operation in his work), but by casting them in oddly familiar forms (his work is strangely ode-like, and intriguingly metered — formalist, I want to say, but nothing at all like Dana Gioia). He registers all kinds of things that are going on out there politically. But there's nothing messianic about it. There's nothing in the work (at least in what I saw that night) that claims "because I do this, my politics are pure" or "because I do this, the Empire of Media-Saturated Capitalism quakes" or even "because I do this, Philip Larkin was a bad poet." And it was a hell of a show, too.

In the end, I'm inclined to agree with a comment Eirik Steinhoff made between readers at the Elastic Arts Center that night: "the problem isn't the Prynne tradition — the problem is the messianism attached to it." If Keston Sutherland represents the Prynne tradition in its current iteration, I'm inclined to think it's the most vital part of British poetry today. If we could only find some way of talking about it that didn't imply it was a way — no, the way — to save the world...


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LATE-BREAKING NEWS: THE SENTIMENTALITY OF EXEMPTION

This just in from Eirik Steinhoff:

Did I really say that about Prynne the Messiah? ....Can we correct that quote to read "print" for "Prynne" and "Masala Dosai" for "Messianism"? That sounds more like something I might have said that exciting evening.

That sd, the Wilkinson/Riley colloquy does usefully illuminate the issues that crop up when promises are made that poetry is often hard pressed to keep. Keston's keenly alive to this problem, speaking of the "sentimentality of exemption" avant-gardes fall prey to.

*****
MORE LATE-BREAKING NEWS: HENRY GOULD WEIGHS IN

I'm not sure how to feel about being called "chipper." Then again, I've been called a lot worse, generally with justification.