Félix Fénéon, or: Modernity is Flat

Félix Fénéon, in Signac's painting

Skepticism about morality is what is decisive.  The ending of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some metaphysical beyond, leads to nihilism.  'Everything lacks meaning' (the untenability of [the Christian] interpretation of the world, upon which a huge amount of energy has been lavished, awakens a suspicion that all intepretations of the world are false.

            —Nietzsche, from The Will to Power.

I'd been poking away at Félix Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes on and off for what must have been weeks when it hit me: modernity is flat!  Let me explain.

Fénéon is a fascinating figure.  An art critic, an anarchist, quite probably a one-time terrorist, and the man who invented the term "neo-impressionism," he was never really famous, but he was ubiquitous on the Parisian art and literature scenes of the 1880s and 90s.  He edited Rimbaud and Lautréamont, championed pointillism, and he's the figure near the center of the spirals in what is probably Paul Signac's best known painting.  An odd man, his Nouvelles en trois lignes is an odd book: it's a compendium of more than 1,200 little narratives, most three lines long, originally written for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906.  The narratives tell compressed stories of miscellaneous news events of no great significance.  We don't get history book stuff here, but what the French call "faits-divers"—mostly true crime stuff from the provinces, or weird little events that don't fit in any more formal context.  It's a minor form, to be sure, but Fénéon is a genius with it: his delivery is deadpan, and even within the restrictions of a few sentences he often manages to be wry, or to give an ironic twist to the events.  The title given to the collection of these faits-divers, Nouvelles en trois lignes, is sort of perfect: it can mean "the news in three lines," but also "novels in three lines."  The English translation goes with the latter, and it is a shame there was no way to keep the double sense of the French original.

Despite the elegant simplicity of the individual items in Nouvelles en trois lignes, I had a hard time getting through the whole thing, because the pieces, read in mass, become enervating.  Even with the often-sensational subject matter, they become, en masse, an endurance test: there's no development, virtually no judgment of events, no direction to them.  There's a clear tone—removed, objective, yet ever so slightly ironic—but it never changes, so the narrator becomes difficult company to keep.  Everything is seen from the same perspective.  Horrors and trivialities come to us in the same voice, with little or no difference in judgment.

Maybe a few examples, chosen at random, will make the point (these, which occur consecutively in the book, are in Luc Sante's excellent translation):

At Menzeldjémil, Tunisia, Mme Chassoux, an officer's wife, would have been murdered had her corset not stopped the blade.

Fearless boys of 13 and 11, Deligne and Julien were going off "to hunt in the desert."  They were brought back to Paris from Le Havre.

A virgin of Djiqjelli, 13, subject to lewd advances by a 10-year old, killed him with three thrusts of her knife.

In the heat of argument, Palambo, an Italian of Bausset, Var, was mortally wounded by his chum Genvolino.

Some people, believed to be the same ones who attempted a derailment on Tuesday, tried to set fire to the Labat house in Saint-Mars, Finistère.

Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartier.  Eugène Dupuis came to fetch her.  They killed him.  Love.

You get the idea.  There's a flatness of delivery here, re-enforced by the accumulation of examples.  The narrator is almost transparent in his objectivity: only in the word "fearless," attached to the two naïve boys, and "love" attached to the murder of Eugène Dupuis do we get something like analysis or opinion.  And it is the opinion of someone a little removed, a little world-weary, a little like our American stereotype of a certain kind of jaded Parisian.

It is in this very flatness, the thing that makes Nouvelles en trois lignes difficult to read through, that its significance lies.  The worldwide gathering of information, and the availability of specifics about names and places represents an impressive, and distinctly modern, information regime.  You couldn't assemble a daily paper featuring these kind of events before the late nineteenth century, with its telegraph cables and cheap newsprint and centralized police bureaucracies keeping records.  This kind of communication is native to modernity.  As Nietzche knew, modernity gives us an impressive machinery for information delivery "The entire apparatus of knowledge," he wrote in The Will to Power, "is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification."  But Nietzsche also knew something else: that modernity was largely emptied of systematically articulated values.  After what he saw as Christianity's self-destruction, we had no established moral framework.  Dante was able to articulate an intricate, multi-leveled, continuous moral universe—a vertical universe extending from the deepest circles of the inferno to the highest celestial haunts of truth and beauty.  But modernity is stripped of that condition.  In a way, Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes  can be seen as our Divine Comedy: it gives us a universe full of fast communication, and lurid sensations, a world flattened out and shorn of any vertical scale of vice and virtue. Fénéon's moral universe, like his tone, is flat.  And, for many, it is our home.

Lives of the Philosophers

“People always talk about Nietzsche’s childhood, about how ideas like the death of God can be explained away by the fact that his father and grandfather were ministers,” a young philosophy professor told me not long ago, “but they only do that to Nietzsche, never to someone like Hume or Kant.”  As a Nietzschean, he found this frustrating, and he continued by asking why it was his guy always being treated as if his ideas weren’t propositions that could be true or false, but symptoms of some psychological condition.  Surely, he argued, this said something unpleasant about the people willing to treat Nietzsche this way.

I found the comment fascinating, but it took me a while to understand why.  Eventually, I concluded that two things had struck me as odd. Firstly, there was the emphasis on interpretation being correct or incorrect.  I expect this sort of thing from people in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, but I was surprised to hear it from someone specializing in continental philosophy.  I’d always taken John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the kinds of questions asked by Bentham and Coleridge as a good way of distinguishing between the English-language tradition and the continentals (Coleridge was educated in philosophy in Germany, and was among the leading English continental-style thinkers of his generation, though, to steal a phrase from Mill, his prominence in that field was due in large part to the flatness of the surrounding terrain).  Bentham, said Mill, was interested in whether a text was or was not true; given the same thing to look at, Coleridge was interested in what the thing meant.  If we get a bit anachronistic, we might explain Mill’s Bentham/Coleridge distinction this way: confronted with Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bentham would want to know if that’s how things really worked, but Coleridge would want to know what it meant to think of life in terms of evolution.  Bentham’s way of thinking would take you in the direction of verification and falsifiability.  Coleridge’s way of thinking would take you in the direction of significance and, I suppose, cultural impact.  Both paths can take you to interesting places.

Anyway.  This second, Coleridgean way of looking at things allows for much greater latitude of significance, beyond the binary of true/not true, and I’d naively assumed that people emerging from a training in continental philosophy would be in sympathy with it.  But it seems I may have been wrong: perhaps American philosophy departments are an interpretive community more in line with Bentham’s norms, and we in the English departments are the interpretive community with Coleridgean norms of understanding.

Just as surprising to me was my colleague’s notion that a biographical or psychological explanation didn’t so much explain as explain away, a distinction I’ve never really been comfortable with.  I suppose the idea of the explaining away of something entails that the proffered explanation is somehow total, that it accounts for everything that needs to be accounted for, and therefore one needn’t trouble oneself with any further questions.  “Why did Nietzsche claim God was dead?  To tick off his preacher daddy.  Next question!”  That would, indeed, be an irksome attitude to encounter.  But I’ve known a few biographers, and I don’t think they see their task as being to reduce their subject’s works to symptoms of certain biographical events or psychological trauma.  Indeed, I think they see their work as adding a dimension to how we interpret writings, rather than as taking dimensions away.

My guess is that it’s the tendency toward Bentham’s, rather than Coleridge’s, way of interpreting texts that makes so many philosophers wary of looking to the life of a philosopher.  Even Ray Monk, who wrote a splendid biography of Wittgenstein, expresses a great deal of caution about the biographies of philosophers.  “Can knowing the facts of a philosopher’s life, or gaining an insight into his or her personality, somehow shed light on their work?” he asks in a recent issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine, “I think it can,” he continues, “but, in spelling out how, one has to be very careful, for otherwise one risks allying oneself with some pretty crass points of view.”  And what are these crass points of view?  Monk cribs some terms from James Conant, “reductivism” and “compartmentalism.”  The reductivist, in this view, is the explainer-away of things, the guy who thinks that once we know enough about a philosopher’s life, we’ll be able to (in Conant’s words) “see why he wrote what he did and thereby discover the real meaning of his work.”  In contrast, compartmentalists believe that the facts of a philosopher’s life have nothing whatsoever to do with the correct understanding of his work. For both reductionists and compartmentalists, there seems to be a tendency to want to reduce the pertinent frames of reference for a work, to see it as either only conditioned by the life, or as a set of contextless propositions with no connection to the life.  This is not how we read in English departments, not lately: we tend to look for a plurality of significances, some contextual, others not.  Which is not to say that we don’t come up with some loopy and imbecilic readings.  I mean, the price of our kind of freedom is an eternal lack of vigilance.

Conant himself advocates another path beyond that of the reductionist or the compartmentalist: he says we can turn to the lives of philosophers in order to avoid certain misunderstandings of their work.  One thinks, for example, of Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, which argues that the logical positivist take on Wittgenstein is misguided, and that his life (as opposed to his published texts) proves the case.  Long story short, many positivists have interpreted the last statement in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” as meaning that mysticism is empty.  Monk points to Wittgenstein’s statements to his friends to support the view that Wittgenstein meant something quite different: that mysticism and the holy were real and powerful, but were beyond our capacity to voice, and that any attempt to paraphrase the ineffable was doomed to fall so short as to constitute a lie.  On the one hand, I find this quite convincing.  On the other hand, I find the whole debate that runs “he meant this,” “no, he meant that” sort of naïve.  Haven’t we learned enough from Freud (and, for that matter, from Marx, from Jung, from Lacan, from Surrealism, from…) to see that what we think we’re saying is only the small, visible part of a much bigger iceberg of meaning?

Biography, of course, is not an art limited to the recording of someone’s off-the-record statements, and one of the great things it can accomplish is to give a sense of the concrete situation out of which an idea or set of ideas emerge.  This needn’t be the absolute limit to the significance or meaning of those ideas, but it can provide a sense of the problems initially being addressed: both (the great) Karl Popper’s theories of tolerance in The Open Society and its Enemies and (the odious) Leo Strauss’ sense that liberalism paves the way to nihilism and eventually to fascism take on more significance when we note how they were written by men whose lives were scarred by the Holocaust. 

Or consider Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the concept of identity and difference.  Deleuze argued that we have traditionally considered difference to be something that derives from, or comes after, identity: things have essential identities in themselves, and we compare them and note how they are unalike.  This isn’t really the case, though: for Deleuze, identity is constituted by difference: something is what it is because it differs from one thing in one way, from another thing in another way, and so on: identity is negatively defined, not something with an unchanging essence.  If you read François Dosse’s excellent, exhaustive dual biography Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari: Biographie croisée, you see why the mild-mannered Deleuze hit it off with the extraverted, manic Guattari so well: the kind of thing Deleuze had been theorizing was a conceptual version of something Guattari had been putting into practice at the experimental LaBorde clinic, where he was revolutionizing French mental health care.  The French had been treating mental health problems fairly crudely, more or less keeping patients locked up in isolation.  Guattari felt that this only allowed mental health problems to continue.  Instead, he put patients into constantly shifting group environments, and into different roles, having them perform many tasks at the clinic (the same went for the medical staff, who would rotate into dishwashing or social group leadership roles or whatever).  The notion was that these patients didn’t have a set identity as ill people, but that they were who they were in relation to others, and that their identity would be different if they were in different groups.  It’s not just that you’d be person X wherever you were.  You’d be defined by your relation to those around you, and the differences constituted your (contingent, changeable) identity.  Deleuze took to this immediately, and together Deleuze and Guattari developed, from this notion of difference, the concept of identity as a desiring machine connecting to other desiring machines.  Much later, when Deleuze is interviewed by Claire Parnet, he insists that the resulting text isn’t the product of his own contextless intellect: it is the product of what he is when he is connected to Claire Parnet: hence he says the author of the book of interviews is Deleuzeparnet (something the publishers did not honor, by the way).  This is clearly something with connections, and to a degree roots, in Guattari’s clinical practice.

But why is the biographical information about what Guattari did at LaBorde important?  My historian pal LeMahieu put it better than I could when the question came up at lunch a while back.  “So,” he said, “it’s an example of that French philosophical tradition, where they take something concrete and specific and convert it into something as abstract as possible.”  He’s right, I think, and right in a way that shows us both the strength and weakness of the continental tradition in philosophy.

Poetic Pluralism on Trial

Back in 1998, it still seemed marginally plausible to believe that much of the grand expanse of American poetry could be divided into two fields, one centered in Iowa City lyricism, the other in Buffalo language writing.   It was then that a much younger and more naive version of the present humble blogger wrote in praise of Chicago, in the first editorial for Samizdat.  "Chicago has fostered poets," I claimed, "without pressuring them to conform too closely to the establishment or the counter-establishment.  It is in the interstices between orthodoxies that poetry finds innovation and life, and this is why Chicago has become one of the good places for poetry."  It was the first in a series of essays in which I tried to go to bat for pluralism.  I wanted to say that confessional lyricism and language writing were both important, and that good work could be produced in both of those idioms, and in a whole range of other modes.  In the years that followed I like to think my understanding of the contours of the American poetic field has become subtler and more detailed, but I also like to think that my pluralism has remained intact.


On the face of it pluralism is among the least exciting and provocative of positions.  Who, after all, could really get worked up at someone who advocates letting a thousand flowers bloom, who wishes for nothing more than that we live, let live, and try to find things of value in works that come from traditions other than our own?  Who indeed? Well, as it turns out, just about anyone who strongly believes in what they've committed to.  I was reminded of this recently when reading Keith Tuma's On Leave, in which Tuma, whose criticism both explains and advocates experimental poetics, writes of the difficulty he had in maintaining his friendship with the immensely charming formalist poet Michael Donaghy, whom he knew when they both studied at the University of Chicago.  Differences in poetics mattered between those two guys (both of whom, I should add in a pluralistic aside, I admire).  And I've had people take me on for my pluralism, too, sometimes quite effectively: if you bother to root around in some of the comments on old posts of this blog, for example, you'll find Keston Sutherland letting me have it for a lot of things, including, if I remember correctly, my pluralism.  If you're seriously committed to a particular program, pluralistic poetics can look like a cop-out.


Rather than revisiting any old arguments, I'd like to put my own pluralism on trial today.  For that purpose I've put myself in the defendant's chair, called Judge Lance Ito out from whatever room they send you to after your fifteen minutes of fame have expired, and summoned two imaginary lawyers to do the talking.


THE CASE FOR THE  PROSECUTION will be made by a thin man in black, his turtleneck unwrinkled, his great bald dome gleaming above his expensive glasses, his elegant, pencil-skirted assistant whispering in his ear intermittently.


THE CASE FOR THE DEFENSE will be made by a puffy, sweaty man in a worn brown corduroy blazer.  I am unnerved to see that his shirt is only partly tucked in, and that his briefcase contains a tuna sandwich, Doritos, and what looks like a pair of extra socks.


After a shuffling of papers, the prosecutor speaks, pronouncing the word "professor" with just a touch of icy contempt.


THE PROSECUTION: Let me begin by reminding the court that we are here to determine whether Professor Archambeau's longstanding poetic pluralism is a defensible position, or an affront to all those who truly care about poetry.  It is, as I shall demonstrate, the latter.  I call to the witness stand an academic whose standing, it will be agreed, exceeds that of Professor Archambeau: G.W.F. Hegel, late of the University of Berlin.  I thank you, Mr. Hegel, for taking the trouble to appear here from beyond the grave.


MR. HEGEL: Ja, ja, gut.  Indeed.  Though why you couldn't simply cite my books is beyond me.  It's quite a long commute from the circle of hell reserved for bad writers, you know.


THE PROSECUTION: Would you speak, please, to the issue of pluralism in the matter of aesthetics.


MR. HEGEL:  There was a time, you know, when poetry, and all art, mattered to people, and mattered as something powerful, not merely as something interesting.  Plato, of course, cast the poets out of the Republic, even though he admired them: they were too important for him to tolerate, because they were too important to the people.  They could move the masses, they could change the beliefs of the populace,  they could sway not just a few aesthetes, but the entire polis, and they couldn't be tolerated.  I didn't live in an age when art mattered like that, still less do you.  I, and you, live in an age when science prevails as a way of knowing and of making things happen, not art.  Art does not disappear under such conditions, but it affects people differently.  "However splendid the effigies of the Greek gods may look," I have written, "and whatever dignity we may find in the images of God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, it is of no use: we do not bend our knees before them."  Art, since the triumph of science, is at the periphery of our society, and no one goes to war over whether images should or shouldn't adorn a church.  Art has worked itself out, and the reason people like this Archambeau can say they admire poems in all sorts of different styles and idioms is that art simply doesn't matter to such people.  Poetry is interesting to people like him, not vital.  He is symptomatic of an age in which art has become marginal.  


THE PROSECUTION: Thank you, Mr. Hegel.  No further questions.


THE DEFENSE: If I may, Mr. Hegel: what are we to make of the partisans of one or another sort of poetry?  If we live in an age when poetry is merely interesting, and not vital, how do we account for those who would say "Jeremy Prynne is good, or right, and therefore Glyn Maxwell is bad, or wrong"?


MR. HEGEL: Those who truly care, those for whom different kinds of art aren't simply different but worse or somehow (politically, ethically, morally) wrong are throwbacks, of course, to an earlier age, survivals within our age in the way that Greek civilization survived inside Rome.  But we can say this: at least poetry matters to them, as it surely does not to the defendant, a modern-era dilettante if ever there was one.


THE DEFENSE: I see.  Well, I'd like to call on another witness now, whom we've fetched in with some difficulty from the cycle of eternal return.  Mr. Nietzsche will now take the stand... ah.  Thank you.  Mr. Nietzsche, what do you make of the most extreme partisans of particular kinds of poetry, those who condemn the works of other schools of poetry?


[A great shriek of feedback comes from the microphone on the witness stand as it becomes entangled in Nietzsche's mustache]


MR. NIETZSCHE: What kind of untermensch wired this place for sound? Hah? Bah!  Well.  Of course we must look at the partisans of various schools of poetry — when these schools are not the dominant one — as people compelled by ressentiment, by a sense of injustice and injury.  They look at the prizes and accolades awarded to those who write in the dominant poetic styles, and they grind their teeth in frustration and outrage.  They feel that such poetry isn't just different, it is evil, because its prominence deprives them of what they crave.  They wish to see it cast down, and yearn for a great redemption in which they and their kind of poetry are redeemed into the light.  This, of course, is slave morality.  "It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey," I have said, and we shouldn't be surprised when the lambs talk to each other, saying "these birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb—should he not be good?"


THE DEFENSE: So you'd say, then, that those who condemn pluralism are just envious?


THE PROSECUTION: Objection!


[Lance Ito nods slightly, though it is unclear whether he sustains the objection, or is simply nodding off in a stupor.  The prosecutor pounces on the opportunity, while the defense attorney seems absorbed in trying to unwrap his sandwich].


THE PROSECUTION: Mr. Nietzsche, does this not imply that Mr. Archambeau's pluralism, in contradistinction to the alleged slave morality of his critics, is an aristocratic ethos?


MR. NIETZSCHE: Yes! Or close enough.  If he actually has some preferences, but is willing to tolerate the things he doesn't really care for, that would be true.  The birds of prey look on the lambs without any real hatred or sense that the lambs are evil.  Rather, they say of the lambs "we bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."


THE DEFENSE: [with a mouth full of tuna sandwich] Surely you don't mean that Archambeau would eat poets he doesn't like!


MR. NIETZSCHE: Him?  No, he'd hardly have the will to overcome his own hesitation.  He'd just write a lukewarm review, with mild condescension hidden behind seemingly neutral language.  I've seen him do it.  But in a general sense, his pluralism implies a kind of privilege—just as the resentfulness of the partisans of particular styles masks a slavish ressentiment.


THE PROSECUTION: Just so.  Partisans seek justice for their excluded and despised poetry, while Professor Archambeau, ensconced in the ivory tower, looks down on them.


THE DEFENSE: I must object.  This line of argument implies that Mr. Archambeau advocates for a particular style, and merely tolerates others.  I assure you: my client has never had a clear aesthetic conviction in his life!


[Archambeau looks distinctly uncomfortable, shifts in his chair, and, brow furrowed, seems about to speak, when the attorney for the defense speaks again]. 


THE DEFENSE: I must now call my final witness, the late Mr. Leszek Kolakowski, whom some of you will know for his devastating critique of Marx in three volumes, Main Currents of Marxism.  I know this may seem strange, but I assure you his comments will be most relevant to proving the defense.  Welcome, Mr. Kolakowski.


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Make it quick.  We're poking Stalin with sharp sticks in the afterlife, and it'll be my turn as soon as Orwell tires out.


THE DEFENSE: Very well.  Could I prevail upon you to read a passage from your study Modernity on Endless Trial—the part I texted you about?


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Yes, yes.  Here it is: "A few years ago I visited the pre-Columbian monuments in Mexico and was lucky enough, while there, to find myself in the company of a well known Mexican writer, thoroughly versed in the history of the Indian peoples of the region.  Often in the course of explaining to me the significance of many things I would not have understood without him, he stressed the barbarity of the Spanish soldiers who had ground the Aztec statues into dust and melted down the exquisite gold figurines to strike with the image of the Emperor.  I said to him, “you think these people were barbarians; but were they not, perhaps, true Europeans, indeed the last true Europeans? They took their Christian and Latin civilization seriously; and it is because they took it seriously that they saw no reason to safeguard pagan idols; or to bring the curiosity and aesthetic detachment of archeologists into their consideration of things imbued with a different, and therefore hostile religious significance. If we are outraged at their behavior it is because we are indifferent, both to their civilization, and to our own.”  There it is.  But what relevance this passage on the fate of civilizations could have to these picayune proceedings is beyond me.


THE DEFENSE: Ah! Yes.  Well, the point is this: isn't my client, by virtue of his pluralism, free from any charges of insensitivity and cultural arrogance?  He's no conquistador — I mean, just look at his paunch and soft hands!  He couldn't destroy an Aztec temple if he wanted to, and I assure you he wouldn't — no more than he'd write a negative review of a book just because it came from some poetic movement with which he had no affiliation.  He's a man of peace and tolerance!  The defense rests.


THE PROSECUTION: I confess I must shake my head in disbelief.  Can my colleague on the defense really misunderstand Mr. Kolakowski's passage so profoundly?  Can't he see that Kolakowski defends western civilization against its critics?  Can't he see that what Mr. Kolakowski says only affirms Mr. Hegel's charge that people like the defendant don't really care enough about anything in particular to have beliefs?  Indifference, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is my charge against the defendant.  If he truly cared about something, he'd be less ready to tolerate anything.  The prosecution rests, as well.


JUDGE LANCE ITO: ...What? What?  We're done then?  I leave it to the jury.  If the charge won't fit, you must acquit.  Who wants to go for a smoothie?  My boss at Orange Julius says I'm getting good at making them.

Seeing Red with Nietzsche

Fret not, gentle reader: though the title of this post might make it sound like I'm about to embark on a rage-fueled rant against all the untermenschen getting in my way at the salad bar, I'm not here to talk about seeing red—I'm here to talk about seeing Red, John Logan's wonderful play about Mark Rothko, which opened last night at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.  Logan makes Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art in The Birth of Tragedy central to the story, and he's helped me see not only Rothko but also Nietzsche in a new light.


I'm often a fan of the work of the director, Robert Falls, although sometimes he goes too far into big spectacle for my taste (his King Lear featured a sawn-in-half car on stage, for example).  I've been less enamored of John Logan's work, though like most people I know him more for his movies—Gladiator, say, or Sweeney Todd—than for his plays.  But there really was no way I was going to miss Red, which just hit too many of my buttons: as a provincial art school brat in the 1970s I grew up surrounded by painters still working in the then-aging abstract expressionist mode, with all the brainy, butch swagger of Rothko, Pollock, and company; and Rothko was known for his love of exactly the literary and philosophical works that sit close to my heart: the Romantics, the German Idealists, and the existential wing of modernism.  When a colleague of mine, who'd seen the New York production, told me the play was all about aesthetic theory, and that it had only two characters "an earnest young bumpkin and a cynical old intellectual wreck—that is, your origin and your destination," I knew I had to be there on opening night.


When the play began, I knew right away that, whether it went well or poorly, whether it would succeed or fail by more objective lights, it would speak to me. The cavernous set, depicting Rothko's studio, came to me straight out of my youth: stacks of paintings leaning on one another, unframed in stretched canvasses; paint mixed in steel buckets; a big sink spattered with god knows what chemicals; a hot plate used for  in-studio cooking and the alchemy of paint mixing; a big adirondack chair from which the artist could stare at his work in progress; high-wattage floodlights; a battered old record player spinning classical LPs. I remember this as the stuff of the Aladdin's caves in which my dad and his colleagues made their art.  It will always be my image of the sort of place where the real, serious work gets done.  And then, in one of Rothko's first speeches to Ken, his new, young, naive intern, he rolls through a list of writers that pretty much comprises the syllabi of my seminars—Wordsworth, Beckett, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—before thundering "you have to be civilized before you can paint!"  I don't believe it's true that all artists need this required reading list, but it's the stuff that's meant the most to me, and it's the background of the work for which I care the most.


The play never bogs down into a mere matter of talking heads: it makes much out of small movements and long silences, and there's an energetic scene of Rothko and his apprentice painting.  But talk there is, plenty of it, and it shows that Logan knows the big issues in aesthetics.  The action centers on the creation of what became known as Rothko's "secret paintings" — a series commissioned in the late 1950s to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, but that Rothko refused to hang there.  Rothko, who came of age at a time when there really were no collectors or institutions for his kind of art, believed in the autonomy and integrity of the artwork, in its status as a stage in a personal struggle, in what amounts to its spirituality.  He believed these things with the intensity possible only for those almost totally removal from the forces of the art market.  But his paintings were supposed to hang in a place whose closest parallel would be the Vanity Fair of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: a restaurant where the rich and status-hungry of Manhattan came to see and be seen, to establish themselves in a social order.  These people needed expensive, aesthetically profound art on the walls to show that they had both economic status and cultural capital, but they didn't really care about the paintings except as tokens in a game of status.  Rothko found himself crucified on the contradiction between the religion of art and the commodification of art.  His young assistant confronts him about this, throwing a new generation of artists in Rothko's face, saying "at least Andy Warhol gets the joke!"  (He's right, of course: Warhol saw just how art became a prestige commodity, and he cranked out visually shallow, repetitive work in a place called "The Factory" as a way of underlining the point, though it's by no means clear his many avid collectors understood, or understand now, that they were being punked, and that Warhol's real medium wasn't the slipshod silkscreen, but the apparatus of the New York art world, which he played as well, and as flashily, as Pagianini played the violin).


Logan also treats the matter of artistic generations with real sensitivity.  Near the beginning of the play Rothko speaks with a little glee about how he and his abstract expressionists did in an earlier generation of painters, and how it's "impossible for anyone to paint a cubist picture now."  Revere the fathers, he tells his assistant, but murder them.  There's a bit too much relish in how he says this, and we know he's being set up for a reversal, which comes when he later returns to his studio choking with rage at a show by Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop artists.  After this, Logan shows us Rothko moving from an initial glee at the destruction of the old, through anger at his own aging, to a kind of acceptance of the inevitability, even the rightness, of change.  Near the end of the play he dismisses his assistant, telling him that, having learned enough from the old master, he should be out in the world with his own generation, making an art that speaks to their experience.  It's an interesting moment, in which the young man's growth is acknowledged, and the old man grows through acknowledging the passing of all generations, including his own.  I wish Falls hadn't had Rothko put his hand over young Ken's heart at this point, though: it was too literally a benediction, and one of the few moments in the production to fall a little flat.


The real aesthetic center of the play, though, isn't a matter of artistic generations, or even of commercialization.  It's a riff on Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus.  Early in the play, the young Ken tells Rothko that his favorite painter is Jackson Pollock.  Rothko rolls his eyes, but later, after Ken's read Nietzsche on Rothko's advice, Ken comes back with an explanation for his admiration of Pollock, and for Rothko's reservations about the man.  Pollock, says Ken, is Dionysus: passion, the loss of self-control, the life-force itself coming through in all its disorder; whereas Rothko is all self-possession, analytic mindfulness, limit, restraint. Pollock threw paint down in a trance-like dance, says Ken, while Rothko stares at his canvasses for weeks on end, wondering what they need, and how to provide it.  Rothko rightly rejects this as shallow, and as too easy a division, and challenges Ken to think harder.  He does, and he comes to see Rothko's canvasses as an opposition between the two Nietzchean forces.  The luminous reds seem to represent Dionysus, and we hear Rothko and Ken shouting out the various associations we have with red—blood, warmth, anger, fire, Santa Claus, Satan— signs of life in its excess and passion.  Ken speculates about Rothko's colors as Dionysian and his form, all those containing rectangles, as Apollonian, but he soon moves on to interrogate Rothko about the meaning of another recurring color in his work, black.  Rothko's black is death, but also limit, and inadequacy, and self-doubt: the various antitheses of passion.  But red wouldn't make sense without black, just as passion, desire, abandonment and the like wouldn't make sense, wouldn't even register to our sensibilities, without their negations.  Ken calls this a conflict, but Rothko, gesturing at his paintings, tells him "conflict" isn't the right word for the relationship of red and black,  Dionysus and Apollo.  Rather, the right word for the relationship is "pulsation," the beautiful, living heartbeat of the colors in relation to one another in Rothko's luminous paintings.


This idea, I think, is the strongest part of Logan's script.  It's a real insight into Rothko's paintings: I'd always thought of them as icons of aesthetic autonomy, as color in relation for purely formal reasons, proud in their removal from the world of morality, commerce, political actions, and the like, assertions of the value of things as ends in themselves.  But there's a slightly different angle, in which the formal relations are seen as living things, experienced through time by the viewer as the necessary, pulsating oscillation of differences.  Think of them this way, and you can see them as meditative instruments, as the sort of thing that might reconcile a man to the pulsating change of time—to, for example, the rhythm of changing artistic generations.


The notion of the pulsating interrelation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is more than just an insight into Rothko, though: it's also an insight into Nietzsche.  I think I can best explain what I mean with reference to a recent exchange I had with a sociologist colleague.


Not long ago, my sociologist pal, who is passionate about the Chicago Cubs and has written a book about how fans of this team form communities based on their enthusiasms, directed my attention to an article in which an editorialist complained about people doing "the wave" in Wrigley Field.  His objection was that "the wave is the very embodiment of groupthink, the surrendering our individuality in order to follow the rest of the lemmings..."  My pal agreed with this position, but I didn't.  I don't mind the wave, and in a way it's just a version of Nietzsche's Dionysian feeling, in which the division between spectator and participant dissolves, and (to quote Nietzsche), "every man feels himself not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil 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."  The crowd, moving together, is a harmless manifestation of Dionysus.  What could be wrong with that?  My colleague came back at me, saying "you know that I refer to the Cubs using the first person collective pronoun, and when we do something good, of course I want to be screaming and cheering and feeling that good old collective effervescence.  For me, the wave isn't about connection with the team."  In fact, "the wavers are disrespecting my team."  Ah! I thought.  This is neither an endorsement of the respectful, intent Apollonian spectator, nor of the Dionysian erasure of the hierarchy between crowd and the performers.  Rather, I thought, this is the moment of synthesis that Nietzsche sees as the birth of drama out of earlier ritualistic gatherings. The drama privileges the performers over the crowd, who are not equals in performance, except very intermittently.  But they're not isolated or passionless, either: they're united by a collective, focused passion.  It's about what's happening on the stage (or the baseball diamond), and one is restrained and reserved compared to the participants in a Dionysian ritual, but there are real foci of collective passions, and the form of the drama (or of the ballgame, as my colleague conceived of it) provides a kind of balance or synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Or so I thought.  But now, thanks to Logan's Red, I think that's not quite it.


After seeing Red, I'm more inclined to think of the relation between Apollo and Dionysus as a pulsation, rather than a balance or a synthesis.  That is: I don't think it's a matter of finding some ratio of the two, or some fusion, so much as it's a matter of letting the two modes of experience alternate, interact, and combine in patterns that make up a living, changing whole.  Rothko's paintings aren't a matter of balance, but of a living relation that changes for the viewer over time.  And watching the Cubs isn't a matter of intense, analytic spectatorship (although that's a part of it), nor is it a matter of enjoying one's unity with the gathered crowd (though that's a part of it too).  Nor is it a matter of finding a combination of these things, allowing for certain forms of collective experience (cheering together) but excluding others as illegitimate because they're not focused enough on spectatorship (doing the wave).  Instead, the experience of watching the Cubs, like the experience of looking at a Rothko painting, is a matter of letting these different kinds of moments come together in pulsating patterns that change over time.  I think, now, that's more in line with what Nietzsche was getting at.  It's certainly the version of Nietzsche Logan's Rothko presents to his apprentice Ken, but we're left with some question as to whether it is a vision he can live up to.

Dancing Like David Byrne: Apollo Performs Dionysus

A while ago I went a bit overboard in examining the phenomenon of the hipster in terms derived from Nietzsche's study The Birth of Tragedy. Long story short, my argument was that the hipster was, at the core, an Apollonian rather than a Dionysian figure — that is, a figure devoted to self-possession, critical distance, and individual identity, rather than being devoted to the loss of selfhood in an ecstatic fusion with others. The hipster doesn't want to, or is unable to, join in with large groups. He or she just can't quite surrender the self to the whole. But at the same time, I argued, the hipster also wants camaraderie and a sense of group-identity — wants, that is, some measure of Dionysian experience. This is why there is a recognizable hipster look, and recognizable hipster music and neighborhoods. But the hipster position is unstable: wanting to be part of a group but hating giving oneself over to a group is a complicated, fraught place to be. This is why we find hipsters hating on other hipsters for being hipsters: they yearn for group identity and despise it at the same time. Or so my story ran.

Today, though, thanks to some comments from Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, I've been thinking about a happier fusion of Apollo and Dionysus, a fusion to be found in the music of a band that meant a lot to me back in the 80s, Talking Heads, and the dancing of their frontman, David Byrne.

I've never quite been able to put my finger on the exact nature of the curiously affectless nature of much Talking Heads music. Certainly much of it comes from Byrne's singing, which is almost a kind of talking. He does little to give emotional quality to his delivery: dynamic changes are muted, there's little or no tremolo, and he doesn't run notes like an R&B singer. The flatness of delivery really stands out when you listen to the Talking Heads' cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" after listening to the original: Al Green glides into and out of falsetto, purr-growls like a cat, holds back and then releases energy, lets his words blurr at the edges, to where they become purely emotive sound. He even lets loose with a little James Brown at the end. In contrast, David Byrne mostly sort of narrates, with a slightly breathy quality. When he does go into a kind of falsetto, it isn't driven by passionate intensity, as in Al Green's falsetto of barely-controlled ecstasy. Rather, it seems like Byrne's read an instruction saying "insert falsetto here," and followed it, for no compelling reason. I don't mean that this is a bad thing — the affect of affectlessness is the genius of the band. This affectlessness comes across in the arrangement and instrumental performances, too. Talking Heads keep the tempo slow and steady, and you could pretty much set your watch by the drum beat.

But you didn't want to talk about music. You wanted to talk about dance. Okay! Consider Byrne's dance in the video clip above. The person who posted it to Youtube considers it "funny," and I suppose it is, in that there's a kind of incongruity to it, and incongruity is at the root of a lot of humor. But I'm interested in the particular kind of incongruity. On the one hand, the dance signals "performance" and "rock show" mostly by the largeness of the movements. This is stage stuff, giant, choreographed, and meant for a big crowd in a big venue to notice, focus on, and collectively get into — good Dionysian stuff. On the other hand, there's a kind of distance between the dancer and the dance: Byrne moves as if he's not emotionally committed. There are no Freddy Mercury operatics, there's none of that Mick Jagger sex-chicken strut. There's a sense of performance, but not performance of emotion. The excessive symmetry of the movements, their regularity, and the relative lack of energy all create a sense that the dancer stands above the dance, rather than enters into it and emotionally commits. All of this combines to put the idea of performance in quotation marks.

There are a number of ways one could talk about this. "It's defamiliarization," we might say, echoing Victor Shklovsky, "it's a way of highlighting convention by tweaking it a bit." True enough. But it's more than that. It's also a matter of taking a Dionysian ritual — the rock concert, where the audience sways, butt-shakes, and sings in unison, enjoying its togetherness and unity-in-fandom — and combining it with a kind of Apollonian self-reserve. We don't just lose ourselves in the performance, because the performer himself hovers a little above his performing self, and asks us to do so, too. We enjoy the loss of ourselves in the crowd and the music, but we also watch the front man hold himself back, and we emulate that. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the weirdness of this holding-back in the Dionysian context of a concert takes us a little out of the moment, and we stand back and analyze it, even as we participate in it. We get to be Apollonian observer-critics even as we also get to be Dionysian participants. It's no wonder Talking Heads was the intellectual's rock band: they let us worship our usual god even when we're in the realm of his rival, Dionysus.

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.