Ideology and Aesthetic Pleasure (15 Sept 2009)

At the Valve, Bill Benzon was wondering about ideology and aesthetics:

I’ve got a question about people’s expressed aesthetic preferences: Does it reflect their sense of immediate satisfaction with the work, a superimposed identity or ideology, or something else?

This is something I've thought a lot about, for better or worse. Most of my ideas about it are derived from Bourdieu's Distinction and Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic.

First, when tastes become reflexive, consciously curated, they become predominantly signaling mechanisms: we want to project a certain identity through the tastes we choose to advertise and by managing carefully to try to conceal the tastes we think are less flattering to us. That's almost self-evident, I think. At the point when we are trying to catalog our own tastes, the sense of it being our "real" taste is gone -- one can't know one's own aesthetic response, for to think it is to destroy its spontaneity. Identity -- if there is such a thing that predates our self-fashioning -- is probably like that too; we glimpse it only by accident, only while we are trying to see something else. It's much easier and much more convincing when others tell us who we are and what we are like and even what we seem to enjoy than for us to know ourselves directly -- our self-knowledge is too distorted by wishes, secret shame, denial, grandiosity, modesty, and a variety of other expectations we are always in the process of juggling.

Our efforts to signal identity through conscious control of our tastes are shaped by ideology. We are guided by what we understand as representing the class to which we think we belong and how much we mean to struggle against that affiliation. Our skill in reading signals and assigning interpretations to them are all inflected by class habitus, which itself is thoroughly ideological -- meant to protect class boundaries and generally speaking, reproduce the existing social order and power structure. That's not to say our tastes are phony to the degree they are calculated. But taste is not ever free of all calculation, an expression of pure spontaneity and of our inner quality -- that is the most ideological position of all: My inner refinement is revealed by my altogether genuine and natural pleasure in Brahms while your innate vulgarity is inevitable and unavoidably revealed by your unthinking joy in Coldplay. We respond to what we have prepared the way for, and that often can be controlled through deliberate planning, i.e., I will read about the French New Wave filmmakers and the associated criticism so that I will understand and "really" appreciate Godard's Week-End, which in turn will make me think that I am cool. If we don't seize upon that preparation process and make it conscious, we will be signaling our contentment with being guided by coincidence, the tastes of our friends and family, marketing information, the zeitgeist, and so on. We probably won't reveal our inner taste so much as become a barometer for prevailing popular taste.

So there is no point in our trying to figure out our "real tastes" so that we can tell ourselves that we have become more authentic. We should forget all about making authenticity to ourselves a criteria for pleasure. Pleasure may or may not be spontaneous, but it is all too frequently rare, so we probably shouldn't spurn it when it comes. But we can't opt out of the ways in which our pleasures are imbricated with class snobbery. Class identity seems to be one of enabling conditions for experiencing many, many forms of pleasure (if not all of them) -- the pleasure of belonging, of excluding, of knowing where you are and what you might become, the pleasure of winning. Pleasure is not necessarily a social good. Likewise, aesthetic pleasure is not virtuous or politically innocent. When I listened to abrasive music as a teenager, it was because in part I hoped it wcould serve as a kind of nonviolent weapon as well as a nonpermanent tattoo -- marking me as a certain type and driving the wrong sort away. IO tried to elevate these desires to feelings -- incontrovertible and irreversible -- by feeling them in the music. Then I could feel as though the music carried me to where I belonged.

Anyway, what is more interesting, I think, is that the tastes we aren't entirely conscious of -- the aesthetic responses we don't guide or manufacture for ourselves, are also ideological, in a more profound and insidious way, shaping the field in which we conceive our identity projects. Eagleton's thesis is that the aesthetic is how we experience the law -- the demands of the state, or of power more generally -- spontaneously, as though it was our own desire and entirely natural, unquestionable. This does wonders for replacing coercion (what repressive socialist states needed to maintain control) with consent (what Western democracies/plutocracies make do with). The category of the aesthetic is how we come to embrace and seem to invent what was already necessary; it is how we love Big Brother while still feeling free enough to work within "free markets" and contribute to the "spontaneous order" they are held to produce. Eagleton:

For power to be individually authenticated, there must be constructed with in the subject a new form of inwardness which will do the unpalatable work of the law for it, and all the more effectively since that law has now apparently evaporated.... Power is shifting its locations from centralized institutions to the silent, invisible depths of the subject itself.

Later he calls the aesthetic "no more than a name for the political unconscious," "shorthand for a whole project of hegemony," and he verges close to simply equating "ideology" and "aesthetic" -- "lawfulness without a law" in Kant's formulation.

This sort of logic leads to skepticism of depth psychology as a whole -- all forms of identity making -- as a kind of insidious plot to make us all slaves to an idea of ourselves that really comes from the state. Hence, a particular strain of radical counterattack, which consists of "free play" -- destabilize your identity, embrace sundry forms of anarchic behavior (free love, squatting, drifiterism), and escape into the margins. This seems a bit impractical. Also, this would entail surrendering all the pleasures and comforts of being somebody.

Stupid Names (7 Aug 2009)

I don't hate Thomas Pynchon like New York magazine reviewer Sam Anderson apparently does, but I agree with him about this: "I hate -- maybe most of all -- his characters’ stupid names." Picking awful, jokey names for characters does seem to call the whole aesthetic into question, as it puts Pynchon's sense of humor in a bad light. And the names come up continually, reminding readers over and over that that they might not be in safe hands. Is it ever actually funny when made-up characters are given funny names? Or is this a rhetorical tactic that only high-school English teachers find droll and amusing?

The complaint about stupid names reminded me of my long-held philosophy of judging bands by their names confidently, without ever having to hear their music. If a band chooses an annoying name -- one of the most definitive choices they have to make collectively about what they are trying to accomplish -- you can count on them to make similarly poor choices in their music. TV on the Radio? Sounds great, lets go for it, it's got something. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? Yes! Really whimsical. CYHSY! (Generally, it is bad when your band's name is typically compressed to an acronym when your releases are being reviewed. This recourse to abbreviation is to save space, but I'm sure it also helps writers and editors keep from vomiting on their keyboards.)

A band's name is a potent symbol in the use of musical taste for signaling purposes. If the band's name seems dumb to me, I won't adopt that band and integrate it with my sense of self. I won't fly my own identity under that sort of banner. The more musical taste functions as a parameter of fan identity, the more important the name becomes -- I must be far gone, then, since I am consuming the names alone in many instances and never bothering with the music. Often I have a fantasy of finding a radio station that I trust enough to hear a steady stream of music without ever having to hear the names of the artists.

But sadly when I hear something good, I want to possess more information about it. I can't surrender to the song; I need to maintain a facade of self-control by marshaling and mobilizing facts about it. (I can sympathize with the fear that TNR's Jason Zengerle expresses here. To preserve our imaginative faculties, he suggests that "the trick is carving out spaces in your life that are disconnected, or at least at a certain remove, from the information overload that's all around us." But technology is developing to always put temptation in our path, or rather in our palms.)

Sometimes bands with great names (High on Fire) can't live up to their moniker, but rarely have I turned out to be wrong about a band with a dumb name (virtually every indie band from the 1990s). I can think of only a few bands with names I think I are terrible whose music isn't also terrible: My Morning Jacket, Spoon, Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Can't think of any others.

UPDATE: This PSFK post mentions "augmented reality," probably the next iteration of technology mediating our interaction to the entire world. Do people really want this sort of service before it's available, or do they have it foisted on them and then reconcile themselves to it after the fact by embracing its seeming advantages? It's only when I know I can readily access more info about something that I have a distracting wish to do so.

"A beginning is a very delicate time." (25 June 2009)

Inspired by John Hodgman's speech at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, in which he interrogated President Obama about the Kwisatz Haderach, I decided to read (okay, re-read) Frank Herbert's Dune. I've seen the David Lynch movie at least a dozen times, to the point where snippets of its dialogue are part of my conversational repertoire, but I haven't read the book probably since I was 12 or 13.

I was expecting it to be slightly silly -- and it is -- but it turns out that it's also surprisingly absorbing, despite, or maybe because of, its peculiar tone of haute solemnity, as if Spengler decided to try his hand at pulp sci-fi. Herbert seems to relish not only inventing superfluous terminology and casually throwing out details from the millions of years of epochal galactic history that he'd like readers to believe he has worked out in full, but he mixes in an ersatz Hegelianism, with occasional evocations of the master-slave dialectic, the ideas of totality and species being, and a grand transcendent design in history. What's brilliant about all the quasi-philosophical jargon is that Herbert doesn't try at all to use it coherently; he just seems to like the way it reads tonally. That's enough to endear the novel to me, though I suspect if I knew more about Herbert's pretensions, I'd be less seduced.

So far, a 100 or so pages in, the narrative seems preoccupied with capturing how the characters read so much out of various minute phenomena -- it's like a manual of hermeneutics rendered as fiction. Preposterous feats of intuition and prophetic dreams are blended in with painstakingly methodical deductions about other characters' emotional states and what behavior they will prompt. Strategic problems are never far from the surface, virtually no details are given without a gloss of their tactical import, or alternatively, an intimation of its mythical portent. What emerges from this is a schizophrenic view of human character that alternates between ultrarationality and supernaturalism. I can't think of anything else quite like it.

What I'm trying to resist though if reading the book as camp, though I'm not sure if this is possible, not sure if one can turn off the irony part of the brain. But it helps to regard the language not as accidentally bathetic but as a specific accomplishment of a mood through somewhat unlikely means, a fog of abstractions and interior monologues to conjure what ends up gripping readers as a kind of physical sensation -- does that make any sense? Wait, it doesn't matter, Michael Jackson might be dead...

Semaphore signals (22 June 2009)

I'm currently reading George Gissing's novel New Grub Street, a thoroughly depressing look at the business of manufacturing literature, of belles lettres for sale, and all the petty personality squabbles and scrambles for pre-eminence that go along with it. Gissing seems bent on persuading us that money is all that matters in the end -- i.e., without money a person will lose all sense of propriety and poverty is sufficient to coarsen the morals of anyone -- and that of course literary merit has nothing to do with commercial viability. He denounces the "hateful spirit of literary rancour...that made people eager to believe all evil," noting that literary gossip and what we would now call snark "were enough to make all literature appear a morbid excrescence upon human life." The book's successful character has a robust social network and no illusions about the crap he cranks out; he regards the idea that literature is a calling as the same sort of sentimental claptrap as romantic love, an obstacle that one must circumvent, an illusion that must be abandoned to get along. Naturally, the failure character is just the opposite, thin-skinned, too proud to self-promote or make instrumental use of friends, and too conscious of the inferiority of his product crafted for the market rather than his muse.

Though resolutely humorless and padded out in places to itself meet the tyrannical demands of the Victorian triple-decker, New Grub Street is also chock full of cynical advice for getting along in the then-newfangled world of journalism. Milvain, the successful hack, tells his aspiring sister after reading one of her articles that "there's rather too much thought in it, perhaps. Suppose you knock out one or two of the less obvious reflections, and substitute a wholesome commonplace?" Readers, he argues, "are irritated, simply irritated by anything that isn't glaringly obvious. They hate an unusual thought." To write for the public, one must "express vulgar thought and feeling in a way that flatters the vulgar thinkers and feelers." In today's context, you might put a slightly different spin on that: writing must be simple so it can be grasped quickly, because everyone is too much in a hurry to devote precious time to any one article. They are under too much pressure to move on to the next thing. But Gissing was prescient about this as well: he has a character lament the "huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print."

Not much has changed in the publishing world as far as I can see -- who you know and how timely you file can seem far more important than how good your writing is. And also, it doesn't suit to be a prima donna about your prose until you've earned the right, then you are obliged to be one, whether or not you have any actual gripes with what editors are doing to your work. Professional journalism is often an elaborate reputation game that requires a facility with signaling and accruing social capital. Whether or not one accepts this reality and accommodates it does seem to determine how far one will get in the publishing world, and perhaps in adult life generally. (I'm often tempted to pout and wait for my precocious specialness to be noticed.)

Economist Robin Hanson makes a similar point in this post about the "shallowness" of our society's most efficacious signals -- in this case the salience of "Ivy League school" to signify a crystallized complex of bourgeois elitist traits and supplant more-nuanced proofs of ability. He concludes that shallow signals are more potent because we know that they will be widely understood beyond our immediate community. Everyone at Northwest State University may know how brilliant your work is from direct experience, but others will have to read through it to make that discovery. And those others, who have nothing invested in you yet, would much rather hear that you went to Yale and thereby take your brilliance for granted than put all that time in.

We all want to affiliate with high status people, but since status is about common distant perceptions of quality, we often care more about what distant observers would think about our associates than about how we privately evaluate them.... Academics understand that folks primarily care about distant common signals of impressiveness, such as publications. Getting a lousy paper into a top journal usually counts for more than a fantastic paper in a low rank journal. Only in small tightly-connected academic communities can an informal perception that your low-journal paper was fantastic make it count for more than a crappy top-journal paper.

A similar logic seems to apply to all self-branding efforts, talking about what music we are into, or what books we read, or what sort of logos we have on our clothing, or what kind of car we drive, or what our vocabulary is like, and so on. Assume that it's true that the broader the swath of the population we are trying to impress, the more obvious our choice of signifiers will have to be. Because of the interconnectivity of social networks, and the tantalizing promise of internet fame, the potential audience for our performance of self is always seeming more and more broad, so our choices will be forced toward the more and more obvious, the more and more heavy-handed.

Creative writing and crippling self-consciousness (4 June 2009)

In the New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews The Program Era, a book by Mark McGurl about the institutionalization of creative-writing programs. Creative writing classes are an easy target for cynics (including me) who don't believe that "creativity" can be taught or should even be isolated and reified as a concept, yet are also skeptical of the idea of transcendent genius separating the true Wordsworthian artists from the rest of the plebes and philistines. Neither McGurl or Menand seem to be as cynical as that -- McGurl argues (and Menand agrees) that creative-writing programs as an institution are the most important development in the history of American literature since World War II, and in many ways is more significant than any particular author produced by the programs. Menand writes:

As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "serious fiction" -- I assume that means the fiction that most people don't bother to read because it doesn't conform to the expectations generated by popular genres. Though McGurl rejects this idea, creative-writing programs, perhaps, can best be understood as the attempt to standardize that heterogeneous mass of non-genre fiction, codifying it into an identifiable (if still not all that marketable) product known as "literary fiction." They also fortify the walls that separate genre fiction from the precincts of capital-L Literature. This helps protect literature from the sort of economically grounded analysis that best explains the popularity and specific features of mass-market fiction, which is clearly crafted as an entertainment product to appeal to well-delineated audiences. Literature, according to the professors sworn to defend its reputation, is above such craven pandering; it is a matter of geniuses serving the muse, of aesthetic struggle in the name of art, not commerce. But creative-writing programs, though they help stabilize the definition of literature and carry it forward into contemporaneity, seem to be primarily about commerce -- about networking and forming the connections that will allow as-yet-unknown writers to possibly make a living by writing (or teaching others how to write). This, and not a cosmically serendipitous concentration of talent, is what allowed so many renowned writers to all inhabit the same university classrooms, as Menand details.

Lots of fields are essentially networking cliques. What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is not the networking aspect but the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. Menand highlights this aspect of McGurl's anlalysis and renders it in telling metaphors of machines and carpenter ants:

Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. Reflecting on yourself—your experience, your “voice,” your background, your talent or lack of it—is what writing workshops make people do.
McGurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we’re all highly self-conscious ants, because that’s what it means to be a modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program.... So the fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs may appeal to readers because it rehearses topics—“Who am I?” issues—that are already part of their inner lives.

Again, fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs has an extremely limited appeal -- to those hardy few who routinely read The New Yorker, for instance. As Menand notes, "university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace." So when McGurl talks about self-conscious ants, he's really talking about a small slice of well-educated middlebrows who tend toward a certain status anxiety and are also probably prone to the peculiar kind of identity crisis that afflicts those self-selected members of the "creative class." Like the Calvinist elect, the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class's essential self-consciousness, and when it is acute, it becomes hipsterism.

Part of this crusade for recognition involves writing and reading and commenting on literary fiction, which is perhaps the purest materialization of that personal creativity, the ore of hipster selfhood. In literary fiction, plot is often replaced with meticulous observation, a kind of careful surveillance of surfaces that are then subject to a hermeneutics of authenticity or cool. The same spirit that animates identity creation in the various online forums, mediums, and social networks is what has long animated creative writing programs, so it may be that the programs don't reflect identity-obsessed audiences so much as they have fostered them. Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism.

The "habit of self-observation" seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations. Instead there is only workshops, which are rudimentary rough drafts for the sort of reciprocal "sharing" that now takes place in rolling fashion online. We are all creative writers now. Maybe those who come after us will have the lucky chance to be something else.

Thinking man's filter (12 May 2009)

Peter Suderman's contribution to the "Is Google making us stupid" debate has already attracted some attention. Suderman's contention is that anytime access to all the information on the internet is making us smart in a different way -- rather than signaling intelligence by having facts memorized, we demonstrate intelligence by knowing where to find information online. The internet becomes collective memory, and intelligence is a factor of who has the best system for accessing that memory. Hence, as he titles his post, "your brain is an index."

Books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.

He may be right about this, but that is exactly what people are afraid of. Suderman's focus on memory and data retrieval seems to ignore the aspects of intelligence that involve synthesizing ideas and making argumentative leaps, and more to the point, that involve hanging with an intricate and long-winded argument and understanding how it works and what its weaknesses are. The fear that critics of internet-mediated consciousness have is that we'll lose the ability to formulate these critiques because we will have regressed into the habit of searching for what has already been said and latching on to whatever superficial information ebbs up from that search. As Kevin Drum, who yearns to be sympathetic with Suderman, is forced to point out,

Understanding 'broader categories' — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop.... Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it's reasonable to draw from it. That's because they don't know the context. They don't know the rest of the story. And that's because they don't read enough books.

Matt Yglesias wonders why Drum picks on the internet and fetishizes the book as a mode of learning, though Suderman himself seems to grant Drum's point, following up his post with links to some reference books. But the deeper question has to do with whether the mountains of data now available to us inhibits thought or enables it, or has no particular effect on the quality of thought. It's great to be able to look up specific information and get it quickly -- to be able to pull up texts and search them for half-remembered phrases, for example. But chasing down information online tends to generate a centrifugal force that takes one out of the orbit of the original inquiry. The promise of more and different and enticing stimuli is always there, and our battle against distraction seems always to become more difficult. I'm not sure if the opportunity for distraction makes it inevitable, or if that's just me. Maybe I need to try meditation.

Attention grabber (4 May 2009)

At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, a book about why we find it difficult to concentrate. Miller points out how technology has made it easy for us to distract ourselves with a continual flow of mini-activities, which constantly rewards the novelty-craving part of our brain at the expense of the part of our consciousness that likes to be absorbed in things, achieve flow. We find ourselves becoming the functional equivalent of that guy who is always scanning the room looking for someone more important to talk to and who never has a real conversation or listens to anything anyone is saying. We are always made aware of the alternatives that are slipping away, of the imperative to consume as much as possible within the limits of the time we have to devote to entertaining ourselves. The pressure of what we are passing up becomes intolerable, clouding over the activities we would like to wholeheartedly choose. Miller laments, "In many cases, the thing we wish we would do is not only more interesting but ultimately more fun than the things we do instead, and yet it seems to require a Herculean effort to make ourselves do it."

Rather than make this effort, it seems we try to compensate by indulging alternative ideals: convenience for its own sake; quantity of experience over nebulous qualitative experience; competitive consumption and early adopterhood -- various measurable efficiencies that allow us to belief we are prospering in the attention economy, regardless of harried we may feel by the pace. Or, as Miller notes, we can attempt to use technology against itself, as a filter to block out options, to restrict our freedom, to limit the range of our responsiveness. This is one way to understand the success of Twitter, which synthesizes both approaches -- it's a binge-purge technology whose arbitrary restrictions seem to be simplifying the media onslaught while actually authorizing it accelerating our gluttonous information intake.

Gallagher's book endorses the idea that we are what we pay attention to, so it offers methods for us to seize control over our attention span. But the implication that something other than our own will directs our attention, that it is some wayward entity with prerogatives of its own, is a bit troubling metaphysically. It leaves us subject to "the machinations of late capitalism," as Miller puts it (and I probably would have put it that way if she hadn't), the firms that know how to exploit weakness in how our brain works to grab our attention and fix it on things we would have been perfectly happy ignoring. It also negates for us the possibility of what Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" calls "unremembered pleasures":

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

Those lines are open to all sorts of interpretations, but I've always understood them to suggest that we are more than the sum of our sensory impressions, of the stuff we have paid attention to and collected in the treasure house of our memory. Instead it's what we do, and the unself-conscious grace with which we do it that fills our contemplative moments -- the moments we are systematically banishing from our lives now -- with the spirit of self-satisfaction. The anxiety of identity gets suspended, and there isn't room for the feeling of missing out on something. Rather there is a sense of completeness that comes with giving up on keeping score -- a recognition that our souls are too immeasurable for that.

Hiding tastes (28 April 2009)

An NYT piece by Joanna Kaufman wonders whether the Kindle will rob people of the opportunity to do what I talked of yesterday, judge people based on what sort of books they own.

How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism? If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle — that’s how many it holds — does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve actually read a couple of them.)
The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.

Kaufman notes how publishers will rue the loss of passive advertising that comes from people carrying books around. And individuals will have to become more active about their self-promotion as well. What the Kindle, like other technological developments, will force us to do is find new, technologically mediated ways to project identity. So rather than passively display books on a shelf and let people's natural curiosity run its course, the Kindle, should it catch on, will force us to publish our reading lists online somewhere in a self-fashioning ploy that one can't plausibly disavow. Of course, one could do nothing and use devices like the Kindle as a way to mask one's tastes. But the Kindle itself signifies on a different identity hierarchy. It seems unlikely that the Kindle will signify that one loves books, but probably it will work like gadgets generally and convey where one is on the early adopter/late adopter continuum more than anything else.

The mediated evolution from passive to active pruning and preening of our identity has been the story of the internet's penetration into everyday life generally. Gadgets insert themselves into that process of identity projection; they offer the individual a chance to seemingly extend their personality's reach, while at the same time they give outside parties an opportunity to exploit it. So gone is the idea of seeing someone on the train reading a book that makes you curious about them; coming is the era is using Twitter to blast out to all your followers (the future version of friends) what you are reading, with an automatic link to Amazon already worked in.

The future of book manufacturing (1 April 2009)

Reihan Salam links to this post from Tim O'Reilly, in which he suggests that publishing is becoming like software development -- a process involving many authors working quickly (and perhaps patching bugs later). The fact that he is working on a Twitter book seems to underscore the point, though I can't imagine who in the world would want such a thing. (Sort of like the board-game home version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?")

This sort of thing may indeed portend "the end of authorship," as Salam titled his post. But I'm a little surprised he didn't go the Roland Barthes route and proclaim "the death of the author," and append the Foucaulidan corollary, the triumph of the "author function." They were commenting on the dubiousness of using authorial intention in assessing the actual effects achieved by a particular text. But technology has made such concerns sort of passe. Authors aren't being discarded because their works may not say what they intend; instead, relations of production in the publishing industry call for collaboratively manufactured texts to meet corporate goals. Exit authors; enter coders.

Reilly quotes Andrew Savikis:

The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.
Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

This seems like he is saying that instabooks of the future will have lots of boilerplate in them, and will be constructed along the lines of Mad Libs. Can't wait for these. Sounds like Orwell's Ministry of Culture, from 1984, where literature-makers rotated the dials of text-spinning machines to generate timely and appropriate Party-approved entertainment for the masses.

More likely, if books become a digitized commodity, the money won't be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we'll have pseudo-books instead -- a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook. You could already compile one of commentary on the financial crisis. Alongside the collaboratively compiled, rapidly published texts from the publishing industry of the future will be micropublishing, feeding those publishers, things along the lines of blogs and Facebook updates and the like. So maybe it would be more accurate to say authorship will be everywhere and nowhere.

Weak reading (20 March 2009)

In a footnote to a post at The Valve about "weak reading," English professor Rohan Maitzen adds a footnote that well sums up the problem with academic literary criticism. It's a bit long, possibly longer than the post itself, but it warrants quoting in full

One phenomenon with which anyone in literary studies is certainly familiar, for instance, is the interpretive strategy by which something seemingly incidental in the text is seized upon and ‘discovered’ to have great interpretive significance -- usually because it can be read symptomatically, helping turn the text, as Attridge says, into an “illustration of historical conditions or ideological formations." Here’s a mildly parodic (but fairly accurate) example of how it works. Suppose the text is a 19th-century realist novel -- say, Barchester Towers, which I happen to be reading now. Imagine there’s a scene with a dinner party at which pickles are served. Now, the immediate action of Barchester Towers has everything to do with the internecine rivalries of English clergyman and the moral and social crises flowing from them, and nothing to do with pickles, but now that we have noticed the pickles, it becomes irresistible to follow up on them. Lo and behold, nobody has done pickles yet (though I could give you quite a list of what has been done). So we produce a pickled reading. What are the cultural implications of pickles? Who could afford them, and who could not? Were pickling techniques perhaps learned abroad, maybe in the chutney-producing regions of the eastern empire? Or maybe pickling was once a cottage industry and has now been industrialized. We learn all about these issues and make that jar on the table resonate with all the socio-economic and cultural meanings we have uncovered. Though the pickles seemed so incidental, now we realize how much work they are doing, sitting there on the table. (Who among us has not heard or read or written umpteen versions of this paper?) And perhaps we are right to bring this out--after all, for whatever known or felt reason, Trollope saw fit to put pickles there and not, say, oysters or potatoes. But do we really understand more about Barchester Towers, or just more about pickles -- not in themselves, but as symptoms of industrialism, colonialism, or bourgeois taste in condiments? It’s not that our pickle paper might not be interesting or, indeed, accurate in all the conclusions it draws about the symptomatic or semiotic or other significance of the pickles. But it’s hard not to feel somehow that such an analysis misses the point of the book and thus has a certain intrinsic irrelevance.

The point here, I think, is that you don't really need Barchester Towers to write that historical study of pickles, which is more interesting than Trollope, in a way. What more is there to understand about Barchester Towers? Why privilege it? Why not say Barchester Towers (which by the way is a very funny book worth reading) is intrinsically irrelevant to pickles, rather than vice versa? As objects for historical study, Trollope is no more important an object than pickles are. It's just that most universities don't have a food studies department, whereas they do have literature departments.

What are the reasons for that? Part of the point of having English departments, the argument goes, was to codify national greatness. This is especially obvious in classes dealing with American writers, which often adopt the theme of American exceptionalism as an important point of class discussion. Literature classes also serve as lectures in secular moralism, with English professors resolving ethical problems in texts to show both how the authors were deep, insightful souls and we the readers have become nearly as deep and insightful by reading those authors carefully. I find that dubious. In the main body of the post, Maitzen quotes from this exchange between scholars Derek Attridge and Henry Staten about this kind of reading.

The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature.

Somewhere Pierre Macherey is groaning. In A Theory of Literary Production, he argued that we should read for what texts specifically can't say. The point of analysis is to determine what conditions make the work and its reception possible. "The real critical question is not: What is literature? (What does one do when one writes, or reads?) The question is: What kind of necessity determines the work? What is it really made from? The critical question should concern the material being used and the implements so employed."

That's a bit extreme, but Attridge and Staten veer in the wrong direction, I think, when they suggest one can define the "literary" for its own sake, as a transcendent quality worthy of study rather than a political tactic. Deeming something to be literature is only interesting in so far as we know what that dignified status accomplishes for those involved in articulating it. In itself, who cares what is literary?

As much as I am inclined to agree with Attridge and Staten and find clever counterintuitive, beside-the-point analyses of tangential elements in texts tiresome, their definition of "weak reading" has problems, some of which Maitzen points out. Namely, as she writes, that "a text’s own 'theme' is rarely obvious" and what is obvious to any given reader is "very much a result of one’s experience and preparation." These differences in preparation and experience measure a specific kind of cultural capital -- and bringing up poems presents an occasion for those with greater experience to realize that capital. In discussions about literature (another term that presents definitional problems, to say the least), literature professors get to dictate (for once) what is "truly important."

What's at stake for literature professors is maintaining control over the definition of what counts as literature, and maintaining the authority to impose that definition -- the source of their capital -- on everyone else. They tend to disguise this by maintaining that a concern for literature is a concern for the deep soundings of the human spirit -- hence their tendency to generate ersatz moral philosophy. The pickle-centric sort of readings of texts go half the way toward dispensing with literature qua literature, but they still nod to the necessity of a literary occasion for launching into a study of material culture. But in these cases, the literary occasion serves as an excuse for doing history or anthropology without the same sort of rigor that historians and anthropologists might require from one another. This drives literary studies into further disrepute in the academy, which only then intensifies the calls from within the discipline for a return to a concern for "literature" to redeem the field. It devolves into what appears from the outside to be a racket, a self-protective fog of vague language and unfalsifiable assertions about "literariness," which justifies the continued existence of literary scholars within universities which have become corporatized, instrumentalist.

What Hitler read (4 March 2009)

In the TLS Ritchie Robertson reviews Timothy W. Ryback's Hitler's Private Library, whose subtitle promises "the books that shaped his life." Not surprisingly, these turn out to be mainly anti-Semitic screeds and pseudoscientific works of racial typology. Robertson makes special note of his apparent disinterest in imaginative fiction:

The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.

This struck me as humanistic claptrap, the sort of conclusion tailor-made for literature professors who believe that teaching students to appreciate, say, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and the Brontë sisters will prevent them from becoming little Hitlers themselves. We mustn't lack the imagination to bathe ourselves in the comfortable moral truths extracted from the Great Books by tweedy pedants. The insult that reading genre fiction somehow proves one's lack of imagination is especially gallling, as though all those Harlequin romance readers running their minds along "familiar tracks" are implicitly emotional fascists. Apparently, we are to believe that there is a good kind of imaginative projection that involves novelty, linguistic games, and catering to the upper-middle class tastes, and a bad kind that sticks close-minded readers in a vicarious rut. Could there be a better put-down for someone else's tastes than, "Oh, that's the sort of thing Hitler liked"?

I don't know. There's a good chance you can read and enjoy Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, or whichever author is nominated as a standard-bearer for the human spirit, and still be a fascist. The more important question is whether Hitler would have considered this literary book worth reading.

Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff (6 Feb 2009)

I will take the bait. Here are a few theses inspired by Hipster Runoff, a site that bills itself as "The Most Conceptually Celebrated Blog in the History of the Memesphere." It strikes me as the apotheosis of a new category of critical discourse that, for better or worse, has been slowly congealing over the past few years via such various modalities as LOL cats, Vice magazine do's and don'ts, flame wars, douchebaggery and douche bags as a widely recognized species, text messaging, sock puppeteering, YouTube karaoke, intensely and disturbingly self-referential video art, and so on. This category still needs a label -- I'm hoping that postpostmodern will not be employed. I'm not entirely convinced that this is not just a fresh iteration of previous forms of postmodernity. Anyway, to the theses!

1. Online sociality has brought on a crisis of identity. The self has been externalized and its evolution preserved in ways that were previously unthinkable. The burden of self has thereby become more palpable.

2. Social criticism has been resolved into self-expression.

3. One can't be against hipsters. Hipsterism consists of its own repudiation. Recognizing the existence of hipsters to a certain degree makes one a hipster.

4. Social networks mandate identity formation on the model of cloud computing. One's corporeal self is merely the local host for a self whose operating system is now fixed elsewhere, distributed across a digital array. Our bodies function merely to transfer data to the cloud, to the networked space in which it may be transmogrifed into identity. Akin to "software as a service," we now have self as a service.

5. The variables we transfer to the cloud increasingly delimit the field of identity and condition what sorts of data will subsequently be considered relevant or applicable. Our data trail winnows, making online recommendation services seem more prescient and useful. These services will work to colonize more and more aspects of social being, suggesting friends and lovers as well as music, hobbies and interests. A song recommendation generated by your online practices will not be some byproduct of one's identity but its very substance. One will exist as the residue of the recommendations that one generates actively or passively through consenting to consign most of one's social activity to online forums and have them tracked and compiled. Our identity will only be as deep and complex as the quantitative density of our Facebook status updates and tweets.

6. Existence online appears accelerated, though in fact it consists of a series of frozen moments. It waits for and demands our input, perpetually presenting options and reminding us of alternatives while confronting us with the history of our previous tendencies. It thus forces on us unremitting self-consciousness. There can be no harmonizing of action and its preconception; no spontaneous authenticity.

7. Online, we are made painfully aware of the existential need to act, though that awareness is tempered by the way in which our actions online are always provisional and easily altered, augmented or supplanted. We can embrace necessary action with none of the responsibility for consequences.

8. Online practice is always a simulation in the sense that it occurs within a world that offers no real resistance to the self. A nondialectical space, the field of online being offers nothing to negate; it only assimilates. If, as Hegel claimed, the "rational is the actual" and vice versa, the realm of online simulacra is a realm where rationality is impossible. No critical intention can disrupt the reality presented online, nor can it merge with action and become praxis. Action results not in self-actualization but merely self-conscious agglomeration.

9. The collapse of language into abbreviations, arbitrary conditions of brevity, self-enforced infantilism and the like are attempts to import the the inflexible conditions of reality, against which we shape ourselves, to the online world, which lacks such conditions and threatens us with an amorphous and intolerable incontinence of identity.

10. Faced with the promise of a seemingly infinite extension of identity online, our actual lived identity shrivels to the disappearing point of spontaneous revisions at every instant, all of which are minutely recorded and make subsequent necessary reinventions that much more implausible and untenable.

The author as brand (30 Jan 2009)

In my post about volunteer criticism yesterday, I complained about writing online degenerating into self-branding via vectors like Facebook. At the Big Money, the Slate business site, Jill Priluck makes a related argument about the book-publishing business:

Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands.

Without support from publishing houses and their marketing budgets, Priluck suggests, authors can become preoccupied with brand building rather than writing. Self-conceived writing professionals of course have incentive to turn themselves into a brand and their writing into "branded content" -- they want to make a living. But noncommercial writers online face the same dilemma; the Web offers the possibility of a measurable audience, and the temptation is always there to write what increases the numbers (Gawker style) rather than write what one thinks. If as Priluck says, authors "trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances," then so do nonprofessionals who are just writing for attention. Just as Facebook and Twitter seem to suggest that the purpose of friendship is to have the most friends or followers, the purpose of writing becomes maximizing readership, the content itself is merely a means to that end, which is always the content's ultimate meaning.

Is it possible to have "online presence" without it becoming a brand. Probably because of the centrality of marketing discourse in our culture, branding has become the all-purpose paradigm for all sorts of social behavior, a phenomenon whose recent explosion seems directly traceable to the way the internet lets us quantify the extent of our influence while dramatically expanding our reach. But brands are like distillations of our essence that discard the better part of our spontaneous personality -- we simplify who we are to something that is consistent and capable of being instantly communicated -- like an epitaph. And we consent to let the nature of our identity be openly traded and renegotiated in an open market. As Priluck puts it, "When authors are beholden to a brand, they ally themselves, almost like actors and athletes, with agendas and meanings that are well beyond their control."

We heedlessly commit ourselves to thinking of ways to improve our brand without worrying about the fact that it means we are always for sale.

Against studying novelistic merit (12 Nov 2008)

In my former life in academia, the topic debated in these two posts at the Valve would exercise me greatly: Is artistic merit a matter for literary study? As someone who aspired to make unreadable books -- late 18th century commercial fiction -- relevant again, I certainly didn't think aesthetic quality was a prerequisite for what I study as a degree-seeker in literature, and I came to think that setting literature on a pedestal for special attention did a disservice to the more important task of understanding social history. The preachers of artistic merit, besides being paternalistic (urging unsuspecting students to "improve" themselves by teaching them literary appreciation and fostering their exposure to Great Art, the right art), tended to mistake their tastes for universal truths, which had the subtle and troubling effect of making contemporary academic tastes trans-normative while obliterating our ability to perceive the norms of earlier eras. Preserving those norms and getting inside them seemed the most important thing about studying literature to me; it gives us a palpable sense of how what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling" -- can change over time. That gives hope that the current consumerist era we are mired in is not permanent. So I agree with Rohan Maitzen's pedagogical approach:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

In moving from book to book, and in noticing the shifting norms, one ideally draws in work in other disciplines that can help articulate that shift and allow one to theorize its causes. A certain amount of the shift has to do with the writers themselves, but to me, that's the ineffable, ultimately inexplicable and irrelevant aspect we should strive to strain out. Those concerned with artistic merit (and who are not teaching creative writing as opposed to literature) seem to want to focus only on that individual "genius," with the effect of ultimately invalidating truly critical insight -- namely insight into what shifts social norms with regard to how readers take their entertainment, and what those modes of entertainment say about the society those readers lived in and that we have in part inherited. My suspicion is that reified entertainment -- books being one of the first instances of this -- is a crucial component of capitalist society and the nature of our enjoyment of such things has changed as capitalism has entrenched itself more deeply, in the material structure of our society and in the inner workings of our psyche as well, shaping how we discover pleasure and from what, shaping the methods by which we internalize mores and develop ambitions and aspirations. These are the inner, individual mental structures that ultimately sustain socioeconomic formations.

Dan Green's retort to Maitzen seems unduly preoccupied with a literary work's value in and of itself - - an irreducible matter of personal taste :

While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to “philosophizing,” et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It’s possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, “artistic merit” might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.

This statement immediately makes me wonder who gets to decide what is "aesthetically inferior" and on what grounds. Also, I wonder whether literary criticism even exists outside of academia. Literature, as a concept, is an academic construction. Criticism that hones that definition is an academic exercise. Outside of the academy, people who write about books are reviewers, not critics.

In short, whether or not a novel is "good" shouldn't matter to people who study them; that only matters to people who want to read them for pleasure. What would make a typical reader of a particular time choose a certain novel for pleasure, however, may be the most important question of all. To answer that, we have to disregard what we think that reader should prefer.

The myth of critical distance (29 July 2008)

Morgan Meis, an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, wrote recently about the changing role of criticism in a world in which anyone can publish their opinions.

The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.
In response, critics have become bemoaners. It seems that every week a new article comes out lamenting the state of criticism in field X, Y, or Z. The critics are bemoaning the state of their craft, bemoaning the state of contemporary culture, bemoaning the fate of the world. A few centuries ago the intellectual world trembled at the steps of Samuel Johnson. More recently, careers were ended by a few words from Oscar Wilde or Walter Lippman. A generation of Americans checked in with H.L. Mencken on a daily basis to figure out what they thought about any given subject. Most of these figures were angry and disdainful to some degree or other. But they were not bemoaners. They stood confidently atop the world and proclaimed. Generally they deemed most things worthless. On occasion, they would nominate a work or a person to greatness. A critic who tries to stand that tall today looks anachronistic and slightly foolish. No one is listening. No one cares who the critics are anointing or scorning.

This seems pretty indisputable, across the arts, though I still have a hard time fathoming why anyone would get worked up about it. Yes, old-style criticism, where middlebrow tastemakers anointed the greats with well-phrased encomiums that urged us into the warm bath of literary greatness, has been by and large replaced by hype and word-or-mouth marketing, which lets us know which cultural figures we should be developing an opinion about. And we should see this an awful triumph of philistinism, since hype is driven by commercial imperatives rather than the discriminating, independent perspective of the critic. But how independent are critics, ultimately? Isn't a large part of their game trying to monopolize the ability to make taste, to improve their own brand? And critics often try to remove themselves, absurdly, from the fray of cultural participation to burnish their claims to eternal objectivity. But as Meis points out, this has always been a dubious pose, a reaction to their irrelevance.

On the face of it, there aren’t many options. You can protest and wait for better times. You can try to hold the clock back as strenuously as you’re able. But this comes at a huge cost. It means, essentially, refusing to participate in the culture of your time. Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There’s even a name for it: “critical distance.” To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century.... The following years did not see a new race of giant critics so much as a slow withering. The critics today are a largely tremulous lot, beholden to popular opinion on one side or, on the other, to fancified jargon borrowed from the academy and applied to generally humorous if tiresome effect. Criticism thus finds itself parroting the opinions that everyone held anyway or spouting from a grab bag of “high theory” that invariably makes little sense and is but a desperate plea for legitimacy. A cry for help when all ears are deaf.
Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space.

This is how I felt as a record reviewer, making these untethered pronouncements, anchored to no particular point of view in an effort to represent all possible ones. I felt my own perferences slipping away from me, and ended up despising just about everything. It all felt like a burden to have to process it all.

But writers starting out seem to take the fruitlessness of speaking for the world for granted now, and they write fully aware that their opinion will be aggregated, and that the goal should to be to condensate their opinion into one easily quotable line.

Meis suggests another alternative, that critical discourse become a parallel art form, that interpenetrates other works rather than worship works perceived as hermetically sealed.

Accepting the metaphor of closeness means accepting that this participation is a two way street and that art and criticism collapse into one another and interpenetrate all over the place. Moving from art to criticism and criticism to art is moving along a level plane. That's to say, you have to get excited about moving horizontally. The days of distance are behind us.

Looking for clues (24 July 2008)

I have read Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production several times now, and I still don't think I understand what he's talking about. Either that, or I can't grasp why it matters. But while re-reading it this time, I was also reading what seems to me a highly "produced" text, an Agatha Christie murder mystery, Evil Under the Sun, and this helped illustrate for me what I think Macherey is getting at.

Macherey is at pains to point out certain critical fallacies, which in his view obscure the literary object and prevent critics from generating "objective" or "scientific" observations about it. (Why deriving such knowledge is important remains unclear to me, but I may be an irredeemable philistine when it comes to "scientific" cultural analysis of the Althusserian school. Seems part and parcel of the dream of breaking through "spontaneous ideology.") One of these fallacies (the "normative fallacy" -- if I were Macherey I would be sure to italicize it) involves critics trying to restate the message of a text in their own boiled-down formulations. "Criticism proposes to modify the work in order to assimiliate it more thoroughly, denying its factual reality as being merely the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention." Such critics are intent on replacing the literary work with what Macherey characterizes as an idealized (and falsifying) version -- one that has decoded the literary text and rendered it in unambiguous language, into crystalline commentary. But no language is ultimately unambiguous; every new formulation is subject to interpretation and so on, so this is a fruitless process ("critical works which attempt to put questions about the nature of discourse when they themselves are really discourse in disguise," writes Macherey), but nevertheless a seductive one, as it places the critic closer to the truth, mediating between the author and the true essence of the ideas that the author was trying to communicate.

From the point of view of the normative fallacy, literature is a matter of stalling the reader's recognition of the message, staging a bunch of distractions and transpositions and using elliptical or periphrastic ways of expressing things so as to make a text out of something that the critic, after the fact, expresses in its essence. Literary works are just belabored or cryptic ways of getting ideas across.

Of course, mysteries are structured like this -- the author stages a bunch of delaying tactics to prevent our seeing who committed the crime, and our pleasure comes from that protraction, from the sinkhole of time opened up within the simple details of a crime. "The detective story offers the best example of this disappearance of narrative," Macherey explains. "It is constructed entirely around the possibility of this prophetic reading which completes the story at the moment of its abolition." In a sense, the detective is the critic, who retells the whole story in succinct form at the end, replacing the version we just experienced before as we read. So in Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot explains away the entire book in the last two chapters and the function of all the clues Christie had so carefully planted earlier. He tells the story straight, while Christie had wound in all these distractions, detours, and misleading feints and red herrings. It gets very meta, because Christie has Poirot seem to criticize the ineffectiveness of her own imaginative conceptions earlier in the book. What we thought were just lame, lazy plot and character devices were actually clues -- they were unconvincing because they were the inventions of the failed criminals, not of Christie, and Poirot was able to deduce the criminal intent from these cliches that we could only ascribe to Christie herself (a neat trick that would seem to insulate Christie from being judged for her own literary merits). "First of all there were certain preliminary scenes," Poirot says, describing how the criminals prepared their crime. "A conventional jealous wife dialogue between her and her husband, Later she played the same part with me. At the time, I remember a vague feeling of having read it all in a book. It did not seem real. Because, of course, it was not real." So what are we, reading a book of fiction ourselves, supposed to make of that evidence? Everything in the book reads like something you'd only encounter in a mystery novel. How can we distinguish? We can't share the ground from which Poirot judges what is real and what is not.

Mysteries fit the theory of composition Poe put forward in "The Philosophy of Composition," which Macherey wants to expose as being absurd, if not an actual joke Poe was playing in inviting readers to take it seriously. Poe argues for a teleology in literary works -- the end is preconceived and all of a texts elements are designed to produce that end -- "every element should contribute to the conclusion." Poe claims that "it is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition -- that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem." So, Macherey notes, the artist is supposed transcending spontaneity, only the reader is experiencing spontaneous responses -- the reader experiences ideology, the writer orchestrates it. And the critic who translates the work into its intentions stands even further outside ideology, exposing how ideological discourse works.

If you buy into Poe, everything in a work is intentional, and good critics can presumably read out the intention of every detail by working backwards from the achieved effect. That is what Poirot does at the end of the novel, collecting all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and placing them properly, as the hackneyed metaphor Christie works into the text would have it. A character doing a jigsaw puzzle tells Poirot, "I do think the people who make puzzles are kind of mean. They just go out of their way to deceive you." Obviously Christie is venting some criticism she must have heard often. Poirot replies the his crime solving "is a little like your puzzle. One assembles the pieces. It is like a mosaic -- many colors and patterns -- and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place." By analogy, the text is conceived as a complete picture, and Poirot's assemblage of the pieces is the narrative we experience in reading.

But what Macherey argues is that it would be silly for literary critics to proceed in the same way as Poirot, deducing the proper meaning of every piece. He argues that this would be a "radical misunderstanding of the writer's work," and that a text is "never a coherent and unified whole" -- there are always multiple things being suggested at every moment in the text, by every analyzable aspect, and these things are often moving us in different directions simultaneously.

If I understand Macherey correctly, he is saying that what is interesting or significant about a book like Evil Under the Sun is the stuff that Poirot can't explain in his summation, the aspects of the book that aren't integrated into his construction of the completed jigsaw puzzle. The excess, so to speak. These are details that prolonged the narrative but had nothing to do with the crime; they just helped perpetrate the novel itself -- give it character types, make the motives plausible, provide the backdrop of normality on which the relevant anomalies in the criminals could be registered. In this excess, we can catch a glimpse of ideology, which Macherey, following Althusser, suggests is otherwise inarticulable. As they see it, ideology is lived in, a habitus -- tangible, not merely a characteristic of certain statements or positions. Rather it enables ideas to be formulated and expressed, and can't be expressed directly in language without again being masked or distorted. But literary texts, in their roundabout approach to rendering lived experience, capture something of it, pin enough of it down to make it subject to analysis: "The spontaneous ideology in which men live (it is not produced spontaneously, although men believe that they acquire it spontaneously) is not simply reflected by the mirror of the book; ideology is broken, and turned inside out in so far as it is transformed in the text from being a state of consciousness. Art, or at least literature, because it naturally scorns the credulous view of the world, establishes myth and illusion as visible objects." It manages to "present ideology in a non-ideological form," in what ideology enables it to say and what it inhibits.

So what is left over in Evil Under the Sun after Poirot is finished giving the official solution to the book? Quite a lot, actually. What's particularly jarring are the superfluous suspects, who are given reasons to kill that are convincing enough within the context of the novel but then are dropped as irrelevant red herrings once the real killer is revealed. But if one of these alternate suspects was the guilty party, the novel wouldn't change much at all. The motives are purely on the level of surface, one as significant as any other. Whether the woman was murdered by her stepdaughter or a drug-smuggling ring makes no difference in the world of Evil Under the Sun. The suspects are perfectly interchangeable, like the cards in a game of Clue. The implication of this is that there is always a superfluous amount of evil, that crime in the culture she depicts is overdetermined, but at the same time utterly arbitrary. No deeper implications can be inferred from the occurrence of any crime; each is isolated from larger social problems or deeper psychological insights.

But the main thing is the sexism -- after the crime is solved, Christie is at pains to deprive the working woman character of her job, marrying her off to the husband of the dead woman, who was killed basically because she was a vain and pathetic attention-seeker. (Christie basically leads us to believe that she deserved to die.) This betrothal was utterly unnecessary to the mystery aspect of the novel, but it ties together other assumptions animating the plot about a woman's place and her proper aspirations. Working women are essentially no different than criminals, cold-bloodedly calculating how they can prey on the world for gain. They should instead be at leisure, prettified trophies for the vacationing men to ogle at their own leisure (their attention should not be co-opted by ostentatious female vanity). If they become ornaments, they might be spared the unpleasant business of having murderous motives assigned to them.

Evaluative criticism (9 June 2009)

Ronan McDonald's recent book, The Death of the Critic, which argues that literary criticism should be evaluative so that it can reach a broad audience and therefore be relevant, has prompted some discussion at The Valve and Salon. Writes McDonald, in a passage excerpted by professor Rohan Maitzen here, "Perhaps the critic is not dead, but simply sidelined and slumbering. The first step in reviving him or her is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. ‘Judgment’ is the first meaning of kritos. If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative."

McDonald appears to be serious in arguing that the academic study of literature should focus on whether works are good or bad, inviting a return to the "warm bath" approach to pedagogy that invites us to luxuriate in the Great Works and congratulate one another on how perceptive we are in appreciating them. But who establishes the terms of correct aesthetic judgment? It seems like a will to power is all that's required, and then the spread of one's aesthetic tenets serves no greater function than oppressing the world with your particular tastes. And if it's not simply egotism, usually a covert political agenda is being served -- the way the New Criticism tended to denigrate political works in favor of sterile formalism, which guaranteed quietism in the humanities. McDonald argues that true criticism was destroyed by cultural studies and its political agendas, but passing judgment is a political act. What is so hard to understand about that? You can't impose an aesthetic value system on the public without imposing at the same time an implied set of political views, usually conservative ones, since the very act of imposing your judgment on others is an elitist proposition. (Not surprisingly, McDonald doesn't like the democratization of criticism -- probably because he suspects democracy as a principle. What, all those rubes out there get to have their own opinion, and it should count in the social world we share?) An aesthetics is always political; otherwise it's merely solipsistic.

Speaking of solipsism, McDonald's concerns over the democratization of criticism prompts this blithe statement from Salon's Louis Bayard:

The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you're a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving -- "Hey, that's my job!" -- and yes, elitist -- "Don't try this at home, guys." I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Believe it or not? Bayard's point is well-taken but is undermined utterly by that condescending interjection. Oh, is the great Louis Bayard to deign to find himself informed by the great illiterate mass of monkeys pounding away at their naive Amazon reviews and noncommercial blogs? I'm left with a sense of the mammoth amount of entitlement that critics seem to feel by their appointment to their prominent perches, and if that sort of critic is dying, I'd be happy to shovel the dirt on the grave. You have to hope he was being ironic in a way that is not coming across -- which itself is an index of the distrust between critics and readers (readers like me, anyway).

Maitzen's conclusion seems pertinent to the question of that distrust:

I share McDonald’s concern about the isolation of academic expertise from today’s reading culture more generally…I think, too, that he is right to be looking at questions of judgment and how they are understood and articulated as one of the flashpoints for misunderstanding or resentment between academics and other readers. I just don’t see how his prescription to be more evaluative is an adequate response, unless (at the minimum) it is accompanied by a commitment to showing why the question "Is it of any merit?" requires substantial complication before a worthwhile answer is possible. The responsibility here is not all ours: ideally, readers would want, not to be dictated to, but to be engaged in debate worthy of the books they are considering.

Criticism that prompts readers to become critics themselves in their own way would be healing the divide. That's why the flowering of millions of critics on the internet should be heralded as success, not failure or death.
If critics -- any critics, academic or otherwise -- deserve our attention, it seems that should be a matter of their being interesting in their own right, producing something compelling from their interaction with some other work that makes us want to think and talk about it too. Mere evaluation seems the least interesting outcome of such an interaction. At best, it prompts tautological arguments about taste.

McDonald believes that "If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its connections with a wider public," but I'm not sure why that matters. Does criticism need to compete on the same turf as marketing, and should it really strive to become more like marketing (evaluative criticism of the most straightforward sort), because it happens to have an extremely wide public in our commercial society? McDonald apparently laments academic critics' loss of public influence, but I'm not sure why they would deserve it; surely it's better that critics are taking less of the attention away from the art they would, under McDonald's system, be judging? Academic critics in general write repetitive and aggressively unreadable prose; this is because the mechanics of the profession demand it. (Academics must prove their mastery of a field through tedious recounting of previous scholarship, then they must prove a mastery of the field's arcane lingo, which helps establish the discipline's authority.) Were they to write in a more accessible fashion -- for lay readers rather than their peers -- they would be undermining the credibility of their field, th epresumption that special training is required to perform the sort of analysis in which they have become specialized. If we don't think these specialized analyses are worth performing, better then to argue for the abolishment of literature departments, and turn literary analysis back over to the Virginia Woolfs of the world, the leisure-class dilettantes with the time and inclination to parse fictions.

Deconstruction time again (10 April 2008)

At the NYT site, Stanley Fish recently posted this essay in response to Francois Cusset's new postmortem, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Having recently re-read 1984, the discussion had extra salience for me, as most discussions of theory eventually get around to the attempt to control thought and reality through language, as Orwell illustrated with Newspeak.

Walter Benjamin argued that "the only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Orwell in 1984 was implying the same thing. The Party obliterates the past and makes its hope inaccessible. Was deconstruction doing the same thing?

French theory is usually taken as an assault on Enlightenment thought, and therefore a threat to liberal society as we know it. Fish modifies this slightly:

what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.
The solution to the problem in the rationalist tradition was to extend man’s reasoning powers in order to produce finer and finer descriptions of the natural world, descriptions whose precision could be enhanced by technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes, atom smashers, computers) that were themselves extensions of man’s rational capacities. The vision was one of a steady progress with the final result to be a complete and accurate — down to the last detail — account of natural processes. Francis Bacon, often thought of as the originator of the project, believed in the early 17th century that it could be done in six generations.

This is what Fish calls the Baconian dream, the Enlightenment project of an airtight scientific explanation of all observable phenomena, which replaces the need for God as an explanation. Secular folk generally take this sort of thing for granted nowadays, and we tend to have a blind faith in the benevolence of science.

Summing up the general thrust of deconstructive theory, Fish invokes this quote of Hobbes's: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." In other words, truth is manufactured in discourse and is malleable. 1984, which is preoccupied with the totalitarian implications of a Berkeleyesque idealism (wherein there is no reality outside the mind), takes the absence of a 100 percent verifiable real truth outside of human minds and runs with it. In the novel, the Party must eradicate once and for all the fantasy of independent, noncontingent truth to reduce everything to power, which they monopolize. This supplants what Fish calls the Baconian dream in providing "the final word" on nature. The Party is the final word on everything in 1984, and it utters that final word in whatever form suits them as the unknowable Real moves on. The novel makes clear that science is at the mercy of politics, and serves political ends, not objective, neutral ones.

But Fish is right to say that deconstruction, which sets out to expose the political agenda of seemingly objective practices like scientific method, is itself apolitical. As he explains,

No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

But though some academics harped on social construction of gender and the canon to try to expose and unsettle established "natural" hierarchies, most others realized that the deconstruction game was a never-ending spiral that pulls down all authority if pursued to its logical conclusion. It's not a very useful tool in and of itself, since it can be used only to make one argument -- there are no given truths. But the inescapability of this conclusion led ultimately to an enhanced interest in "historicity" among academics in American English departments -- in the absence of absolutes, various socially constructed phenomena (i.e. everything) could be compared and critiqued after being "situated" in a historical moment through close reading "texts" (i.e. everything). And various discourses regarding said phenomena could be surveyed and a dignified role for literature asserted -- it's constructing historical reality! You can then bypass more-tedious research and its decidedly undramatic conclusions for intuitive leaps of insight derived by sensitive readings of novels and tracing patterns of tropes. This means that you don't have to do much more than parse the rhetoric in a text to draw historical conclusions from it and start making a transhistorical case for the "invention" of this or that ontological category. Then you can write books discovering the invention of the fact, the invention of shopping, the invention of woman, the invention of basically everything. Better yet, these categories are constantly reinvented because they have no firm universal basis.

The problem with French theory is less its assault on truth, but its assault on clear straightforward expression. Its jargon is an even more recondite Newspeak than that spoken by Enlightenment rationalists, with their zeal for coining words to categorize everything. The near-incomprehensible discourse in your average text by Lacan or Derrida became a convenient tactic for professionalizing academics to adopt in order to demonstrate that what they were doing was over their philistine critics' heads. It also made for a useful test of graduate students' willingness to play by the rules (will they write in this putrid style to keep enemies at bay?) and doggedly attempt to follow absurdly nuanced trains of thought, which make needless distinctions apparently designed to confuse and alienate the less learned, who can't even begin to contextualize what is at stake in such dithering. One night with Kristeva or Spivak quickly weeds out the nonbelievers.

But deconstruction -- the idea that ideology is constructed and malleable -- has mainly been a boon to advertising, supplying a working model for undoing prejudices against, say, wasteful spending or frivolous identity-making. Deconstruction immediately opens the possibility of ongoing, perpetually incomplete (and perpetually profitable) reconstruction. Hence women are always "becoming" women and men, men, and so on.

Twilight of the English professors (19 March 2008)

One of the best personal decisions I've made was the one to give up on writing a dissertation in English Literature. It seemed silly to quit at the end, and only when the work got serious and needed to be professionalized, but there is such a thing as sunk costs, and at some point I had to write mine off. I didn't have any interest in being a professor. No dissertation, no matter how broad or theoretical or New Historicist, was going to make up for my deciding to study English instead of economics or even sociology, the subjects I was actually interested in. At some point, I was going to have to try to say something meaningful about literature as literature, and I didn't believe anymore that there was anything worth saying. This may have been my imaginative failing, but I was thinking that literature had only a faint impact on life as it was lived by most people, so to comment on it is to theorize about echoes when you could be wrangling with the real thing. It seems as though you are rejecting reality for the cave and the shadows. (I have a similar understanding of real news -- aka business news -- versus the personal-interest vicarious-fantasy material masquerading as news. Studying literature started to seem to me a way of affirming the latter over the former.)

Still, this Nation item depressed me completely. William Deresiewicz looks at the MLA job list and comes away with these impressions:

The most striking fact about this year's list is that the lion's share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the "service" component of an English department's role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you've got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That's more than half the list, and we still haven't gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what's left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. "Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures." "Postcolonial emphasis" is "required." "Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable." ...

This year's Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It's not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the 18 years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star -- a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom -- emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Would that someone would have discouraged me. But the universities need writing teachers, and literature grad students can be impressed into teaching composition courses for meager wages as long as studying literature for a living can be dangled before them as enticement. In the English Department I was connected with, the rhetoric and composition folk formed a well-disciplined and highly professionalized cadre who were devoted to instrumentalizing the department's course offerings. They had the energy for this because their teaching and their studies weren't fatally split. They and their kind will inevitably inherit the shell of the English departments that are left when lit studies collapse completely. Perhaps they will be absorbed by Education departments, who share a similar fetish for pedagogy for pedagogy's sake.

On a related note, John Mullen, writing in the TLS, looks at Rónán McDonald's recent book The Death of the Critic and decides that English professors are ruining their own brand.

Cultural consumption at the margins (3 Jan 2008)

Because the manner in which media is distributed these days has so changed the way I experience it and even conceive desires about it, I wanted to refresh my memory on Marxist literary theory, which strongly emphasizes the network of social relations within which a work exists. (You can already see this has done wonders for my prose style.) It seems that, for example, the amount of music available for free (if you are willing to take it) makes it impossible to listen to it in the same way. This reminded me of Terry Eagleton's Marxism and Literary Criticism where he attributes to Marx the idea that "capitalist society, with its predominance of quantity over quality, its conversion of all social products to market commodities, its philistine soullessness, is inimical to art." One pessimistic way of applying this idea: Accustomed as we are to attach a price to cultural product, the fact that it's suddenly (for all intents and purposes) free encourages a massive and rapid accumulation, which serves to reinforce the status of the art as product rather than experience. We become buried under the surfeit, doomed to process the material rather than enjoy it -- forced to focus on consuming our way through it rather than actually listening to it, watching it, reading it, whatever the case may be.

In other words, we may be so ideologically conditioned to regard culture as a priced product that we can't understand it or value it outside of that context, even as technological change is reducing the relevance of price to cultural experience. The underpinning assumption is that the social context that produces cultural objects also produces at the same time (or dialectically, if you prefer, with each altering the development of the other) the subjects fit for such objects -- mass culture, for instance, is presumed to yield a certain sort of person fit to be one of the masses, with lowest-common-denominator tastes and untroubled by disposability. So we experience "free" with a kind of panic, either the culture is becoming worthless or we are in the midst of such a bargain that we need to consume as much as we can to behave rationally within that market. But the outcome -- collections of music, for example, that run into the thousands of albums -- is anything but rational. Spending hours devouring clips on YouTube of commercials you remember from childhood is not especially rational either. Trying to read 17 newspapers a day, because you can, because they all shed a slightly different light, is not entirely rational despite being technically feasible with no extra financial costs at the margin.

It's hard to escape the pressure that marginal thinking puts on cultural consumption -- the idea that if you can download one song for free and 1,000 songs for free at the same expense, you may as well get the thousand, quality concerns be damned -- precisely because capitalism has weaned us to view culture as something to consume. Eagleton, assaying the Marxist position on artists' commitment to progressive or revolutionary attitudes, offers this bleak comment. Comparing postwar art to that inspired by the fascist crisis, he writes:

There are less "extreme" phases of bourgeois society in which art relegates itself to minor status, becomes trivial and emasculated, because the sterile ideologies it springs from yield no nourishment -- are unable to make significant connections or offer adequate discourses. In such an era, the need for explicitly revolutionary art again becomes pressing. It is a question to be seriously considered whether we are not ourselves living in such a time.

The ideology by which we see art as commodity (which has innumerable facets -- reflected not just in the digital files vended online, but in the breathless coverage of Christie's and Sotheby's art auctions, the manufacture of promotional materials and solicitation of reviews, the reporting of sales figures and the equivalence of profit with popularity and popularity with quality, and so on) seems to be one of those sterilizing ideologies that yield no nourishment, but optimists might argue that the wide, cheap distribution and interactive nature of the internet are reshaping that ideology by revolutionizing forms and media themselves, which inevitably reshapes the consumers of such forms and media. This view verges on "crude technologism" -- the idea that technology automatically (and undialectically) produces new social conditions. But if such a revolution is happening, it leaves a certain generation (mine) especially strung between ideological configurations -- open to new developments but conditioned by old practices. And it's not clear that this shift won't yield art (and art appreciators) that's even more philistine -- leading to more quantity over quality, not just for ideological stragglers and strandees but for those fully formed within the internet era. The interactivity and superfluity of culture encourages us not to grapple with it as it is but to alter it to suit our prejudices and convenience. We can, say, only engage with culture at the level of relaxation -- listen to smooth jazz and watch TV shows that spoon-feed us the feelings we're supposed to have. Or we can only pay attention to culture to the degree that it seems to be paying attention to us -- read only the comments people leave for us or that are about us on social networks.

But those tendencies will be mixed with a kind of indifference to regarding culture economically, as protected property. This indifference to prices, ownership, copyrights, etc., will inevitably rise to a new way of experiencing culture. A utopian prognosis would be something that builds in part on the premise of individuals mashing up digital content and sharing it to amuse friends and in part on the inconsequentiality of what's already made -- everything may come to be seen as raw material for some further production and consumption itself will seem boring. The lack of cultural scarcity will render a coveting, consumerist approach pointless. But another alternative would be the sort of thing Brave New World suggests, where the ocean of interconnected cultural material becomes a network of control.