Naive Counter-Manifesto

What, then, is so terrible? The stalls of the marketplace provide a fascinating babble, a white noise for a well-adjusted lifetime. Let a thousand flowers bloom, etc. Perhaps the demise of Literature marks the end of a certain need. Perhaps we should give up the ghost. To what end do we require the pantomimic wraith of the poète maudit, the leering shade of Rimbaud or Lautréamont with its bottle of absinthe and its bloodshot eyes? For the pragmatic among us, the end of Literature is merely the end of a melodramatic model, a false hope that has gone the way of psychoanalysis, Marxism, punk rock and philosophy. But for the less pragmatic among us, we realise— we experience—what has been lost. Without Literature we lose Tragedy and Revolution both, and these are the two last best modalities of Hope. And when Tragedy disappears, we sink down into a gloom, a life whose vast sadness is that it is less than tragic. We crave tragedy, but where can we get it when tragedy has given way to farce? Shame and scorn are the only response now at literary readings to literary manifestos. All effort are belated now, all attempts are impostures. We know what we want to say and to hear, but our new instruments cannot hold the tune. We cannot do it again nor make it new since both of those actions have telescoped to equivalence—we are like circus clowns who cannot squeeze into their car. The words of Pessoa ring in our ears: ‘Since we are unable to extract beauty from life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty from life.’ This is the task given us, our last, best chance.   



–Lars Iyer, “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos)”

But everything has always been impossible.  This is the problem with strong historicist and culturalist arguments: they’re written as if pain were somehow less real in other times and places.  As if Sophocles or Dante or Woolf were able to do what they did because they faced fewer obstacles than we do.  It turns the achievements of the past into products of luck, the canon into a gallery of welfare queens who lazily sucked down the privileges of coherent societies and smaller libraries and who thus didn’t really deserve to write works of enduring energy.  Whereas we hyperboreans breathe the alpine air of our abstract society, and our parched ephemeral snow-scratchings testify to the integrity of our almost-entire-defeatedness.

The despair-inducing impenetrability of reality as it faces you is always irreducible.  God has always been exactly this far away, and death this near.  Your contemporaries have always been a pack of vicious mediocrities, and money has always been scarce.  There was always a social price to pay for creating genuine art.  There were always people starving and dying while you were dreaming of masterpieces.  Politics was always a necessary sham, education a necessary containment.  We always come too late because we think we must have just missed what has actually never existed anywhere else but in our visions.  We think somebody somewhere—mom and dad, Homer and Virgil, Kafka and Rimbaud—had the primary experience in comparison with which ours feels so secondary.  But that is the primary experience.  Which doesn’t mean we don’t have visions, or should pretend not to have them.  Puritanism is an inadequate response to false plenitude.  Everybody has always had exactly as much reason to despair as you have right now.  So write now.

Let Me Kiss You Hard in the Pouring Rain: Against Materialist Anti-Aesthetics

I do wish this weren’t inspired by Lana Del Rey.  But what can I say?—It is.  A little mood music to begin, then…

In the last post I mentioned that materialism was the reigning worldview today: the belief that meaning and value are entirely constructed by and incarnated within human institutions.  Even the tree outside your window, the mouse skittering in your walls, is an institutional construct, because your ability to think about it—even to perceive it—is constrained by the words and concepts available to you, and the system that organizes them and confers meaning on them.  On this view, society is a kind of locked room–and this brings us quickly enough to the familiar impasse of such radically “immanent” though, namely, its inability to account for social change, which it tends to regard precisely as a locked-room mystery: “Who let all these new values into our system?”  But that’s not my topic.  My topic is the consequence of this view for art and our understanding of art.

People who are really impressed, really struck, by a work of art tend, in my experience, to want to say something like the following: “That was the real thing.  That was authentic.”  What does this mean?  It seems to mean that paying attention to the work was more like having an experience than it was like having a simulacrum of an experience, which is what you might expect from art.

Materialism has two explanations for this, currently travelling under the names “postmodernism” and “identity politics.”

1. Postmodernism claims that the sensation of an authentic aesthetic experience is simply false, an illusion produced by the manipulation of constructed discourses.  You never touched that tree, it says in its version of Zeno’s Paradox (wherein the sign is so fractally divisible that the referent perpetually slides out of reach); in fact, you never left this room. The implicit aesthetic standard: works that most clearly reveal their essential inauthenticity are the best works.

2. Identity politics claims that the sensation of an authentic aesthetic experience comes from the perfect alignment between the work of art and the institution that organizes both the artist and the audience (“the street,” “women’s experience,” “subalternity,” etc.).  The implicit aesthetic standard: works that strive to make themselves identical to their institutional situations are the best works.

In practice, both standards are applied at once in materialist criticism: artists understood to belong to dominant social groups are told to divest themselves of their power by creating postmodern works that expose their authority as an alterable imposture, while artists understood to belong to subordinate social groups are allowed to produce works “authentic” to their identity because they need such consolations in the throes of their freedom struggle.

(Where the ethics animating these judgments come from, materialists cannot say.)

A hundred years from now, this is going to look every bit as arbitrary and incomprehensibly stupid as the bulk of neo-classical criticism, with its emphasis on “decorum,” looks to us.  But most people will accept this: context changes, after all, as the materialist critic is the first to tell us.  My claim is a more radical one: our critical standards are extremely stupid right now, even as we speak.

Take the most common critical move today, used on everybody from Lana Del Rey to the whole company of Romantic and Modernist writers: the critic begins with a work that seems to generate some powerful feeling, to disclose some kind of transcendent vision, ecstatic feeling, materially-ungrounded knowledge.  The critic then, with either a flourish of self-congratulation (internet-mode) or an expression of disappointed shock (academic-mode), reveals the following: this seemingly transcendent art was involved in transactions related to the exchange of money, the production of publicity, the movement of materiel and personnel, and the standards and values immanent to all of these brute social facts.  Finally, the critic finishes off the work of art by collapsing it back into the standards and values of the material institutions that brought the art before the audience, thus denying the work’s claim to transcendent truth, feeling, or expression.

The above is not only the modus operandi of certain cynical websites, but the hegemonic critical ideology in academic culture criticism today.  We are all mean-minded minions of Pierre Bourdieu, because we are all materialists. The incomprehensibly stupid consequence of this: because we can explain context, we effectively know all there is to know in advance about text; because we know all there is to know in advance about text, we are not really ever reading.  We’re only—forgive me—playing video games.

Is there no way out of this dull regress?  I have only one to propose.  Accept as fact, because it is a fact, that works of art are in the world.  Someone pays the artist, someone pays for the material, someone pays for the finished work.  Chances are, someone paid the adman too.  That is indeed the enveloping context.  But now you have the work before you–any kind of work, let’s be generous, let’s let it be anything from the latest pop song trying to get you to sing along to the massivest modernistest tome that forces you to read it with pencil in hand and annotations at your side.  And ask yourself this as you pay attention to the work:

Is there anything in it that seems to come from outside your language, your understanding, your conceptual array, your expectation?  Anything that not only can’t be related to anything you already know, but also doesn’t now even appear able to take the form of knowledge?  Is there anything that burns through the context?  Enough to burn you?

The Strange Lanes of Hell: Why I’m Not a Marxist

fascism brought the slogan “art for art’s sake” to its logical conclusion

–Kirill Medvedev

My fellows of the intellectual class, stunned by our economic “precarity” (didn’t their mothers warn them?), continue to ragpick among the detritus of the old radicalisms, not seeming to understand that the neoliberalism they complain of is kin to the very same apocalyptics, indeed the last one standing.

Here is the end of a poem, titled “***,” that currently headlines n+1, the reigning headquarters of Brooklyn radicalism (though perhaps soon to succumb to the inaccurately-billed New Inquiry).  The poem is written by a Russian radical writer named Kirill Medvedev and translated by Keith Gessen.

Night comes on
the cold streams in, streams in, streams in,
and enters
through the gates, through our sleeves
through our skin
enters our blood,
and somewhere in a warm room
on a soft bed on white
sheets
a pretty young mother
is stroking her little child
sleep sleep sleep my little one
sleep my baby child
sleep sleep don’t listen
to the wind howling
the cars rustling
sleep tighter my little one
gather strength
you’ll need lots of strength
the working class needs brave strong tough fighters
there are difficult times ahead.

Do people seriously propose that we try this again?  When it didn’t work the last ten thousand times around?  It didn’t work when Jesus Christ tried it.  Unless the end of the poem is ironic–I know, I know: irony is the decadent epitome of petty-bourgeois fagdom; I’ve read my late-Lukacs (the question is, Brooklynites: have you?).

But a Dissent essay by Medvedev is heavy with the old jargons, heavy enough to preclude irony:

The artist is connected to his environment, stratum, and community through a collective experience—bodily, historical, cultural. In the artistic act, this connection manifests itself voluntarily, which is why it is a moment of freedom. An artist can think, reflect, and deduce as much as he wants outside the artistic act. But only in the act of creation, only voluntarily, having become a kind of blind, insane vessel, can one create a form—a form that connects a person with his biography, with his experience, with those unilluminated, chaotic, power-hungry clots in which his history joins up with the collective one. Only in this way can one break through to reality—to force someone to hate you or to express solidarity, to make someone think, to make someone experience collective oppression alongside you. This is why terms like “form,” “sincerity,” and “personal, biographical experience” are still, I think, significant even in politicized art, because manipulation either of one’s own or of someone else’s personal experience (as in art, so also in politics) ultimately leads to chaos, creating a deceptive unity—that is, yet another ideology or “individual project” in which even private or cultural experience only justifies powerlessness or conformism or a set of sentimental bromides.

This is straight, uncut Lukacs: it could come word for word from “Realism in the Balance.”   And remember, Lukacs’s version was the reformist variety of this line of thought.  We tried it this way before, and it did not work.

So, the poem’s ending seems like a genuine sentiment: a pretty young mother (what if she were ugly or old [is it only bourgeois ladies who have babies when old, bourgeois babies whipped up in test-tubes by bourgeois doctors?]?) whispering revolutionary dreams into the ear of the babe (what if he doesn’t want to be working class, even if his people were?  is it up against the wall with him?  or, still more likely, what if hot young working-class mom doesn’t want her kid to be working-class even if she was, and doesn’t want to bring down the system but only to see him succeed in it?  I keep asking: are we really going to do this again?).

The ending is too easy to pick on.  Let’s try the poem’s middle, in which the wife of an assassinated activist opines to the speaker, who readily agrees with her:

In the end it’s the labor unions
that are the true workshop of communism.
Yes, I say, right now that’s the situation,
no matter what anyone says,
and who knows what the future may bring, but for the moment
the progressive labor activists have a higher political consciousness
than the intellectuals,
than the professors,
it’s just too bad there are so few of them.
But strategically that’s the most important thing.

I know not how it may be in Russia, but the n+1 boys are evidently holding this up as exemplary here too in “the present conjuncture,” so I feel it’s not wholly irrelevant to note my own time spent working among labor union members.  Their unions were workshops of two things: 1. ethnic and racial hatred and rivalries; 2. the desire to advance economically within the system.  Ordinary working people do not and never will want to bring down the system.  They only want their share of it.  Emerson, deceptive ideologist of so-called individualism, noted this back in the time of Marx himself:

We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men’s eyes conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large institutions and empire. If these did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors. Therefore he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town and state and way of living, which our counsellor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and reject the reformer so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.

Marxism is the disease for which it claims to be the cure.  The name of the disease, for lack of any better, is materialism, and its nature is the belief that there is no exterior to the immanence of institutions; the utopia it promises is the capacity for self-transcending autocorrection on the part of the material the institutions organize.  Neoliberalism, of course, claims no less.  Marxism names the chimerical autocorrection capacity “history,” while neoliberalism calls it “the market.”  But the narrative is in essence the same: hence the disposability of intellectuals under both regimes.

Look again at Medvedev’s essay, in which he speaks of the artist as “a blind, insane vessel”–an old, old idea; it’s ancient locus classicus is in the Phaedrus.  And an idea I agree with.  But not in its materialist sense, either Marxist or capitalist, in which theories the artist is the vessel only for the immanent truths of social organization: in both cases, “what the people want.”

The older version of the artist-as-insane-vessel theory went very differently.  Here is Plato:

The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art-he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

And here Shelley, just before Marxism would come along and turn what had been for him a productive tension into a crushing, simplistic hammer:

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

The descending frenzy that possessed Plato’s and Shelley’s poet was not immanently determined by collective history.  It come from outside the frame–from the unrepresentable world of Plato’s Forms, from Shelley’s far-off futurity.  Because it comes from this unincarnated world, it cannot be analyzed using the tools of sociology.  On the contrary, poetry contains sociology, rather than the reverse.  But the night-side of this truth should be given its due: if what poetry materializes is a glimpse of the heretofore immaterializable transcendent, then poetry may not respect persons or institutions.  May, in short, be the enemy of that which would make it serve–human society–in which case Plato and Lukacs were right to call for its social regulation.

Which is their prerogative.  They are, after all, the keepers of order.  But a poet who calls for the social regulation of poetry is not, in fact, a poet.  The world has fewer poets than might be suspected.

To cleanse your palate of Medvedev’s exaltation of labor unions and pretty mothers, here’s a real poem written, inconveniently enough, by a son of the working class:

“Medlars and Sorb Apples”
D. H. Lawrence

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavor
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavor as Syracusan muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussy-foot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple.
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels.
Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.
Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences
Orphic, delicate
Dionysus of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture.
Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
The fibers of the heart parting one after the other
And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
In a deeper and deeper darkness
Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odor of leave-taking.
Jamque vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation.
Strangest of all strange companions,
And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples
More than sweet
Flux of autumn
Sucked out of your empty bladders
And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its

Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
And the ego sum of Dionysus
The sono io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.