SUCH AN AWESOME SITE
I don’t know what to say about American Cultural Studies.
I am completely dumbfounded by it.
Stuart Hall
1.
What I have been trying to establish is the idea that the poverty of the imagination is first a poverty of reading. Criticism creates the opportunity for creativity. We are poor because we cannot read and reconstruct even the crude ideological narratives of the media, and, as my old teacher Merle Brown tried to show, we are poor because we are no longer sufficiently interested in what a poem does to provide the care that should go into reading it, allowing it to perform itself with our participation and cooperation as readers. As Brown saw, the devolution of reading and criticism was inaugurated by deconstruction even if that was in no way deconstruction’s philosophic purpose. It has been sad to witness the devolution of reading in universities, because when I was a student I assumed that the university was about the only place where that sort of care and attention to literature and art still mattered. So egregious has this lack of care become in some quarters that the refusal to read has become a reluctance even to look.
In a case that is emblematic in my mind, in 1994 at Illinois State University, the University Gallery brought in an exhibition of paintings by Mike Cockrill. The paintings depicted adolescent and preadolescent girls in a variety of precociously sexual poses. A scandal erupted around these paintings, with opponents accusing the university of supporting child pornography. But none of the exhibition’s critics seemed interested in reading the paintings. They were interested only in locating the artist’s (vile) political “position.” Everyone in the community was talking about the paintings, but no one was looking at them with much care. We had been humiliated by a political critique into a shamed averting of our eyes from exactly that which was meant to be the focus of our attention. “Will you ‘gaze’ upon the paintings?” became a kind of political litmus test that precluded all other discussion. But when I took the risky step of daring to read the paintings, it became clear to me that the exhibition was exactly about libido and complicity. What gives us pleasure is corrupt, just as art’s own powerful seductions are often not pure but corrupted by the ills of the social moment. Cockrill’s paintings mixed equal parts of horror and indulgence. The paintings neither bluntly blamed (as anti-porn advocates might like) nor entirely volupted (as pornographers might like). The paintings created emotional, libidinal, and political instabilities. These instabilities are mirrored in the paintings’ formal strategies, which move between commercial, pornographic, and Beaux Arts technical conventions. A thrilling opportunity to read had been passed over for the sake of the virtuous feeling of political certainty.
This devolution of reading in the academy is largely the consequence of the ascendancy of Cultural Studies in North American universities. In the messy instability following New Criticism’s demise, it was Cultural Studies that emerged as the new dominant, the new stamp in which all Ph.D.s would be minted. In the hands of its original thinkers—Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams in particular, in their famous Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies—Cultural Studies was a lucid and necessary examination of the relationship of culture (whether high culture or working-class culture) to the administrative state. The most important, fundamental, and incontestable claim of early Cultural Studies was the simple idea that culture was political. However, in universities in the United States in the 1980s and ‘90s, Cultural Studies experienced an explosive growth leading to a curious institutionalization and professionalization of what had begun as a marginal and Marx-inspired movement. American Cultural Studies was driven by three primary methods, most of which would have surprised the Birmingham founders: semiotics (the language of “social construction,” of culture as a vast “text”); feminism, race studies, and Queer Theory (which together constituted the “politics of difference” and “identity politics” and effectively excluded Cultural Studies’ original concern, the broader tradition of “class”); and the celebration of commercially developed “popular” culture (the very commercial culture that had been the enemy of working-class culture for the earliest cultural theorists). These three tendencies in North American universities were the advance guard for the left in the so-called Culture Wars of the eighties and nineties. Beyond infuriating the right, which it certainly did, Cultural Studies had very damaging, if less visible, consequences for literature, which was swamped by undifferentiated “signifying practices,” PC guilt, and Bart Simpson dolls.
The reading of literary texts in the humanities dominated by Cultural Studies has become a matter of searching the text for symptoms supporting the sociopolitical or theoretical template of the critic. The political/theoretical template (whether provided by Louis Althusser, Homi Bhabha, Antonio Gramasci, Donna Haraway, or a host of others) comes first, and what’s in the poem or essay or novel is determined by the template. As art critic Libby Lumpkin argues in her book Deep Design (1999),
So deeply are [present-day academicians] invested in the construction of art as philosophy that they have dispensed with the bulk of the language once used to describe material objects. Despite the fact that art must, by definition, embody its meaning, the term “form” is censored or disparaged.[1] (112)
Cultural Studies’ “reading after symptoms” has had a flattening effect on literature, because all texts can be said to contain “signifiers” acting as “social symptoms.” Consequently, the literary text becomes one “signifying practice” among many. Literature becomes just another “discursive formation.” A TV commercial, a sitcom, a tabloid treatment of OJ, a poem by Yeats—they’re all “manifestations of culture.” This tends to flatten culture, abolish distinction, make everything gray, just as much as Fresh Air’s juxtaposition-without-comment (as if it were the most natural and even perspicuous thing in the world) of Christoph Eschenbach and Barry Manilow tends to flatten. In academia, Cultural Studies has done much the same thing with Milton and Madonna, as conservative critics like George Will remind us ad nauseam. The problem here isn’t that this juxtaposition violates old high/low distinctions. The problem is that this kind of reading destroys all difference. It impoverishes. It creates Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black.” Even though the academy has a hard time acknowledging this complicity with the Middle Mind’s tendency to flatten, it is obvious even to mainstream writers like John Seabrook, distinguished Nobrowologist, a person not always willing to acknowledge what he sees, as I have already noted. Seabrook writes that his introduction to Nobrow was not on Madison Avenue; it was in Raymond Williams’s Cultural Studies seminar at Oxford in 1983. “The Williams seminar now seems like the real beginning of my education in Nobrow—the real world of culture that I was working in at Tina Brown’s New Yorker.” (53) At Oxford, the party line was that aesthetics was all politics; it was all about the ideology of “taste” and “class hegemony,” short and sweet. This line hasn’t changed much since then.
The fundamental lack in the approach taken by American Cultural Studies is that it looks at culture only as a critic, as a member of the faith of criticism, and it can’t imagine what it might mean to look at texts from the perspective of artists. (For good or bad, this was not a problem that the lading New Critics had, many of whom, like John Crowe Ransom, were also practicing poets.)For an artist, difference is everything. The difference between the hack, the dilettante, and the artist as both master of a tradition and inventor of the “best next thing” (as one of our greatest literary artists, John Barth, put it) is everything. The reason that these distinctions are important has nothing to do with supporting high culture, or disdaining pop culture, or maintaining standards, or appealing to timeless and transcendental notions of the beautiful. It is much simpler than that. It has to do with the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead. For an artist to make something that is mere conventional hackwork is to feel dead in a way that is fundamentally defeating. On the other hand, to make something that has the click of invention (the “autonomy” that Adorno refers to) is to feel that life has been pulled from the abyss called death of perception wherein one is dumbly pent by Stevens’s quotidian or Hegel’s “night,” the night of the Middle Mind dead. Each day’s practice is the requirement of going once more to that abyss, where life’s failure is a real possibility, and plucking life out in the possibility (if not the realization) of its human capacity. This cannot be done in a context in which, as Stevens wrote, “the deer and the dachshund” (or Eschenbach and Manilow) are one. It can be done only in a world in which the imagination rules supreme and, as Stevens writes again, “the rabbit is the king of ghosts.” Thus, art’s ongoing power, whether in Beethoven, Coltrane, or Radiohead, is that this call to life is powerful and intuitively persuasive (as old Plato knew, which is why he banished it from his ideal republic). Art is always necessarily a threat to the Reign of the Dictatorship of the Present.
And so when Cultural Studies race theorist Cornel West, good and smart man though he is, argues in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (his contribution to The Cultural Studies Reader) that the politics of difference ought to inform the work of the artist of the future, the artist in me winces. West argues that artists should think of themselves as “culture workers” and should “align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized, and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action.” (257) Thus, surely, is a vision of the artist that is virtuous as all get out, but it is also a recipe for bad art. Probably a lot of bad art. Hung on the walls of coffee shops and hung on the walls of the local museum, sponsored by a corporate foundation in need of the appearance of social conscience; spouted from the lips of distinguished visiting writers and spouted from open mike poetry readings ad nauseam. And so I have to say that I don’t think Cornel West knows what he’s talking about. He advocates art as social activism. I don’t think West understands how art functions and how it has its social impact. Art is not the display of self-congratulatory social virtue. Period. And no amount of complaining by social activist artists about the unfairness of having to prove themselves “in light of norms and models set by white elites whose own heritage devalued and dehumanized them” will make bad art good. For an artist, West’s recommendation that artists think of themselves as “Critical Organic Catalysts” (265) must sound bizarre and frightening. Worse yet, it sounds deadening.
Stevens again:
In this area of my subject I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociological or political, obligation of the poet. He has none…. No politician can command the imagination, directing it to do this or that. Stalin might grind his teeth the whole of a Russian winter and yet all the poets in the Soviets might remain silent the following spring. (27-28)
Cultural Studies is also dead to something any artist must be sensitive to: how the past lingers for an artist. Cultural Studies’ interest in time has to do with paradigm shifts and radical breaks. The biggest “scoop” in this intellectual world is to be the first to identify and name the current “moment.” Everyone wants to be the next Jean-François Lyotard writing The Postmodern Condition. “Until further notice, you are to think of yourselves as living in postmodernity. No, make that late capitalism. Wait, it’s really the postcolonial moment. Hold it, the post-human. I’ll have to get back to you on this.” Believe me, reputations are made, contracts are signed, product is distributed, conferences are proposed in sunny places like UCLA and Duke, or not so sunny places like New Haven. This is the best academic buzz there is: to announce that the present is dead and long live the present. That gets you the “go straight to Yale” card. Once we’ve gone on to the next stage, all the rules change, and appeals to past organizations are by mysterious edict ruled out of order. There is an absolutism in Cultural Studies’ understanding of time.
Cultural Studies utterly fails to see why certain aspects of the past are values that we ought to want to insist on. This is something that artists understand very concretely. The past is something that lingers. It is carried in the body. The internalized music of Shakespeare’s phrasing, that is what matters to the artist, not his status as Harold Bloom’s culture hero. That odd bloody brown in Rembrandt. These qualities of the past become visceral for artists, and it is through their present works that the body of the past stays alive for us. An artist worthy of the name is like the pianist who studied with a master who studied with Bartók who studied with István Thomán who studied with Liszt, and so it is not too much to say that that attack on that phrase, that feel, that quality of technical care, is old Liszt himself talking to us. It’s like in Buddhism, where the assumption is that every rinpoche studied in a tradition and a lineage that began with the Buddha himself. And every member of the community gains a feeling of connectedness to a human past of great value through this rinpoche. This is so even as we move forward to invent the Buddha of the Future.
Where is Cultural Studies’ concern for this sort of experience of human time? What we fail to see in Cultural Studies’ putative left radicalism is just how rationalist, how abstract and “disembodied” its jargon is. In the corporate university of the (very near) future, Cultural Studies will find a welcome place provided for it. It has done international capitalism the favor of dismantling the disciplinary structure of the old bourgeois university; it has made reading a matter of technical competence in “discursive formations” and “signifying practices” across fields; it has rationalized and abstracted the traditional work of the arts and humanities, devaluing and dismissing them as the products of “elites”; it has given itself over to technical professionalization; it has aided and abetted in the flattening of differences in the culture as a whole; it has worked in such a way that its creations are inseparable from the marketing of popular culture in the mass media (how many Peewee Herman dolls? how many Star Wars action figures? how many Madonna albums? how many Simpsons videos? how many semiotically turned episodes of General Hospital?); and all of this it has done in the name of left critique! For capitalism, who needs friends like Reagan education and drug czar William Bennett when you have enemies like these? Constance Penley, professor of film studies, writes, “It is probably obvious to you from my tone here that I am, for the most part, completely gaga over…[Star Trek] fandom. It indeed represents the most radical and intriguing female appropriation of a mass-produced cultural product that I have ever seen. A friend of mine told me that I wasn’t really a fan of Star Trek, I was a fan of this fandom, and I think there is a great deal of truth in that.” (491) But what I would like to know is what difference this distinction makes. I don’t discount the idea that women can take Star Trek and appropriate it for their own lively purposes, and I say more power to them. What I question is Penley’s interest in their activities. Is she a participant? No, she’s a postmodern ethnologist visiting a subculture. What she does clearly do is promote a general interest in Star Trek that those interested in marketing its products can have little problem with. Sounds like a lot of product-licensing opportunities to them.[2]
As for the grating sounds that the Professors of Signs make when referring to Marx, or Queers, or feminism, who care? These sounds are entirely managed (literally, institutionalized) by academic culture, and they have next to no practical effects outside of that context. Talk about “false consciousness”!
The huge irony here is that what cultural conservatives like George Will fear most, that the values of a shared cultural tradition are being lost, has come true. But traditional culture has not been lost to the efforts of academic leftists. It has been lost to Will’s own beloved free market economy moving ever further into its international mode. It is capitalism that looks without pity on Will’s cultural sentimentality. What does Shakespeare matter to George Bush II? Hey, George Will, Bush doesn’t even like your precious Cubs! Wrigley Field? Fuck it! Sell it to the Japanese and build something in its place with lots of luxury boxes where corporate execs can munch sushi and watch Sosa launch homers. If nobody Stupid White Men (in Michael Moore’s endearing phrase) can afford to go to the game, who cares?
On the other side, the joy of Cultural Studies in its conquest of the humanities in academic America must come tempered by the understanding that it is not its leftism that allows it to win, but its unacknowledged complicity with the globalized corporate culture of the future.
My criticism of Cultural Studies is as much concerned with how it has been institutionalized, taken up into the daily practices of the Lumpenprofessoriat, as it is with specific canonical texts of Cultural Studies. How has the influence of Cultural Studies been lived in classrooms, seminars, dissertations, job presentations, and conferences? As Lisa Ruddick of the University of Chicago writes in the November 23, 2001, issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education,
After I finished my first book 11 years ago and was suddenly freed by tenure from the necessity of adhering to the critical norms of the moment, I became, disappointingly, paralyzed. I was in great conflict about continuing to observe certain intellectual rules that were a part of the dominant thinking—rules that I thought were very limiting but that I couldn’t challenge without courting disgrace….
I remember a particularly bad season when I struggled with an article on Ulysses. I was writing about Joyce’s insights into the touching human need to bury, burn, or otherwise take care of the bodies of the dead—an impulse that is universal…. Yet I was still afraid I’d be attacked for “essentializing”—for supposing that there are shared features that constitute the essence of being human.
Cultural studies has radically remade the professionalization of the study of literature, creating a new conformism in the process. Worse yet, it has undercut its own political premises of “political engagement.” The brawny lingo of “intervention” and “interrogation” are now not much more than respectful professional markers that cause no one anxiety, not in the dean’s office, not in the mayor’s office, not in the state legislature, not with the local congressional representative, and certainly not in the offices of CEOs and branch managers who now count on the technically literate and conceptually sophisticated graduates of these programs for the next generation of entry-level employees for USA.com. It doesn’t even create anxiety in English departments any longer, because most of the students of the New Critical period have gone off into that sweet good night of the academic pension. No. Cultural Studies is now safely institutionalized in the contemporary university of “excellence,” where administrators can refer to it as a “best practice” in reading.
Cultural Studies has always lived in danger of being seduced by its object, especially when that object was commercial popular culture (that great unresolved oxymoron) or, more recently, technology. Just at the moment that its critical gaze is set to reveal the Entertainment State or techno-rationalism, an intravenous drip-line is inserted directly into some subtle pleasure center in the critic. (It’s a part of the brain that’s shaped like Mr. Spock in silhouette.) Or perhaps the right metaphor is that the culture, like a sea urchin, has inserted its stomach into the critic and is dissolving her from the inside. “Cultural Studies demonstrates the social difference that theory can make,” says the brave critic. But now the aggressive edge of the critic softens as the urchin stomach does its work. Now the critic looks a little doe-eyed. Now she’s mumbling something about how cool virtual reality is. How American popular culture rocks. Finally, the critic asks for the little cute ET doll to cuddle with and sighs, “This is such an awesome site of resistance.”
Cultural Studies needs a good theme song, and I suggest Radiohead’s cunning “You and Whose Army,” in which the Holy Roman Empire is challenged to “come out if you think you can take us all.” Meanwhile, it sounds very much as if we’re all falling asleep or into a very deep and incontestable languor.
2.
I want to pursue a little further the effect of the growth of Cultural Studies in academia, especially in the context of the Culture Wars, and above all in that battleground referred to as the Western Canon, a battleground that Cultural Studies’ taste for identity politics and pop culture has claimed as its own. I think that what has happened in these so-called Culture Wars has been unfortunate, unnecessary, and destructive of the social and artistic health of the imagination. A review of the positions of the academic left and conservative traditionalists should reveal that the Culture Wars are a mere sideshow in relationship to the real action: the operations of the media-oriented Middle Mind. Taking sides in this pitched battle royal, the Great Canon Debate, the most recent Battle of the Books in which moderns fight it out with classics, is a fruitless diversion. Commitment to either side is an error, especially as the Middle Mind marches on, its truth on four hundred clear channels, coming soon in HDTV, wireless, broad-banded, and downloadable into every frontal lobe. (Just when we thought lobotomies were a thing of the past!) Neither side offers opportunity to the imagination. The academic left’s relentless rhetoric of “resistance” is couched in purely sociological terms that exclude the importance of the aesthetic. The traditional practices of the humanities, based in deep engagement with primary artistic texts and not abstract theoretical renderings, provided clear instances of art’s capacity for creating imaginative environments. Cut off from such an understanding of its history, the imagination dries up. On the other hand, the traditionalist’s call to our cultural legacy as a simple catalogue of perfections without contexts, distant and arid museum pieces, denies to the imagination any sense of how those earlier works might inform the work of the present. In any event, both tendencies are impoverishing, and it’s worth our while to see just how that’s so.
Ground Zero for the Culture Wars has been the so-called literary canon, a term originally used in order to account for what books are and what books are not part of the Bible. The Torah, or Pentateuch, is a canon. It is those five books and no others that make up the Old Testament. Canon is, without question, a loaded and probably very wrong concept to use in order to talk about literary or artistic works. (When exactly did we accept the idea that art needed a bible?) If we must, however, use this term, I think it behooves us to use it knowingly. The root of the word canon does not mean “those things which are properly included.” The root word (from the Greek, kanon)means a device for measuring what ought to go in whatever receptacle one has in mind. So, the canon is not really the list of included books, it is the principles (or, we might say, aesthetics) which allow for inclusion.
We seem somehow to have lost view of this etymology. The canon now is treated as if it were territory to be sacrificed for war reparations. “Okay, we the defeated forces of tradition agree to toss out old George Meredith (although we really sorta liked The Ordeal of Richard Feveral), and you can occupy his spot with Edith Wharton or Peewee Herman or whoever. Screw it. We give up.” But nary a word is said by either side about why it was appropriate in the first place for George Meredith to be in every Victorian anthology or why it is good and proper for Edith Wharton to take his place. (Henry James would have kicked them both out, and for very particular reasons.)
Mere “inclusion” in a canon in which there is no kanon, or measuring stick, is a victory about as interesting as inclusion in a “primetime fall lineup” of network television shows. It is a political victory, perhaps, but it allows in principle many kinds of stupidity. (Consider Amy Tan. Oh hell, consider The Simpsons. That’s greatness, right? But compared to what?!) It would be far better to do away with the notion of a canon and insist instead on a shared understanding of the qualities of what we have called beauty, ethics, and meaning—that which we would choose to be the most advanced edge of our human project (which is a long way from being done if it is ever to be done “well”; everything hangs on that “well”).
Now, none of this need imply that the social grievances of the canon-busters are not real. Sexism, racism, and homophobia are bloody real. The problem is that the very nature of the contest—competition for limited space within a canon, what Adorno called a “cultural museum,” is a tremendous victory for those who do not want art to be a destabilizing force. Canons stabilize. That’s about the only thing they do well. Like the Middle Mind, the canon is a strategy for managing potentially radical energy. Insofar as academic feminists have placed the force of their work on the “politics of representation” in a heretofore male-dominated cultural canon, they have betrayed the original radical energy and promise of feminism. Fortunately, this energy lives on in artworks that are mostly outside the university. Putting the four astonishingly transgressive novels of British writer Ann Quin[3] in a “canon” does them no service at all. Her novels or Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel or Pamela Zoline’s The Heat Death of the Universe are still alive as fictions if they can continue to speak “autonomously,” as Adorno put it, to readers. On the other hand, as correct as the politics of an Arundhati Roy may be (and I’m ready to say her politics are much more right than wrong), as an artist her work begs for the canon. Her work frees no one from artistic convention, and it offers conservative forces considerable consolation because it maintains meaning as a function of “content” rather than form. As a consequence, winning the Great Canon Debate with writers like Roy is to lose a much larger battle.
In my judgment, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital has said much of what I think needs to be said about the Great Canon Debate. His principal points seem to be that a) neither the side advocating the traditional canon nor the side representing the noncanonical understands the degree to which they participate in the construction of a “social imaginary” (in their depictions of, respectively, the traditional or the “repressed”); b) neither side quite recognizes how much they have in common (i.e., the assumption that cannons are about social “values”); c) neither side understands the degree to which their debate takes place in “an ever shrinking island within the university itself”; and d) neither side understands that other, larger social forces—the culture of Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern “performativity,” the technical literacy of the managerial class—have no stake and no interest in the debate. The professional managerial class has effectively devalued cultural literacy as a form of cultural capital and has replaced it with the needs of its own class: computer geeks to fix Y2K problems, for instance.[4]
Again, my interest in the canon debate has more to do with how it looks from the point of view of the one group involved in the production of the matter at hand but excluded from the debate: the artist, a practitioner involved in specific lineages of making certain kinds of things. The role of artists in this debate has been pretty much what the role of artists is in departments of English generally: idiot savant. So let me pose the question in the name of artists. What should an artist’s interest in the canon debate be?
To begin with, I think that the artist (you will excuse me for indulging in the construction of my own “social imaginary” here, as if there were only one perspective that could be said to be the artist’s and that I for unspecified reasons know) is very dubious about the function of a canon. The artist has no interest in the traditionalist’s “transmission of a legacy,” in part because anyone can see what a self-serving line of baloney that one is, especially when delivered by ideological hacks such as William Bennett. On the other hand, the artist has little sympathy for the “minority” position that counter-canons should displace the dominant canon in this absurd zero-sum game that we seem determined to play. This is so because the artist has little sympathy for arguments about art that don’t concern what is good, what is well done. The artist knows all too clearly what dull embarrassments can be made of mere political conviction or displays of virtue. For the artist, the “beautiful” is no mere idealist, essentialist premise; it is the necessity of every day’s work. Without it there is no work and there certainly is no art. What troubles literary artists in particular is the idea that the most attentive segment of their audience, the professional literary critic, is unconcerned with what it means to make something well.
And so, as I was thinking about this question, it occurred to me that Guillory’s book itself could provide insight into the problem, and could even reveal, perhaps, that the actions of scholars of both the left and the right speak louder than their positions. Because Guillory too is a maker of a particular sort of thing with its own lineage. So why would we say—as the panelists of the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association have concluded—that John Guillory’ Cultural Capital is a good book, a book to be distinguished from the lot of unpublishable dissertations(of which there are many) and even distinguished from the lot of publishable manuscripts that are in spite of that fact not particularly good books (there are a lot of these too)? Why is his work of a quality that he deserves a seat on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University and his book deserves to be published by the University of Chicago Press? Well, I read the book and I know why it’s a good book, and I’m not a scholar in comparative literature. It’s a good book because it’s penetrating. It quickly goes beyond the cant that you might not ever have known you knew was cant until you read his book, and his arguments are sustained by a steady flow of original ideas. In fact, this book is loaded with ideas, if you know what those are. “Intelligence,” like “beauty,” is a theoretically discredited “essence” which we nonetheless live by, and I mean live by in absolutely the most serious and consequential sense. To live by something is to stake your life on it.
Guillory’s book is an example of the qualities that ought to make something deserving of admission to a canon, if we must talk about canons, but which the debate over the canon doesn’t know how to talk about. Guillory’s work is in a tradition of literary, philosophical, and political analysis and argumentation that should be obscure to no one to whom that tradition is important. (How’s that for a tautology?) It is as a tradition so important, in fact, that I would call it not merely an intellectual tradition but an ongoing and repeatedly emphasized proposition for what it should mean to be a human being. It is itself the proposition that intellectual penetration, an ability to express complex thoughts, to perform marvelous cognitive feats, and to break open experience in new and powerful ways, are fundamental human values. It is through these qualities that we will recognize what we call “intelligence.”
For many centuries, frighteningly small, often embattled communities of human beings have been advancing this “imaginary” as that which the general culture ought to embrace because the culture ought to see that this sort of ability, this sort of performance is deserving of the notion of human capacity—that beleaguered capacity that the young Marx used to fret about, and upon which the rest of his powerful intellectual edifice is ethically balanced. But this doesn’t seem to me to be how, in the present moment, we engage a book like Guillory’s. We might agree with him, we might argue with his position, but we wouldn’t think to say that what Guillory has performed is in itself a part of the debate. I’m not even sure that the René Wellek Award committee would see this.
And so, in spite of the fact that the canon has been reduced to arguments about the fairness of who is represented and who is not, academics continue to make judgments about the “good,” whether that means grading student papers, writing book reviews, directing dissertations, making evaluations for publication, or selecting a book to be given an award. And one would like to hope that architects, builders of furniture, chefs, master gardeners, and other artists share the same regard for the “good” understood as the mastering and the moving forward of a specific tradition of human making. Only in this way is the world worthy of humans ultimately possible. This is something achieved only by individuals living in a world in which the imagination has real force.
Guillory quite comfortably accepts the assumptions of a particular kind of intellectual making as the premises by which he is willing to be judged. There is nothing unwise in this, either from my point of view or Guillory’s. What his book acknowledges, in a way that is so familiar to intellectuals that it is nearly invisible, is that it has as a perhaps occluded value (but a value which it invests with the whole force of its performance) a set of assumptions about what it means to do something well. This is a stance that artists understand thoroughly and critics seem to have forgotten in principle if not in act.
We come here to the reality that the artist has most at heart. Artists understand what Jacques Derrida calls their “closure” intimately. The artist’s closure is the accretion of individual art works, of techniques and of traditions that allow artists to work and create in their own turn. This is what allows them to know in their bones that there is a difference between doing-what-artist-do well and doing-what-artist-do poorly. It is this historical certainty in the bone that prompted Henry James to wish for the death of the dilettante. The trick, of course, is to know what sort of claim to make for this closure, whether it be the closure of the artist (beauty) or that of the intellectual (intelligence). What we must not say is that “making well” is related to timeless, transcendental qualities. It is not about the conservative principles of the enduring and unchanging characteristics of a “common culture” of the best that has been thought and said. Making well is really a commitment to the absurd, because of the thoroughly contingent and historical genealogy (as Nietzsche would put it) of artistic making. And what we are really saying because we continue to inhabit those traditions through our productive practices is that this is our social imaginary. This is where we make our wager. This—to borrow art critic Dave Hickey’s language—is where we should be trying to “win.” Wanting to win goes beyond “making.” Wanting to win reveals that the ultimate destination for artistic and intellectual making (in short, for the work of the imagination) is the proposing of an idea for what the human world should be.
For example, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music argued against the tradition of classical formalism in the name of a new understanding of personal suffering, of indignation at that suffering, and generally of the importance of the subjective. Their music argued that the individual should stand for something both as a matter of social justice and as the beginning of a modern spirituality that culminated in Sören Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion and the individual. I hope that none of us, even after the end of the metaphysics of the subject, would want to entirely unsay that old Mozartian thought, or fail to appreciate the world that made it possible. Mozart lived in an authoritarian and repressive world, and yet the work of the imagination moved his world forward in profound ways. Is our own world so much more repressive than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or so much better at controlling the work of the imagination that we cannot do something similar? Are we even capable of maintaining Mozart’s imaginative revolution in the face of the ever-advancing National Security State?
[1] Worse yet, this political/critical tendency has affected the thinking of artists themselves. As Julie Caniglia put it in her essay “57 Cultures and Nothing On” (Minneapolis City Pages, April 24, 1996), “The multiculturalism that appeared so revolutionary 10 years ago has curdled into a fractious politics of identity, resulting in a new and, for the most part, incredibly banal didacticism: work that ‘explores’ this personal issue or ‘documents’ that social problem, that ‘provokes’ the viewer regarding the artist’s identity, or ‘confronts’ the artist’s traumas (usually of childhood origins)….As art gets parsed into a multitude of niches based on identity, it follows that the standards for judging such work are lowered, eliminated, or qualified into irrelevance.”
[2] As of November 1, 2002, Accoutrements, a wholesale company that describes itself as “Outfitters of Popular Culture,” had sold 10,884 Sigmund Freud action figures, according to their Web site.
[3]
Berg, Three, Tripticks¸ and Passages, all published between 1964
and 1972. Quin died in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven.
[4] This last point is elaborated with great acuity by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins under the concept of the “university of excellence.” For Readings, the university is no longer the guarantor of a shared cultural tradition; it is, rather, the creator of manifold “excellences,” most of which are quite marketable, thank you.