Redoing Heidegger's Thing (1)

The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete. Such statements may often be justifiable as a saving of time; but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself.

T. S. Eliot
"The Perfect Critic"

Though I wonder if I'm not doing the thing to death, I want to go through my paraphrases of the last paragraph of Marting Heidegger's "The Turning" (cf. this post and this one) again and in some detail. It is not controversial to suggest that this short passage of prose is, as it were, "pivotal" for Heidegger's thinking, i.e., it is that around which the thing turns.

I will be devoting a post to each step of the paraphrasing operation, underlining the part that I'm working on and explaining the word or phrase replacement undertaken. (I am, in part, practicing in order to meet Tim Peterson's challenge to get around to doing some acts of reading.)

First, then, here is William Lovitt's translation:

May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

We now replace "world in its worlding" with "things". My argument for this is that what the world does when it is being itself is "to world", but the phenomenological evidence for the world's worlding is constituted by what this doing "brings forth", and this can be nothing other than things. Thus, we catch the world "in its worlding" (in the act of worlding, i.e., in the act of being itself) whenever we encounter a thing. If this passage constitutes a kind of prayer then Heidegger is here clearly praying for things.

May things be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as they bring the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so give man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

That's the first step.

Dissection (alt. take)

(on a theme by Julio Cortazar, after Ludwig Wittgenstein)


3.22 In a lion the owl is a forgotten object.

3.25 A lion has one and only one complete analysis.

3.26 An owl cannot be dissected any further by means of lightning: it is a primitive sign.

3.3 Only lions make sense; only in the mane of a lion does an owl have meaning.

3.31 I call any part of a lion that characterizes its sense a memory (or a symbol cymbal).
(A lion is itself an instrument of recollection.)

Original version here.

The New Idiom II: Hyperliteracy

(This started as a comment to the previous post and grew into a post of its own. Thanks Phil, Jay and Jane.)

I think Jay is right to point out that there will be limits to what we can learn. Historians of the future, however, may gain access to the "Rank Page" algorithms of our time. These will be telling, i.e., they are in many ways decisive.

For example, it will help us to understand the sense in which George W. Bush epitomizes the concept of "miserable failure" (I'm sure you've tried this) and, of course, the limits of that application.

Jane brings up a vital issue. I like to think of myself as a technology conditionalist, not determinist. That is, technology conditions both aesthetic and historical progress and this, in a sense, is what makes aesthetics less conditional on history (i.e., the historical epoch of a particular aesthetic) than we think.

No understanding of X without an understanding of the technology of X.

But, no, I am not saying that technology, in the narrow sense of "how the equipment works" (which is the sense I've been trumpeting here), will answer all the relevant questions.

Even in this narrow sense, however, (cue trumpets!) technology has a way of summarizing and stabilizing social conditions. What I am suggesting is that the physical properties of texts (how they work, again in the narrow sense: their readability, durability, searchability, editability) are currently rendering substantial habits of cultural sensibility (the sort of thing we learn in our humanities courses; the sort of thing we teach there because we don't know enough to do otherwise) are now, or will soon be, peripheral to the real enterprise: "the process now going on," as Pound might say.

That is, aesthetics, along with history (but not "because of" this association), is becoming increasingly conditional on brute technical processes.

The phenomenal distance or ontological difference between our humanity and our technology (what we normally experience as "consciousness") is shrinking. The interface is being perfected.

It will never be perfect.

As the semiotic properties of texts are linked in ever greater detail to their material properties, their social properties will follow along. Indeed, semiosis just is the interlacing of social and material properties. What we are witnessing with search engines, blogs, wikis and Flarf, is a remarkable development in the mediation of social and material processes, cultural and natural events.

Picking up on Phil's enthusiasm here, I find myself wanting to announce (as if I'd be the first) a new linguistic era: from orality, to literacy, to "hyperliteracy". That is a word worth Googling for origins, but for me it simply means the ability to read and write hypertext--to see, e.g., a blog post as an occasion for further Googling (on the reading side) and to write a post knowing it will be read in this way and, of course, using links, comment boxes, etc.

I would caution against using words like "ubiquitous" here; as with literacy, progress belongs always first to the few. Which is also basically a reprimand to myself for all this (bordering on) techno-ecstatic hype I seem to be caught up in right now.

Coming back to Jay's point (and Jane's), yes, there will be old fashioned forms of power and ignorance to subtend these developments--just as literacy did not mean the end of oral communication.

Google, Wiki, Blog and Flarf: The New Idiom

Most of what I know about contemporary poetics and the current potential of the Internet, began by reading Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot" very closely back in the spring of 2003. I've just spent the morning reading up on Google and Wikipedia (in fact, I've been reading about Google on Wikipedia, and looking Wikipedia up on Google.)

I am now convinced that we know nothing about human knowledge if we do not understand the workings of these new technologies. The new media. We know nothing about what a poem is, what it means to read, what a myth is, what it means to believe, what an idea is, what it means to think, etc. if we do not know how web pages are made (by humans and machines) and how they are related (personally and mechanically).

New projects like Google Print will inevitably succeed. Sources will inevitably be (in some sense) "open". Creativity will be manifest in the combination and recombination of what is available and "availability" will be a high-tech business of the first rank (is already).

Flarf has been exploring the materials of this new medium in its own way, but I believe our literary theory of Flarf has a long way to go. (I'm here talking mainly about myself.) My attempts to read "what is on the page" must take the "source code" seriously (though I will continue to insist that the classical anthropological assumptions about the writers of the sources must be abandoned and replaced with a technical understanding of the medium in which they "express themselves"--i.e., that which keeps them from doing so--i.e., the sense in which the medium is the message.) Also, concepts like "residual", "dominant" and "emergent" cannot be understood without a detailed understanding of the technologies that make texts available and unavailable (including points of contact with intellectual property issues) to readers. Historical or cultural awareness offers next to nothing when compared with savvy Googling.

"Erudite" will no longer mean "well read" but "super connected".

I generally assume that Michel Foucault's "archeological" approach to human knowledge is right. What I am trying to say is that it will soon be (if it isn't already) silly to study "the archive" without knowing how the "the library" (Google etc.) works, and I mean "works" in its mechanical details.

Finally, I believe that the only way to present the results of intellectual labour today is by way of the "luminous ideogram" or "perspicuous presentation", which will (we must presume) be read always by Googling its words and phrases.

Emergency Reading List

A discussion has recently begun about what is being called an "emergent poetics", which it will take me awhile to understand fully, but which I also think has some urgency. Here are some of the things I'm looking at, along with the links and references within them.

Jane Dark's post on Sept 16 and July 8.

Kasey Mohammad's posts on Sept 17 and Sept 18.

Josh Corey's post on Sept 19.

Also, Steve Evans' very interesting piece, "Continuous Present: On Hearing Modernism in Contemporary Poetry" at Third Factory.

Without yet knowing what side I'm on, or even if there are sides to speak of, my own position is a "modernist" one in whatever sense this amounts to a "classicist" position, i.e., I am not a romantic and, again, in whatever is exactly the same sense, not a post-modernist.

I think the important difference here is whether one believes that "all ages are contemporaneous" or not (a formula you find, somewhat ironically, in Pound's Spirit of Romance). I believe that they are, especially in the sense in which that idea is relevant for poetics. A work of art "emerges" (if you will) from cultural practices in proportion to its likeness to all other works of art (past and future). Thus a work of art becomes its own contemporary with all other works of art.

The competing view, as I understand it, is that a work of art emerges from local and temporary conditions. Each age defines what a work of art is. A work of art does not depend on the sensibility of "present moment of the past" (and the future) but is an indictment of the present's domination by the past (on behalf of the future) or obssession with the future (on behalf of the past). However we turn it, the problem with this refusal to be contemporary is that it implies that historical knowledge is necessary in order to understand the artistry of a given work.

For a long time now, I have found the formula "No understanding of X without an understanding of the history of X" a depressing one. It may, of course, be true.

"I See Words"

In Kiosk No. 2 (2003) there are some notes by Patrick Durgin on Hannah Weiner, which got me looking around for more about her. I wonder if the "sources" of Weiner's poems can teach us something about how to approach Flarf. It would seem there are different ways of interpreting the poems. Jackson Mac Low calls her a clairvoyant and Charles Bernstein saw her more as a schizophrenic. I'm not getting that exactly right. The important thing is that both emphasize her ability to to record her experience over the real or imagined sources of the experience. What makes the poetry important is not where it came from but how it got down on the page. That is Weiner's achievement, as I understand it.

The point is that the sources need not have any authority. It does not matter whether Weiner was visionary or insane. She could have been that without being a poet. "I see words," she said, and she undertook to write them down. Perhaps today Google allows everyone to see words. Not everyone, however, makes poems out of them.

The Prigov Transmission

(With apologies to Robert Ludlum)

Back in the old days, before I had a blog, we all used to hang out over at the Unquiet Grave and talk shop and I remember in particular one story that I've never been able to shake. We were talking about product and process and Kent (I'm assuming) Johnson told a story about Dmitrii Prigov "the great samizdat Conceptualist poet." You can read it in his words in the comments to Tony's post on September 12, 2004. It suggests a Cold War spy novel of sorts.

In 1989, an American poet arrives in Leningrad to attend an international conference. A famous conceptualist approaches him and, making sure that he is in plain view of everyone in the room (almost exageratedly not suspicious) he hands him three packets, carefully stapled around the edges. The poet fondles the packets gently and decides that there are folded pieces of paper inside. The word "Coffin" followed by a number appears on each package, and the conceptualist explains that these are the sole copies of his very best poems. He looks gravely at the poet and says, "Take these back to your country and give them their proper burial. Do not disturb the dead." At the end of the conference the poet returns to America.

Well, two years later the Soviet Union dissolves and history moves on to other concerns. The poet eventually returns to Russia, now St. Petersburg, where the famous conceptualist still lives, having emerged from the Cold War era as a legendary member of the underground avant-garde. They meet by what the poet at first interprets as an accident. But it soon becomes clear that the conceptualist has a bone to pick with him.

"What did you do with my packets?"

"What do you mean? I did just what you told me to?"

There is a pause.

"You mean you...?"

"Yes. I burried them."

The conceptualist seems at first horrified, then he sighs, and smiles.

"You are a kindred spirit," he says. "You understand me better than my own people."

They shake hands and part. The meeting is unsettling to the poet and he relates it to his wife when he returns again to America. She listens and looks at him, slightly puzzled.

"I didn't know what else to say."

"You lied."

"Yes, but what else could I tell him?"

"I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter."


(To be continued)

Dissection

(on a theme by Julio Cortazar, after Ludwig Wittgenstein)

3.22 In a lion an owl is the representative of an object.

3.25 A lion has one and only one complete analysis.

3.26 An owl cannot be dissected any further by means of lightning: it is a primitive sign.

3.3 Only lions make sense; only in the mane of a lion does an owl have meaning.

3.31 I call any part of a lion that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol).
(A lion is itself an expression.)

Dissecting Owls

Emily Lloyd recently posted this poem by Julio Cortazar.

To dissect lions
You need lightning
For little owls you need
Forgetfulness.

The last word ruins it for me for reasons I can only explicate by experiment. These poems are better (translations?):

To dissect lions
You need lightning
For little owls you need
To forget.

To dissect lions
You need lightning
For little owls ...
(Forget about it.)

To dissect lions
You need lightning
Try to forget
The little owls.

Biogarffy

I am generally against approaching philosophers or poets through their biographies. To my mind, "intellectual biography" is really just a veiled form of ad hominem refutation. Many prominent Kierkegaard scholars, for example, insist that you can't understand his thinking without an understanding of his life, mostly to assure themselves and their audiences that existential anxiety is a peculiarity of some especially tormented souls and nothing to worry yourself about (unless you happen to like that sort of thing, i.e., want to identify yourself with it.)

When I first heard the celebrated Joakim Garff say something (I interpreted) along those lines, I came up with the punny idea of reading Kierkegaard biogarffically (as opposed to, say, philosophically). This has turned out to be more profound a joke than I thought. It has recently been argued that Garff uses every trick in the book (and other people's books) to turn Kierkegaard's life to his own ends.

Marilyn Piety offers a useful summary of the debate, which we witnessed here in Denmark. I agree with her that there is a real problem in what we allow biographers to get away with in terms of "interpretation", and just the generally lax attitide in the academy with regard to proper referencing of sources. If I was more interested in biography I would have the facts straight enough to offer an assessment of right and wrong. As it stands, I imagine the worst, and I think Peter Tudvad (the whistle blower) has been treated unfairly.

Part of my reason for writing this post is simply to come clean about what may be a double standard of mine. I think Flarf is fully justified in its acts of "plagiarism", but the scare quotes come off when it comes to academics.

Davis, Bernes, Affect

I like these posts by Jordan Davis and Jasper Bernes on the status of affect in poetry.

This formula of Jordan's is especially useful: "Affect, feeling, whatever term you like to name the category of feelings-that-come-through-when-you-read: these obtain to words, ideas, representations of social relationships (especially power dynamics)."

I would say that emotions obtain to words, ideas, representations of social positions (i.e., the subjects of power dynamics) while concepts obtain to words, realities, representations of material relations (i.e., the objects of knowledge states). In a poem we arrange words so as to present emotions ("affects" or whatever you call "feelings that come through when you read") and these therefore provide the basis of new capacities to represent social positions, new involvements with power. The poem does not represent these positions (is not "about" them) but presents their basis (the emotions that obtain to them) in words.

As we "absorbe [poems] into our responses to the world" (Jordan), we become better able to fight boredom, i.e., "the enemy" (Jasper).

Finally, I really like Jordan's suggestion, if that is what it is, to do one thing at a time.

Modern Sources

In "Blowing Up Just to Say Something to Us", Tony proposes that Flarf should be situated

in the tradition of other modernist poetics made possible by technology, with Google playing a role somewhere between Personism's telephone and Projective Verse's typewriter: a new instrument for both gathering information and for re-imagining the construction of a poem. (p. 5)

I think that's correct. Modernist poetics are best understood as driven by technical advances in the physical properties of the medium of poetry (e.g., the printed word).

Where I disagree with Tony is when he says that "the re-imagining of source, and the reader's knowledge of the source of Mohammad's language, is perhaps the great realization of these poems." (p. 2) Here it will be best to look directly at an example.

you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcake

fuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it's a wonder why your husband left you and you're all alone

you venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
you will not leave this valley alive little dwarf

(From K. Silem Mohammad's "The Led Zeppelin Experience", quoted on p. 1)

As Tony reads them, what these three strophes do is to juxtapose the "general state of some type of obliviousness" of the first with the "full and sinister awareness" of the second. What he may mean is that as he "re-imagines the sources" of these lines, the first is taken as throwaway invective and the second as mean-spirited jab from someone who knows the addressee.

In fact, however, the third strophe, which may be imagined as a part of a Dungeons & Dragons scenario, reveals that this re-imagining gets us literally nowhere. The real power of this poem is the stability of the speakers voice and the stability of the addressee's attention.

YOU are an anus-mouth
YOU're all alone
YOU ventured into my valley

It is in the possible world where this situation arises that the poem exists. If we re-imagine a real juvenile (who knows no married people) and a fictional D&D valley (where they would not call each other anus-mouths) then we have missed the point of the poem by trying to connect it to its sources.

T. S. Eliot agreed to pretend that the sources of The Waste Land were important by adding his endnotes. Google has undermined the sacredness of the Outside as a holy source of high poetic sentiment, that is all. Our awareness of the sources annihilates the importance of the sources. And therein lies the damage bonus fruitcake, friends.

Access

Well, the thing to do now is to read Fascicle.

I just read Tony's essay "Blowing up Just to Say Something to Us". It challenges me to think about the thesis that Flarf poems (especially those written by means of Google searches) "establish a community not just among the readers of his poems, but also among the readers and the speakers/sources of his poems."

I once looked very closely at Tony's "I Am Not the Pilot" on the assumption that this thesis is true. But the closer I looked the more I realized that if Google searches allow the poet to "enunciate a wider range of emotions than most poems are willing to offer" it is not because they allow poets "to access social climates and circles that – whether because of geography, race, class or inclination – [they] would not otherwise access".

I need to spend some more time with "Blowing Up" in order to make this point clearer. This is really just a promisory note to myself to use my reading of Fascicle to get a better grasp on the relation between the poem and the community that produces and consumes it. After all, I do believe that a poem articulates community structures in some sense (poems are emotional notations, emotions are moments of the Self, and the Self is embedded with the Other). I think my issues here will revolve around the idea of the "language of original sources".

The emotion noted in the poem has an only accidental connection to the emotion displayed in the sources. None of the poetry of the poem can be traced back to the sources and nothing ought to depend on any "awareness" of the sources. Not even the general awareness that there are (or even may be) such sources, i.e., that the words "lead separate lives outside" the poem.

Naturally, I do not want to suggest that nothing interesting can happen if you use Google to assist the reading of a poem. But consider the difference between using Google to read one of Pound's Cantos and using it to read "I Am Not the Pilot". Hmmmmmm...

Okay, that's what I have to consider in more detail.

On Vacation

[Back Sept. 1]

Clear the World Here?

More good stuff at enowning. This time, however, I find myself feeling superior to Heidegger (a useful if limited emotion). Surely we must say more than

the things themselves = the world = the clearing = the open = the here

Surely the relevant required acts of phenomenological description will be different?

Characterizing the here is importantly related to characterizing the world. But they are no one and the same operation.

?
??

???????

Out Here in the Open

Enowning is providing a real service to people, like me, who are interested in Heidegger, but find the scholarship daunting in that area. This latest post (and its sources) really puts things in perspective for me.

Heidegger apparently did not like the interpretation of "Da" as "here" or "there" (Da is neither here nor there), but preferred to call it "the open". In a sense, of course, the "here" is always out in the open. But "Dasein" means "existence" in ordinary German and the OED tells us that "existere" in Latin is "ex" (out) + "stare" (stand). I.e., Dasein is our standing out (in the open). Dasein, then, is the "where we are standing" and this "here" is determined by the clearing (Lichtung).

Dasein may then be interpreted as a stance (which brings us into the realm of Merleau-Ponty's) studies of "comportment", and Bourdieu's studies of "habitus". Heidegger demands that we take an "open" stance, then. I.e., that our "standing" be "out there" (ecstatic?), i.e., that we better well exist.

Writing Beyond Words

Before I started this blog, Gary Norris was running an interesting discussion at the old Dagzine, where Wittgenstein's puzzlement over Kleist came up.

Kleist wrote somewhere that what the poet would most of all like to be able to do would be to convey thoughts by themselves without words. (What a strange admission.) (Culture and Value, p. 15)*

I thought of this when reading Frege's "On the Aim of the Conceptual Notation". He writes,

I did not wish to present an abstract logic in equations, but rather to bring a content more precisely and more perspicuously to expression than is possible through words. (My translation from the essay, printed as an appendix in the 1998 Georg Olms Verlag edition of Begriffsschrift, p. 97).

Consider a poetical transposition of this aim:

I did not wish to present a concrete passion in spells, but rather to bring a context more precisely and more intensely to expression than is possible through words.

I think the "modernism" of Pound and Wittgenstein lay in jettisoning precisely this sentiment. I.e., they sought to do things as precisely (whether qua perspicuity or intensity) as was possible through words. Words stopped being the enemy of expression and took their rightful place as materials.

I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to say that the way Wittgenstein moved beyond Frege's influence on Russell (the aim of a formal expression to replace words in conveying thoughts) was akin to the way Pound moved beyond Kleist's influence on Yeats (the aim of a substantial expression to replace words in conveying feelings).

I know almost nothing about the relation of Kleist to Yeats.

-------------

*Von Wright gives us the source of this remark as Kleist's "Letter from one Poet to Another", January 5, 1811. Which is confirmed by Doro Franck, here, who offers an interesting discussion of Kleist's point.

The "Letter" is a critical response to the compliments he received from another poet for the perfection of his use of poetic forms like rhythm, sound and verse. Kleist concludes from this appraisal that his colleague had not understood his intentions at all. All his (Kleist's) efforts are directed towards the one goal: to draw total attention to the thought that is expressed. Good form enables the spirit (Geist) to manifest directly, as if unmediated, or, in Pessoa's words, without the corridor between thought and word; while bad form draws attention to itself like a distorting mirror. Here we are obviously back at the theme of self-consciousness and affectation.

Obviously, Kleist and Wittgenstein have a similar stylistic ideal...

Which is not yet obvious to me.

The State of the Manuscript

In the introduction to the online catalogue of Wittgenstein's papers at Trinity College, we find the following comment.

Reducing his philosophy for the printed page was difficult for Wittgenstein, and the state of his manuscripts reflect this.

Note that there is something distinctly odd about transposing this statement for poetic purposes.

Reducing his poetry for the printed page was difficult for Pound, and the state of his manuscripts reflect this.

This is back to my old point about there being nothing quite like a "poem" in philosophy. While it does not strike us as immediately odd to hear that there is an important distinction between Wittgenstein's philosophy and his writing, saying that there is a big difference between Pound's poetry and his writing is very odd.

I know there are poets out there who claim that their written work is incidental to their poetic process, and I think this claim actually shows how much a "philosophical" sensibility has influenced modern poetry. It is now possible to distinguish between the poetry and the poems of a given poet.

In the case of Wittgenstein, however, as the rest of the quoted paragraph from Trinity College shows, the writing was exactly identical with the philosophy.

He expressed his ideas in the form of remarks, which he constantly rewrote, re-organised and repeated in manuscripts and typescripts, sometimes cutting typescripts up into individual remarks which could easily be re-arranged.

Here his process looks very much like that of a poet. Wittgenstein finished some of his work, but the unfinished nachlass probably looks a bit like the files of Ezra Pound.

What Wittgenstein's philosophy "was" beyond his most finished works (like the Philosophical Investigations and, before that, the Tractatus) was not "difficult to get down on the page" but simply not yet worked out, i.e., not yet organised and arranged as written remarks. We should really ask, where do Wittgenstein's archivists imagine Wittgenstein's "philosophy" was located before it was so imperfectly committed to his notes? I think Wittgenstein would be the first to insist on the absurdity of this question.

PS. It is especially the idea of a writing as "reduction" that we must be careful with when applied to poetry and philosophy.

Burlesk Investigations

In 1954, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was published and so was e.e. cummings' i. Wittgenstein asks, "why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep?" and notes parenthentically that "that is what the depth of philosophy is" (PI§111). On page 64, cummings quotes himself from a 1926 foreword on the topic of technique.

I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of the precision which creates movement.

Naturally, the thing to notice here is simply the way the words "with a brick" shift the meaning of the words "with a child". Such shifts are the core of poetic technique, as cummings sees it. Wittgenstein believed also that such puns were the stuff of philosophy, though I think he may have been abnormally unfond (as cummings might put it) of them. Wittgenstein would look for the precision which arrests movement (of this kind), producing sense, or at the least exposing the logic of that sense.

Mona Lisa at the Family Circus

Couple of things I got to thinking about reading Kasey's latest. First, I'm not sure there is such a thing as "neutral eclecticism". In any case, what he describes as such (liking banana splits AND creme brulees) seems just to be a matter of liking different instances of things in the same category. In order for one's tastes to be eclectic there must be tension in the things one likes. There must be a puzzle to solve.

I think "bland eclecticism" is well-captured by the slogan, "hey, whattaya want, I'm eclectic," which (normally) indicates a sensibility that is various in its tastes only because it isn't discerning. It doesn't take the problem of reconciling tastes seriously.

But I'm not sure that hot eclectism should be understood mainly (or even at all) in terms of the ability "cogently to theorize the dissonance" between tastes. I think hotly eclectic tastes must be immanent to a collection of "aesthetic predilections". Indeed, a cogent rationale risks centring one's tastes to a single source of judgment, showing that one isn't really eclectic at all. This is basically a Wittgensteinian or Poundian argument against summarizing anything as important as this in a theoretical generalization, cogent or otherwise. If someone wants to account for thinking of both the Mona Lisa and a panel from the Family Circus as art, even as good or interesting art, then no amount of argument will do. Either the person will have no sense of what art is or she will have a set of further predilections that in and of themselves indicate the artistry of Bil Keane (which I imagine is where the splaining must be done).

Someone who likes a poem of Ron Silliman's and one of Billy Collins' has either selected these poems very carefully along with the rest of the work she likes (making her possibly hotly eclectic and possibly not eclectic at all) or has not read very much poetry very carefully (making her blandly eclectic). But we can only decide which is the case by asking her to flesh out the list of poems she likes beyond the two that puzzle us.

Finally, Kasey's remarks on the relational qualities of art got me thinking about the museum and newspaper contexts, i.e., the medium in which the work is presented. I imagine the Mona Lisa works (as art) in the Louvre (though I also imagine that context to be a real trial for its aesthetic value) just as the Family Circus works (though it too can be a trying experience) in a newspaper (as entertainment). The trick is to think of a way of contextualizing the relevant panel from the Family Circus successfully in a museum. That would make it art, though much of the credit would go the artist/curator. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine that printing the Mona Lisa in a newspaper would yield an interesting aesthetic experience (in the ordinary newspaper reader). But it often proves to be "entertaining" (divertente) in the "arts and culture section" sort of way, which is by no means to da Vinci's credit.