The Politics of Stupidity, or: The Prescience of Pierre Bourdieu

In the last years of his life, Pierre Bourdieu turned with increasing urgency to political questions.  Seeing in globalization an ever-greater concentration of all forms of capital—financial, educational, symbolic, and so forth—he called for a true internationalism, a set of reforms at the European and, ultimately, global level to rein in the forces that would reduce everything to a commodity, and render up all commodities into the hands of the few. Speaking to an audience of students in Berlin in June of 2000, he said a few words about the nature of the emerging global elite that resonate particularly well with today’s grim political picture. Those words go a long way toward explaining the nature of the kind of resentful populism—and in some cases, fascism—that we see rising around us.

He speaks of the unequal distribution of cultural capital, including the kinds of capital (advanced educational degrees, international travel, familiarity with the keywords of prestige fields like economics or the sciences, readership of intellectually challenging books and media, etc.) amassed by the elites of the emerging global economy. To be clear: this is an elite broadly conceived—not merely the 1% we railed against at Occupy, but the professional and managerial classes.  I, and most of those reading likely to be reading this, are members of that class, whether we care to admit it or not.

The ruling class no doubt owes its extraordinary arrogance to the fact that, being endowed with very high cultural capital (most obviously of academic origin, but also nonacademic), it feels perfectly justified in existing as it currently exists… The educational diploma is not merely a mark of academic distinction: it is perceived as a warrant of natural intelligence, of giftedness.  Thus the “new economy” has all the characteristics to appear as the “brave new world.”  It is global and those who dominate it are often international, polyglot, and polycultural (by opposition to the locals, the “national” or “parochial”). It is immaterial or “weightless”: it produces and circulates weightless objects such as information and cultural products.  As a consequence, it can appear as an economy of intelligence, reserved for “intelligent” people (which earns it the sympathy of “hip” journalists and executives).  Sociodicy [the means by which a society justifies itself] here takes the form of a racism of intelligence: today’s poor are not poor, as they were thought to be in the nineteenth century, because they are improvident, spendthrift, intemperate, etc.—by opposition to the “deserving poor”—but because they are dumb, intellectually incapable, idiotic. In short, in academic terms “they got their just deserts”…

There’s a kind of smugness, Bourdieu says, to the widely-held belief among elites that we got here because we’re smart, and others ended up where they are because they’re stupid—a smugness based on an almost willful blindness to the barriers to the development of human capital faced by the majority of the population, and a on a discrediting of forms of knowledge other than those held in esteem by elites.  But so what? Well, there’s this, when Bourdieu continues:

The victims of such a powerful mode of domination… are very deeply damaged in their self-image. And it is no doubt through this mediation that a relationship—most often unnoticed or misunderstood—can be traced between neoliberal politics [the deregulated, financialized, and internationalized world of globalization] and certain fascistoid forms of revolt among those who, feeling excluded from access to intelligence and modernity, are driven to take refuge in the national and nationalism.

Tell people they're stupid—even if it's not spoken except through a thousand micro-aggressions—and they won't forget it.  “America first,” they'll say, or “France for the French,” or "Build the wall!" or “Brexit!” They'll simmer with resentment, feeling that they are looked down on by a worldly elite as nothing more than idiots, or a basket of deplorables.  And here they are, angry to the point of violence, giving us (as Michael Moore put it) "the biggest fuck you in human history." They've been had, of course—preyed on and manipulated by the cynical people who have taken power and seek only their own personal ends. We are right to oppose them, but we would be wrong to say we did not, to some degree, provoke their rage.

Seeing Red with Nietzsche

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Kenneth Goldsmith, or The Art of Being Talked About

I've been thinking a bit about Kenneth Goldsmith lately, in part because he seems to have become ubiquitous in some poetry circles, and in part because he's an engaging guy.  I suppose my thoughts could best be summarized as follows:

1.  I really like Ubuweb, and I'm glad Goldsmith put it together.  It's one of the marvels of the poetry-oriented Internet.  Long may it wave!

2.  I like thinking about the idea of Goldsmith's books.  I don't like reading them, but as he himself has said in "Being Boring," reading them isn't really the point.  They're a bit more like Duchamp's "Fountain," which exists less to be looked at than to spark thought and to be discussed.

3.  I like that Goldsmith's career has a real trajectory to it, a series of changes that often seem to have come out of what he's discovered along the way.  He began as a sculptor, started carving books onto wood, got interested in text, and then became fascinated by the bulk of existing text, and the various means of manipulating or re-presenting that text.  This is cool.  Too many otherwise admirable artists and writers get caught in their own early idiom and fail to evolve significantly.  Sometimes this means decline, sometimes it just means they keep making the same piece, often a very good piece, over and over (sometimes I feel this is what happened to Charles Simic).  It's good to see someone really take a journey, which is, after all, what the word "career" means.

4.  There are points, especially lately, where Goldsmith seems to be going in a direction that (like a lot of what he does) has been taken before in the art world, but has been less common in the poetry world.  It's a turn to the idea of the career itself as the most important medium of the art.  There are plenty of ways to do this, but the way Goldsmith seems to be going is one that people who are critical of the apparatus of fame, the market in cultural capital and symbolic goods, and the construction of status might find disconcerting.  I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on it as a part of his journey, but (for what it's worth) it's a direction I personally see as a bit — what? — I suppose "destined to produce unhappiness for those who take it" is the phrase.

5.  Sometimes I find a bit of an Oedipal urge in him, a desire to dismiss the old kings so that the new, young king (let's call him Goldsmith) can ascend the throne.  This sort of thing is pretty common among poets, including some of the truly great ones: when Robert Lowell died John Berryman is said to have asked "who's number one now?" with hopes that it would be him [Update: I've got this wrong — Berryman died before Lowell] [Further update: the massively erudite John Beer tells me I've conflated two Berryman anecdotes: the "who's number one" comment came with the death of Frost, not Lowell, but when Berryman committed suicide he left a note for Lowell saying "your move"].  The whole Oedipal trip runs counter to my own semi-Deleuzian anti-Oedipal beliefs, but that's neither here nor there, really.

6.  I think, too, that Goldsmith often seems to believe in a linear, progressive version of artistic and literary history, a view that many people in the art world feel has been discredited — and a view that I think of in several ways: as something tied up with the Oedipal desire for dominance; as something that falsifies the rich pluralism of artistic and literary production; as something linked to the logic of the marketplace; and as something that, ultimately, isn't good for poetry.  I should note that there are moments in Goldsmith's writing in which he seems to believe something else entirely.

7.  I consider myself someone who disagrees with an idea of artistic progress that is implicit in many of Goldsmith's public statements.  I don't share what I take to be his Oedipal desire for prominence, but I don't think that desire makes him less interesting or valuable.  As for the embracing of the career as a medium for art: I like it.  But I'm a bit skittish about the particular form his embrace of the medium seems to take.  None of this means that I'm not interested in what he's doing.  Although he's claimed to be the most boring writer ever to have lived, he's not boring as a presence.  He's got the art of being talked about down, people.  Down.

*

So, that said, let's start with a recent, mild-mannered quote from Goldsmith's piece about poetic reputations called "The Bounce and the Roll" that he wrote for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog: "... we might have turned a corner where, in fact, for many people, the marketing, accounting, and management of their career [sic] has actually become their art."  Goldsmith says he's thinking about an unnamed poet friend whose interest in poetry is slowly being supplanted by an interest in the online signifiers of reputation (sales rankings, Google alerts about his books, etc.), and for whom the cultivation and management of reputation and image "may actually be his new literary production."  Nothing seems to be at issue but the possible actions of an unnamed poet.  But if we look around at other statement's Goldsmith has made, we get a sense that this sort of thing has been on his mind a lot, and not just when it crops up in other people's lives.  There's some reason to believe he's talking not only about others, but about the way his own interests have been heading.

Firstly, Goldsmith has long been interested in the idea that the actual act of reading his works is of less importance than the idea of the book — that the writing is less important than the concept, and the conversations one might have about that concept.  As he put it in the 2004 lecture "Being Boring," "You don't really need to read my books to get the idea of what they're like: you just need to know the general concept."  Or again, in the same lecture, "I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence... [one can] know what I do without ever having read a word of it."  I suppose there are some people in the poetry world who'd be made angry by this kind of gesture, but it's pretty old-school in the art world from which Goldsmith comes.  Lucy Lippard called it "the dematerialization of the art object" her book Six Years, which treated the period from 1966-1972.  Why is this relevant here, where I'm trying to speculate about a turn to the career itself as the main object of Goldsmith's concern?  Because it shows us how Goldsmith distances himself from the idea of the text-as-art-object, and moves toward the effect, the stimulation of thought, and the generation of conversation about the object as the real medium of his art.  It's not quite the artist's career as the artist's medium, but it is a step in that direction.

Secondly, just two days after the publication of "The Roll and the Bounce," Goldsmith published another piece in Harriet, one in which he classed himself in the group of those who, like his unnamed poet-friend, obsessed over their online reputation.  The piece, called "Death of a Kingmaker," took on the matter of the way Ron Silliman's blog has changed over the years, and gave us an image of Goldsmith and others "oxygen-starved" for attention, going to Silliman's blog and "checking each morning to see whether something we were involved with got a mention." It hasn't just been the anonymous poet-friend who's been obsessing about reputation.  Goldsmith has too (he claims this has been a condition endemic in the poetry world, but that hasn't been my experience — though I hang out with a different crowd).

Has this obsession resulted in an active turn to the career as the medium itself?  Well, that would be consistent with both Goldsmith's past and his trajectory.  Goldsmith has, after all, worked closely on Andy Warhol, even editing I'll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews with Wayne Kostenbaum and Reva Wolf.  He's sympathetic (in a way more stick-in-the-mud poetry types aren't) to that great Warhol move, the subordination of the created work to the performing self.  Warhol was, of course, a printmaker and a filmmaker and all the rest, but in some profound sense these things were only subordinate parts of a larger work, the creation and performance of Andy Warhol.  His real media were less printmaking and filmmaking than the art-world and the attention economy, which he worked masterfully.  Goldsmith talks informatively and sympathetically about some of this in a variety of contexts, including "The Bounce and the Roll," where he compares his anonymous friend to Warhol, who, "like a marketer crunching his numbers" was obsessed with his own publicity and with "the quantification of taste."  In addition to this interest in Warhol as a self-fashioner, working the art scene around him as an artistic medium and creating "Andy Warhol, Art Star" as his main work, Goldsmith certainly seems to have taken the bull of reputation by the horns: if anyone is ubiquitous in the little world of poetry lately, it's him.  And he seems even to have influenced the way the history of poetry is perceived: Marjorie Perloff's recent study Unoriginal Genius might almost have been subtitled "a useable past for those who would study Kenneth Goldsmith," in that it presents a previously-untraced history of textual manipulation and appropriation that seems to culminate in Goldsmith's Traffic.  He's not writing sonnets, people, he's being a poetry presence.  Or so it seems from where I've been sitting.

The turn to the career-as-medium is neither here nor there in itself.  I mean, one of the interesting things that happened in art in the twentieth century was the opening up of the category of legitimate media to include, hypothetically, anything: stone, glass, clay, paint, murals, earthworks, video, performance, piles of junk, happenings, and even the art-world itself.  Warhol's use of the art-world, celebrity culture, and public image as media for art could be masterful, and often had a kind of critical edge: in acquiescing to the marketplace, he criticized the notion of the heroically autonomous artist; and in producing his seemingly endless repeated images, sometimes deliberately shoddily (more Elvises! More Marylins!) he drew attention to the invasion of the logic of the marketplace into the field of aesthetics.  Others were even better. Gugliemo Achille Cavellini, for example, made self-canonization in art history not just his goal, but also his medium of expression.  As John Held Jr. puts it, Cavellini's was an "art of 'self-historification'" that took the form of "a series of self-produced books, performances, festivals, portraits, novelty items, and voluminous correspondence" with which he sought to place himself in art history.  In 1971 he even produced the publicity materials for a centennial retrospective of his work to be held in 2014. I'm kind of hoping someone actually puts on the show.  It's a bravura performance, sometimes mocking and sometimes embodying the desperation of the artist for consecration and cultural capital.

What I haven't seen in Goldsmith is any indication that he's at all interested in using the career-as-artistic-medium with any kind of critical edge regarding things like status, fame, or cultural capital.  Even when he says that some people might consider career-obsession "a silly game," he doesn't suggest that this might be the case because the pursuit of reputation is for chumps, a mere expression of the vanity of human wishes, or a kind of complicity with the logic of the marketplace.  Rather, he thinks those who consider it silly do so because the pursuit offers "no verifiable return whatsoever."  It all seems a bit caught up in the logic of fame, cultural capital, and the reputation market.  Maybe I'm missing the critical edge somewhere.  And (more probably) it may be that I'm wrong about Goldsmith following the arc of his career to a place where the career becomes the main production.  But he does seem to be thinking about this direction, and he does hustle heavily in the little world of poetry.  (My own thoughts on the pursuit of recognition and status are of little enough interest, but if you want them, they crop up sometimes in Laureates and Heretics, and you can find some here, too. Mostly I just find the pursuit of status as a kind of hedonic treadmill — if you start wanting it, enough is never enough.  Don't get me started, or I'll start quoting Sartre and Milton and Samuel Johnson, and maybe even mention some conversations with much-acclaimed poets who still seem to crave constant stroking).

But back to the matter of hustling for reputation in the little world of poetry.  This is where the Oedipal desire to lay the old king to rest comes into play.  Consider Goldsmith's two recent Harriet posts.  In each post, he takes one of the canonical figures of language writing — Charles Bernstein in "The Bounce and the Roll" and Ron Silliman in "Death of a Kingmaker" — and politely, affectionately, but nevertheless firmly assigns them to the dustbin of history.  Bernstein, says Goldsmith, was the perfect example of the poet who builds his importance by a process Goldsmith calls the "slow roll": a decades-long process of writing, pedagogy, and activism that culminate in a "solid career."  But this sort of career, and Bernstein with it, belong to the past, since we now live in the "moment of the bounce, where Google Alerts are triggered at the mere mention of an author's name or work."  In the new media environment, it seems that those who say "what is written has become secondary to how a literary work makes its way out into the world" may well "have a point." And the book-writing Bernstein?  Well, he may have been the best man with a horse and buggy, but we've moved on to Goldsmith's Prius, and Bernstein is no longer a relevant model for the poet. Or so Goldsmith implies. And Ron Silliman?  Well, he's the "kingmaker" of Goldsmith's title, and he seems to have died.  Goldsmith ends with well-wishes for Ron as a writer, but I think it's telling that Goldsmith sees people in terms of how they can make or break reputations, and telling, too, that he seems to want to consign the lions of Ye Olde Langpo to the past, presumably to make way for something new.  Marjorie Perloff seems to have come on board for this project of dethroning the old kings, too: Unoriginal Genius argues that poets from modernism through language poetry were still seeking an original voice, but the new "conceptual generation" has moved beyond all that, into a more comfortable relationship with "unoriginal" types of textual appropriation.  Out with the old — gently, politely — and enter the conceptualists, led by the ubiquitous Goldsmith!  Goldsmith did, after all, leave the art world for the poetry scene because he wanted to make his mark in history, and thought he had a better shot at it in poetry than in art (he says as much in a 2007 Harriet post called "The End of History").

Again, this sort of desire to knock off the old kings and be the new king isn't unusual (you can't go far in the prose of the young Ezra Pound before you run into it).  What's interesting about it to me here, though, is that it seems like another indicator that Goldsmith might be on the cusp of making the creation of a career, rather than the creation of texts, his main art form.  He's got the Warholian example, the imagination to see the world beyond the text as his medium, and the Oedipal motive — and he's been talking with real interest about the possibility of the electronic manipulation of one's career as a possible future medium of art.

And this mention of the future of art brings me to the question of how Goldsmith seems to conceive of the shape and direction of literary history.  If we're looking for consistency in answering this question, we're going to be disappointed: Goldsmith's got an active mind, and seems to respond more to the particulars of the occasion of writing than to some inner hobgoblin of consistency.  But the center of gravity in his thinking keeps coming back to the idea of a linear procession of generations, in which (as he put it in "The End of History,") "conceptual writing" is "the next generation."  "I often use Brion Gysin's quote from 1959 that poetry is 50 years behind painting," says Goldsmith in the same essay, before telling us that art-world types like himself have a "absolutely staggering" for making a name for themselves in literary history by bringing the poets up to speed.

The ironic thing about this linear version of history, in which one thing is going on until it is replaced by another thing, is that it's a pretty old-fashioned idea.  It has its origin in specific historical circumstances in the late nineteenth century, when for complicated reasons artists started seeking status not from a community beyond themselves, but from other producers.  Since established producers seemed impossible to challenge on their own terms, there was a kind of arms-race to produce new schools and styles, so as not to have to challenge the established masters on their own terms.  Instead, one could dismiss them as obsolete (if you want to read the story in all its glorious detail, a good place to start would be Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production).  Of course the drama of discrediting the established masters didn't result in the old guys stopping doing what they were doing, nor did it stop others from picking up the old techniques and running with them.  But it did dismiss these techniques from the spotlight.  So the linear history is less a true representation of things than a way of claiming importance for oneself and one's peers, and hiding the true diversity of aesthetic production.  The Museum of Modern Art used to present its collections in a manner that seemed to lead up to the inevitable triumph of Cubism and Picasso, but when they re-organized, they chucked this kind of linear history for a manner of presentation that tried to emphasize multiple paths and plural histories — effectively getting rid of the sort of linear "there was this generation, but then they were superseded by that generation" narrative on which Goldsmith fixates.

For me, an old way of looking at things isn't necessarily a wrong way of looking at things.  But in this case, I really do think the linear narrative of literary history is an enormous misrepresentation of the actual state of affairs.  Conceptual writing is something that's going on.  But it's a tiny part of the sum total of what's being written, even by members of the generation born around 1961, the year Goldsmith was born.  To dismiss all that writing by saying that people who are not engaged in a particular practice are not "relevant" or not "responding to their time" (a phrase Goldsmith has used) is to argue that there is only one way to respond to our times — which is patently false.  I mean, crawling into a cave and trying to write runic poetry on stones, if one did it now, would be a response to our times, since the imaginative rejection of the present moment is a very powerful and critical way of responding to that moment (think of all the Victorian medievalism of guys like William Morris: it was a radical response to the industrial moment).  To buy into the linear model is to replace the enormous, messy, rhizomatic field of actual poetic production with a narrow world, and to claim absolute importance for a tiny portion of things, while willfully ignoring or dismissing the rest (or, I suppose, just not being aware of it).  The linear model is, in short, a lie.  But if you want to make a mark in history, if you want to kill off the big names of the past and be a big name yourself —if, in short, you want to be talked about, then it's a pretty tempting lie to tell.  You could even convince yourself it's true.

Roberto Bolaño and the Limits of the Aesthetic

Just coming back to my senses after three days zonked out on the couch with the flu. It's always strange, coming back to health: I feel like I could lift a Dodge pickup over my head Superman-style and hurl it at Dr. Octopus, saving the citizery from certain doom, if I had to (yeah, I'm mixing my D.C. and my Marvel — what of it?). Not that any such emergency is likely: Chicago's so arctic today Doc Oc would probably be found shivering in a snowbank, wrapped in all eight of his arms and checking on his Blackberry to see if he had enough frequent flier miles to visit his pal Mark Scroggins in Florida. For the past three days I've been deeply sub-superhero in my general functionality, and done little more than eat pretzel rods and watch movies on cable — indeed, one could say I've been reduced to my grad school level of existence. But I'm back, people, and lacking any heroic pickup truck hurling opportunities (curse you, Gods of Midwestern Winter!) I want to tap out a few thoughts about Roberto Bolano before getting back to working on my part of The Salt Companion to John Matthias.

So here's what I've been thinking, as I work my way toward the end of The Savage Detectives. One of the things that critics of Latin American literature say about Bolano (forgive me for leaving out the diacritical mark over the "n" throughout — I'm blogging in a hurry today) is that he represents a break with prior generations of writers who were committed to very different agendas: Magical Realism, say, or politically committed writing. And as far as I can tell, they've got a point. What I haven't seen discussed in any detail, though, is the way aesthetic autonomy plays into all this. Long story short, what I think The Savage Detectives gives us is a portrait of an imagined-but-sort-of-real generation of (mostly) Mexican poets whose lives and works are devoted to poetry, not to something beyond it. Bolano's characters, like Bolano himself, aren't just poets, they're poetry geeks, poetry nerds, poetry obsessives. They don't write to liberate the people or to forge the uncreated conscience of their race — they're into poetry as poetry. And, for Bolano, this is ultimately their doom. So The Savage Detectives is a kind of elegy for the doomed poetry nerd, and a confession by an aesthete of the dead-end nature of aestheticism.

If I weren't in a hurry to down some coffee, I'd probably go up to the study, pick up my copy of the novel, and type in a few of the passages I marked by way of evidence. But since that's not going to happen, I'll just offer evidence in summary form. Firstly, consider the novel's long opening section, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico," presented in the form of the diary of a young poet. I wasn't optimistic about the novel when I was reading this section — it just seemed like a salsa-and-guacamole version of The Dharma Bums. But it actually works quite well to establish Bolano's notion of a generation drawn to poetry as a way of disengaging with the world. Here we see young poets dropping out of the world of the professions, turning away from politics or a sense of folkloric connection to The People, and trying to form their own little island, their world-within-a-world, where all that matters is poetry. It's particularly important that their main concerns are with blasting away at the aesthetic conventions of prior generations. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in The Field of Cultural Production, the Oedipal imperative to overthrow older generations' aesthetics becomes most powerful when there's nothing at stake in art except style, when art becomes something pursued for art's sake alone. I mean, if you're an artmaker trying to score big with a market (think Hollywood movies), you actually cleave to established formulae. Same thing if you're all about putting your art at the service of power (think socialist realism, or, closer to home, of the portraits of institutional presidents hanging in the big neo-gothic hall of your local high-gloss university). But if the idea is to make a mark not in the broader world, but in an aesthetic scene cut loose from broader engagement and turned in upon itself (or, to put it in positive terms, set free from extra-artistic imperatives), you become kind of agitated about making new forms. Again, I'm in no way motivated to actually go up to the study and get the book, but I bet if I google a few remembered phrases I can pull a reasonably good passage of Bourdieu off the web. Hang on.... Yup. Here:

The literary or artistic field is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (e.g. ‘bourgeois art’) and the autnomous principle (e.g. ‘art for art’s sake’), which those of its advocates who are least endowed with specific capital tend to identify with a degree of independence from the economy, seeing temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise. (40)

Thus we find three competing principles of legitimacy. First, there is the specific principle of legitimacy, i.e., the recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other producers, their competitors, i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient world of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning art for artists. Secondly, there is the principle of legitimacy corresponding to ‘bourgeois’ taste and to the consecration bestowed by the dominant fractions of the dominant class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public, state-guaranteed ones, such as academies, which sanction the inseperably ethical and aesthetic (and therefore political) taste of the dominant. Finally, there is the principle of legitimacy which its advocates call ‘popular’, i.e. the consecration bestowed by the choice of ordinary consumers, the ‘mass audience’. (51)

I pulled these from this guy's site, which seems to have an interesting critique of Bourdieu. Anyway — you get the idea, right? Art for art's sake turns away from any form of consecration based on popularity, political efficacy, etc. And for believers in this sort of thing, a real event in art isn't the classically correct text, the big popular hit, the top moneymaking movie, the book that spoke to the soul of the nation, or the poem that inspired the revolutionary leader in his early days: it's the work of art that made an impact on the medium of art itself. It's the stylistically innovative piece of work.

This is what Bolano's characters value. Their little movement, Visceral Realism, is all about overturning the old poets. And Bolano shows us his characters trying to cut themselves off from anything heterogenous to art and literature. They want to live for the aesthetic alone (well, that and sex and marijuana). The pathos of the first part of The Savage Detectives comes from how doomed this seems. The characters are surrounded by thugs and pimps and corrupt police, and we can feel the world of power and corruption closing in on the naive poets, bit by bit.

The later sections of Bolano's novel, told in many voices, offer two versions of one of Bolano's great themes: the quest for the missing poet. We hear from a lot of narrators about two poets who are constantly in the background of the first part of the novel, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (really based on Bolano and a friend and fellow poet). Belano and Lima are, in part, aimless waifs,but when they are motivated about something it's all about tracking down lost poetry from forgotten avant-gardes. So we as readers, catching glimpses of Belano and Lima, quest after them, our missing poets, never quite catching them satisfactorily, even as they themselves are on a similar quest for missing poets. The sad thing is this: when we hear of Belano and Lima finding the writers they quest for, the meetings are never satisfactory or transformational. This pursuit of poetry for its own sake seems more and more like an empty or desperate enterprise, like something conducted by people who never really learned to live in the world. Bolano really strips the glamor from the idea of the life lived only for poetry, giving us characters who seem vulnerable, lost, a little desperate. It kind of hurts to see it.

So there's a sadness to the book, in that it takes the position that the aesthetic autonomy that has been the informing principle of its characters is a dead-end. And Bolano's got ethos on this one, people: he lived the life of the poet maudit in a way we bourgeois-bohemians, perched behind our Apple laptops in our offices or studies, simply haven't. But what's more interesting to me is the cultural context of all this. I mean, when people think of Bolano's generation as offering a break with the big currents of Latin American writing, they're on to something — because much of that writing operated on principles other than aesthetic autonomy. This is actually quite common in non-first-world places. In places where people tend to feel semi-colonized, or dominated by an undemocratic oligarchy, they often don't feel that the national institutions represent their values, and they call upon literature to fill the void. Literature becomes a thing of national importance, a political and social thing more than an aesthetic thing (and does so for great numbers of people, not just for the eleven poets in the room, who want to think their work is somehow of vast social importance). (I'd quote my favorite guy on this, Declan Kiberd, but I already did so here and here, so I feel like I should lay off) (by the way: in the second link you'll find a howling screw-up, in which I and my editor both let a slip-up stand, with "Richard Hugo" written when I meant "Victor Hugo" — oh, the shame!). Anyway. In the Latin American context prior to Bolano there are many versions of this heteronomous aesthetic, this placing of the value of art in social rather than aesthetic criteria. There's Neruda's Marxism, for example. Or there's Magical Realism, which for all of its extravagence is a kind of identity politics, right? I mean, much of its goal is to show that there's a special, non-European-Enlightenment logic to Latin America. This makes Magical Realism a cousin to other identity-based reactions to colonialism, like, say, Negritude. But Bolano rejects all of this by following the path of aesthetic autonomy. Then he goes one better, and shows us the limits of his own path. He negates what came before, and negates his own negation (sorry for that sentence — one never really recovers from one's reading of Hegel).

I've got a strong sense this entry is a bit of a stylistic train wreck and in need of a serious proof-read, but I see Doctor Octopus has put on a warm scarf and is menacing the citizens of Chicago. They need me! And there's a very hurlable looking Dodge pickup parked conveniently nearby. It's not yours, is it? No? Alrighty, then!

Classical Music Between Adorno and Bourdieu

Richard Taruskin makes some big noise about classical music, or at any rate about the discourse around classical music, over at The New Republic. Long story (and I mean long story: it clocks in at about 12,000 words) short, Taruskin believes classical music's current crop of apologists does more harm than good. In a review of Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson, Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears, by Joshua Fineberg, and Why Classical Music Still Matters, by Lawrence Kramer, Taruskin argues that the crisis in classical music isn't all it's cracked up to be. What's particularly interesting to me are the parallels in the "classical music is doomed and we gotta do something about it now" debate and the whole "can poetry matter?" debate.

I urge anyone interested in the high culture / pop culture debate to read the article, which makes good use of Adorno and Bourdieu, and is well-written, too. But if you don't feel like scaling a 12,000 word mountain, the basic line goes something like this: Taruskin believes that the classical music he loves needs to be defended from its own defenders, who can't seem to write without (wait for it...) "recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery."

The article begins with an account of an experiment in which Joshua Bell, a leading classical violinist, was asked to go undercover as a busker. Bell was generally ignored, and the planners of the experiement took this as an opportunity to hurl curses from on high at the philistine churls of the public. Taruskin mercilessly points out the flawed methodology of the experiment (Bell had to stand in a place no self-respecting busker would have picked, for example), and argues that the experiment was no experiment at all, but a stunt with a pre-fabricated conclusion.

Taruskin goes on to tell people who lament classical music's loss of prestige that the rise of classical's prestige came about under conditions when the elite classes needed to distinguish themselves culturally from the huddled masses yearning to get down with popular songs. A return to that state ( a condition still present but not robust) is neither possible nor all that desirable. I mean do we really want to become like a snob like Milton Babbitt, who said in 1979:

We receive brilliant, privileged freshmen at Princeton, who in their first year of college are likely to take a philosophy of science course with [logical positivist] Carl Hempel, and then return to their dormitories to play the same records that the least literate members of our society embrace as the only relevant music.

"Pierre Bourdieu, were you listening?" asks Taruskin, after quoting this passage.

Taruskin also invokes the Adorno/Frankfurt school defense of high culture, a version of which one finds in the alt-poetry community to this day. He summarizes the Frankfurt position about as well as anyone can in a short paragraph:

The main tenet of the creed is the defense of the autonomy of the human subject as manifested in art that is created out of a purely aesthetic, hence disinterested, impulse. Such art is without utilitarian purpose (although, as Kant famously insisted, it is "purposive"), but it serves as the symbolic embodiment of human freedom and as the vehicle of transcendent metaphysical experience. This is the most asocial definition of artistic value ever promulgated. Artists, responsible to themselves alone, provide a model of human self-realization. All social demands on the artist--whether made by church, state, or paying public--and all social or commercial mediation are inimical to the authenticity of the creative product.

Going on to note how this position is variously trivialized, mangled, and dumbed-down in defenses of classical music, Taruskin shows the weakness of the position when it comes to accounting for the public's actual musical tastes.

The big wrap-up in the article defends classical music from a more modest and pluralist position, claiming that it can serve as one register — a rather formal one — among others; that it can function like a formal level of diction in the larger and more various musical language as a whole.

I was hipped to the article by D.L. LeMahieu, a historian who's written about the whole pop culture/high culture issue with real depth and the kind of careful research that puts people in English deparments to shame. Since everything LeMahieu says is worth printing in gold-leaf outlined letters on enduring parchment and hanging on the wall for contemplation, I asked him if he'd mind if I posted our correspondence about the article. He graciously agreed:

***
Dan,

Picked up a copy of the New Republic and gave the piece on classical music a read. I actually didn't find myself upset (as you’d predicted I would) at all: I think Taruskin's right about the disingenuousness of the Bell experiment; I think he gets his Adorno right; I'm sympathetic to his argument in general.

I do think he buys into the idea that there's a crisis in classical music a bit more than he should. For example, he downplays the fact that classical music is the main beneficiary of online sales (people who buy classical music tend to buy whole multi-movement works, unlike pop music buyers, who tend only to want the single, and being younger and poorer than the classical crowd, generally have no qualms about illegal free downloading). He also downplays the fact that more repertoire is available now than ever before, thanks to Naxos (a label he mentions very briefly, but a huge phenomenon in the music industry) and to online releases without major label support. He's right that classical radio is in decline, but he never mentions that fewer stations are needed, since one can listen to the better ones online anywhere in the world. So part of the perceived crisis isn't a crisis of the music but of the media. This, of course, is part of the whole internet shakeup, which effects everything from newspapers to (increasingly) television. Overall, I don't think many people would want to turn the clock back, even if it were possible.

Of course in many ways I'm both a romantic and a modernist — in fact, one reviewer of my work called me "An augustan sensibility trained as a romanticist and writing in a modernist idiom during the postmodern era" (talk about aufgehoben!). So when Tarushkin veers closest to the "blame modernism" thesis, or harps on the dark side of German Romantic nationalism, I get ready to pounce on him. But even here I think he's fair -- he doesn't shout "traison!" at les clercs of modernism, so much as he sees the evolution of their aesthetic as a property of a very particular history, a history linked to the rise of bourgeois self-definition via culture (as opposed to aristocratic self-definition via landholding and ancestry) and all the rest. Since these are the issues I've been trying to get at in the chapter I'm currently writing of a book called The Aesthetic Anxiety, I can't really take exception. [Shameless plug: an essay that contains a brief treatment of my book-in-progress' themes is about to come out in Art and Life in Aestheticism. It makes a great gift, so shop early...]

There's been a debate about poetry similar to the one Taruskin traces in the New Republic, with Adorno-influenced people proclaiming their purity and political potential from one corner, while the people at the another corner demand a kind of popularization. Many on both sides see themselves as besieged and on the defensive in an environment of general decline. Meanwhile, and quite un-remarked by either side, I’m told that one of the larger online poetry sites — salt — boasts 200,000 readers of its often avant-garde content every month, a readership comparable to that of Harpers'. Where it all goes is anybody's guess.

What's your take on the article? I'm glad you turned me on to it.

Best,

Bob


***
Bob,

I gave my copy away over a week ago so I will have to rely on memory. One objection to the article was the tone: it was a mirror image of what it pretended to refute. I was also disappointed that he cast the entire problem in terms of the high/low culture debate, about which I know a modest amount. When I researched A Culture for Democracy over 20 years ago, I read a great deal about the decline of "music" (as Classical was then called) in the 1920s and 1930s. I read the first twenty years of Gramophone, which constantly editorialized about the issue. In any case, the NR author says absolutely nothing new or interesting about High/Low, other than to presume the legitimacy of the Low, which is not the issue.

I wish the author had explored not only the technology issue, which you grasp, but also the audience issue: Classical appeals most to UMC (upper middle class) and the old, often many of whom were exposed to the music in their youth but only grasped it firmly as they aged.

Also, there is the damned issue of "art".

Dan

***
Dan,

You're right of course about the question of audience, and the aging of the classical audience. This is the elephant in the room that Taruskin doesn't discuss enough.

You're right, too, about how most of the article just wanders over well-trodden ground in the high/low culture debate. I'm not sure Taruskin presumes the legitimacy of the low, though. When he writes, at the end, of classical music as a formal idiom or register within music as a whole, he seems to say that genres aren't so much legitimate or illegitimate as they are appropriate or inappropriate for particular situations. This is interesting, I think — not because it represents any new conceptual blockbusting (it doesn't), but because it is representative of what I take to be the emerging attitude toward what we had thought of as commercial/autonomous or low/high culture. If there's anything newish in the article's take on high-low it's this embodiment of an attitude one sees emerging, a kind of non-hierarchical pluralism about culture. In this view, high culture has less special social prestige than it did in Bourdieu's France of the 1970s, nor does it have much of a special claim on Frankfurt school political/spiritual redemptiveness. But this doesn't mean (as it seemed to mean, in early postmodernism) that it is bad or irrelevant or to be chucked away in favor of a valorized low culture. Rather, high culture becomes one of the registers in which one can (culturally) speak. Sometimes it stands on its own, sometimes it is mixed with other registers for effect (as in speech that combines high and low diction). So the high culture tradition is absorbed into a largely post-hierarchical world.

20 years of Gramophone — I envy you that!

Best,

Bob

***
Bob,

Yes his pluralism is quite postmodern. But it eludes questions about cultural hierarchy that he presumes in other places within the article. His 'broadbrow" view was first articulated, by the way, by J B Priestley in the 1930s: at the time it was thought "middlebrow" and vulgar to assert such a view.

I devoted 12 years to thinking about this issue and I ended up asserting contradictions: an indication that the problem with judging "art" may have to do with a logic yet to be fully defined. Perhaps it dwells in cognitive psychology or Dilthey's "lived experience" which suggests inaccessibility to the views we assert, despite the best attempts at rationalization, including "disinterestedness."

Dan

***
Dan,

I admit to having failed to unravel the Gordian Knot that is the problem of art, and the judgement of art. I've been relying on a little dodge in which I treat questions of what is better by asserting that there is no better in the absolute sense, only better-for certain tasks. I suppose that's why I'm sympathetic to Taruhkin's ending sections.

As for self-contradictoriness and the inaccessibility of our own viewpoints: I'm sure you're right. I remember when the deconstructionists built their brief empire on that insight.

Mind if I put our little exchange in my blog? I'll let you have the last word...

Bob

***
Bob,

Your pragmatic view echoes that of Dewey, at least as I understand him.

The Deconstuctionist Empire may be decline, but the Cognitive Psychologists still rule.

On Fox, being given the last word means that you have already lost.

Dan

Punk In Theory, Part One: Pierre Bourdieu and Loud Fast Rules

So let's say you're on sabbatical, and you've been drinking coffee by the quart and reading stacks and stacks of French cultural theory to get your chops up for the book you want to write, and you realize you need a break from all this reading or you'll end up in some kind of under-the-table jittery fetal position fit. What do you do? Hop on your bike and bee-line it to the bookstore, of course! A moth to the flame, I know, I know. But that's what I did the other day, inelegantly dismounting and chaining the bike outside the local Borders before hitting the magazine rack, where, after a few minutes of general moping and browsing, I shooed a pack of loitering and malingering fifteen-year old black-clad mohawk and fauxhawk-having kids away from the music magazines (when did the kids start in with the mohawks again? They've been popping up in bristly abundance around Chicago lately, like the aggressive foliage of some kind of tropical fruit...). I dove in and fished around a bit in the shelves until I came up with the latest issue of Loud Fast Rules!, a punk music mag, clutched between my teeth. "Ah!" I cried, shaking the seaweed from my hair and brandishing my mag aloft, "the very thing!"

I couldn't quite figure out the nature of the strange frisson I got from leafing through the magazine there, by the resentful teenagers I'd elbowed aside. Then it hit me: the pages of Loud Fast Rules! looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like the pages of the crappy photocopied punk zines I'd read in high school back in the mid-eighties. There were the same typewritten sheets in the universal font of cheap manual typewriters (courier). There were the same irregular black areas around the edges of the magazines pages, the kind of dead-space you get when you photocopy an imperfectly-aligned page without putting the copier lid down. There were the same oddly-aligned images, looking like concert polaroids taped to sheets of type and then badly photocopied. Even the ads for bands (and there were plenty of these) had this low-tech, el-cheapo look to them.

Just as all of these eighties-looking production values were about to throw me into one of those Proust's-madeline fits of reverie ("Oh Jenny from bio lab! If only they hadn't moved your locker down to the other end of the hall senior year! Oh, 1974 Fiat Spider! If only your alternator hadn't crapped out on the way to the General Public concert!) I did a bit of a mental double-take: I realized I wasn't holding a photocopied zine, but a carefully constructed replica of a photocopied zine. When kids threw their zines together in the eighties using photocopies of typed pages and polaroids, they were on the cutting edge of do-it-yourself, no-budget publishing. But nowadays, anyone with a computer and a printer can make something much more professional looking, and an outfit like Loud Fast Rules! could certainly make something slicker if they wanted to. Little signs indicated they had considerable resources at their command (color on the semi-glossy cover, a UPC code, loads of advertisements, etc). So the question presented itself: what gives with these lousy production values?

And here's where all my pumping sociological iron with French cultural theory came in handy, kids. I'd been reading over Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production (a kind of ragbag of disparate essays), and remembered a short passage about what happens to fields of restricted cultural production (those are the fields of cultural production that aren't governed by some larger external force, like the church, the state, or the market) as those fields age. Check it out:

What happens in the field is more and more dependent on the specific history of the field, and more and more independent of external history; it is therefore more and more difficult to infer or to anticipate from the knowledge of the state of the social world (economic, political situation, etc.) at any given moment.

If field of cultural production isn't governed by external forces like the state (think of those crazy-ass North Korean festivals where people gather in arenas to put on patriotic pageants) or the market (think Hollywood), it tends, over time, to become governed by its own past. This is most evident when it sort of replicates that past (think Robert Frost) or references it (think T.S. Eliot). But according to Bourdieu this is also true when we seem to innovate within the field: often we're innovating not in response to external stimuli so much as we're innovating in order to displace the authority of earlier producers in the field, and to claim authority within the field for ourselves (remember how Harold Bloom cobbled together a crackpot-ish theory of all this kind of Oedipal struggle in The Anxiety of Influence?).

Looking at Loud Fast Rules!, we can really see Bourdieu's ideas at work. I mean, when punk was young, the production values of its zine literature were determined by the material and economic conditions of the relatively broke-ass kids who were into it. Now, with punk being a established, nay venerable, sub-field of music (one that, for the most part, pretty deliberately shuns the market) we see the production values of one of its journals determined not by economics so much as by the prior history of the field. And the position that Loud Fast Rules! takes — one of hommage — is actually a kind of conservative position within that field. This isn't to say that Loud Fast Rules! is conservative in the political sense, though: in fact, it reads a little lefty. You get a good sense of how the mag is conservative within the field of punk, and lefty in the field of politics, just by looking at the cover, which features The Clash, one of the great left-wing punk bands of the eighties. The message sent by the cover is politically leftist, but it also sends off an "honor thy fathers, young punks, for yea, their authority is great, and their ancient wisdom to be honored" kind of vibe.

But more important than the presence of The Clash is the replication of old-school production values. A magazine that looks like Loud Fast Rules! today means something very different than a magazine that looked that way twenty years ago. Back then, it said "hey! whoa! we can do this ourselves, even if we do kind of suck!" (a message much like that of the punk music genre itself). Now, it says "remember when..." I was reminded of some of my favorite lines from Peter Gizzi's (fabulous) new book of poems, The Outernationale:

When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.

Such were my thoughts as I stood there, displacing those teenage punks in Borders. Knocked loose from my reverie when one of the kids muscled in front of me to grab an issue of Mojo, I assessed my potential purchase. Deliberatley un-slick, obsessed with the past, weirdly nostalgic for the eighties, and showing signs of irrelevance? Loud Fast Rules! seemed, for better or for worse, like a good fit for me. I threw it down on the check-out counter with my copy of The Economist.

***

Coming soon: Punk Theory Part Two: TV Eye (or, what happens when you listen to Iggy Pop while reading Guy Debord).