Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

A week or so back, I posted a response to a post by Jeet Heer which prompted a strenuous objection from Gary Groth. In the course of responding to Gary, I said this:

I was replying to the structure of [Jeet’s] argument and to his examples, not to his actual argument per se.

There seemed to be some confusion about this, and some suggestion that more explanation would be helpful. So I’m going to give it a try. This is going to be somewhat ad hoc, and I suspect if I knew my linguistic theory better, I’d be able to (a) have better terms at my fingertips, and (b) present a better case. But you work with what you have.

Right; off we go.

Any work of art (defined quite broadly here) is going to create meaning in various ways. I’m going to divide those ways of creating meaning into two.

First, you have what I”m going to call “emphatic” meaning. I also thought of referring to this as utilitarian meaning or didactic meaning. This is the meaning that is purposeful or directed; it’s what the work of art is saying that it is about. In a novel, this might be plot; in a portrait, this might be the effort to represent the sitter. Intentions aren’t always easy to parse, but with that understood, emphatic meaning would in general be the obvious, intentional point of a piece.

Second, you have what I’m going to call “phatic” meaning. If you’re not familiar with the term “phatic,” Wikipedia is helpful as ever.

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, “you’re welcome” is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Here, though, I’m using “phatic” not just to mean a word or phrase meant as a social placeholder, but rather any element in a work of art that isn’t directly pushing the emphatic meaning. The phatic here is the excessive, the superfluous, the additional. I think you could argue, in fact, that the phatic defines the aesthetic; it’s the additional meaning beyond the utilitarian, which creates ambiguity, frisson, beauty, and the other kinds of confusions and responses we think of when we think “art.”

These distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and you could argue about whether a particular meaning is phatic or emphatic. And of course most critics (which is to say, most readers or viewers) don’t systematically separate out meanings in this way. But I think the terms and concepts can be useful in thinking about what we’re doing as critics or readers.

Okay, so let’s try some examples. Here’s a Victorian fashion plate, as shown in Sharon Marcus’ 2007 book Between Women: Friendships, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.

The emphatic meaning here is, obviously, “look at the pretty clothes.” (Though you lose some of the emphasis thanks to my not ideal scan; sorry about that.) The image is designed so that the viewer (presumably female) can look at the dresses on display. The dresses themselves, then, are the emphatic content. In some sense, you don’t need anything but the dresses. The dog, the horse, the guy in the background, even the women filling up the dresses are superfluous. They add charm or interest, but they’re not the emphatic point.

So if you wanted to talk about this picture looking at the emphatic meaning, you could critique the rendering of the dresses (are they accurate? are they pleasing?) and you could also pull back and talk about whether selling dresses like this is a worthwhile use of art (capitalism, Marxism, hackwork, what have you.)

However, there is also phatic content in the picture — that is, it isn’t just two dresses standing there. There is the dog, there’s the guy, there’s women filling the dresses out. Though the point is the dresses, those dresses have been placed in a scene — and we can think of that scene as excessive, or phatic.

Now, you could just say, “well, the scene isn’t the point — it’s phatic, and so it’s not worth getting into how it’s set up or why the artist made the choices he/she did.” That’s one possibility. But you can also take the phatic content as being as, or even more, important than the emphatic content. That is, the phatic content has meaning too; it’s excess, but it’s not empty excess.

So here’s Sharon Marcus, doing a critical reading based mostly on the phatic content of this image;

Fashion plates were images of women designed for female viewers, and that homoerotic structure of looking is intensified by the content and structure of the images themselves. Fashion plates almost never depicted women singly or coupled with men, but most often portrayed two women whose relationship is contained and undefined. An 1879 plate shows a woman on horseback staring intently at another woman whose back is to us and appears to return the rider’s gaze; a male figure in the background appears to look toward and reflect the viewer, who watches the two women as they inspect one another. The park setting and the physical distance between the two women code them as passing strangers, intensifying the erotic valence of their mutual scrutiny. The composition suggests that the two women are about to move toward one another….Fashion, often associated with a sexually charged inconstancy, becomes a respectable version of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising, in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture whose medium is clothing. That collective intimacy extended to the fashion magazine itself, consumed by thousands of female readers separately but simultaneously.

A woman who looked at a Victorian fashion plate did not simply find her mirror image, for in that plate she saw not one woman, but two.

In a bravura move, Marcus takes the excessive phatic meaning (not one dress, but two women) and twists it back into the emphatic meaning (fashion as not just intended to sell dresses to women, but to sell the women in the dresses to each other.)

An analogous example in prose: Marcus in her book does an extended reading of Great Expectations. She talks a good deal about the plot…but she also pays a lot of attention to when Dickens does and does not describe Pip’s clothing. In one sense, the description of fashion is always superfluous to the plot; you don’t need to know what Pip is wearing to know what happens to him. But Marcus argues that the book is in large part about Pip’s effort to escape his social class, which is equated with his masculinity. That is, Pip is trying, in her reading, to become a woman, and the sign of this in the text is his relationship to his clothes. His finery, therefore, is a sign of his progress towards (or a failure to progress towards) his Great Expectations. The excess phatic meaning is not just excess silk and lace, but something which can be read as important in its own right.

Doing a reading that includes a discussion of phatic content isn’t at all controversial. On the contrary, the phatic content is the focus of a lot of the most creative criticism, precisely because it is less straightforward and often more open to interpretation.

But, at least among the folks I talk to in the comics blogosphere, there seems to be some resistance to thinking about phatic fripperies as central when it comes to critical prose. For me, on the other hand, it seems like a very natural thing to do. That’s what I did in my initial discussion of Jeet Heer’s post. In particular, when Jeet said this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.

I responded by saying this:

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it.

Gary in turn responded by saying this:

Jeet said nothing of the sort, seemingly or otherwise, in the paragraph you quote to support that assertion. His point, obviously, is that criticism takes place in interviews.

And Gary’s right; that is the most obvious point of Jeet’s statement. In the terms above, it’s the emphatic point. Jeet’s argument, the point he is getting at, is that there is criticism in interviews. Period.

But there’s more in the statement than just “There is criticism in interviews.” Jeet doesn’t just say, “There is criticism in interviews” (or,more fully, “There is criticism outside of analytic essays.”) He fleshes that argument out with other words, examples, and rhetorical flourishes. All of that excess is the phatic content. And if you look at how the argument is arranged, what you see is that Jeet states in general that there are many different kinds of criticism, and then clinches (or makes concrete) the worth or importance of those kinds of criticism not by attempting to explain why criticism is important or necessary in itself, but instead by making an appeal to authority.

This is why Gary is especially wrong when he says that “Jeet doesn’t let Matt off the hook”. Because if you look at the way the argument is structured, the final appeal to authority is to — Joe Matt. The argument is structured not in terms of, “Joe Matt said this dumb thing, and he’s wrong for this reason.” Rather, it’s set up as a tension between authorities. Joe Matt said this; however, that contradicts other authorities — and ultimately, when we look at it closely, we see that Joe Matt is actually not opposed to criticism at all, but supports it in the context of interviews. Far from undermining Matt, Jeet uses him as the final prop for an argument whose other supports are a series of imposing appellations (“Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc”.)

You can see a similar process at work in this sentence:

But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.

The main point here, the emphatic meaning, is that “If we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art…criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.” Nestled in between that if/then construction, though is phatic content: the phrase “including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art.” The second bit there is the clincher; we already know about “conversations” (a synonym with discussion), but Jeet feels it necessary to add, to highlight, the phatic fact that the response of artists to earlier art is part of criticism. The very fact that the phrase is superfluous to the argument gives it weight; it’s what Jeet decided to add even though he didn’t have to. In short, while Jeet’s emphatic meaning is a simple assertion that criticism is important, his phatic excess points again and again to artists as the exemplars and support for his statement.

In this context, I think Jeet’s note in comments that ” I think you are reading implications into my writing that weren’t meant to be there (and which other readers aren’t seeing either),” is an interesting commentary on emphatic (intentional, sometimes common sense) and phatic (excessive, implicit, requiring interpretation.) Jeet’s forswearing implications, especially those he doesn’t see. But surely part of what critics do is precisely to look for those excessive, phatic moments not, perhaps, directly connected to artist intention, but still, perhaps even all the more, important for that. Jeet’s emphatic point may not have been “criticism is valid because artists do it,” but his phatic excess shows that he validates criticism through reference to the fact that artists do it.

So here’s a final example: Gary’s response to me in comments.

It’s as if you just want to argue for arguing’s sake and since no one of any prominence is stupid enough to suggest that we substitute artists for critics or justify the validity of criticism on the grounds that artists do it, you extrapolate wildly from an essay so that you have something to argue with. You’re like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing and has a compulsion to enter the fray without having the wherewithal to know what’s being discussed.

The emphatic argument is basically “you, Noah, want to argue for arguing’s sake.” But, there’s also excessive, phatic material here, perhaps best exemplified by the analogy in the last sentence. Gary accuses me of being “like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing.” The phatic meaning zeroes in on generational conflict; Gary wants to infantilize me. He and Jeet are the grown-ups, I’m the precocious 12-year-old. This is especially resonant, of course, given Gary’s status as éminence grise — and given his longtime campaign to pry comics away from their status as children’s entertainment. (Indeed, the argument over who is or is not juvenile gets picked up again in later comments; I throw it at Tom Spurgeon, who volleys it back with gusto. )

Gary’s discussion is especially relevant here since he actually maps the adult/juvenile discussion onto what can be seen as an emphatic/phatic distinction. That is, he accuses me precisely of arguing for argument’s sake — for phatic (excessive) fripperies, rather than for good, emphatic reasons. Emphatic arguments are adult, phatic arguments are childish…and Gary sides with adulthood.

Supposedly. The irony is that phatic readings are, as I noted above, really what experienced “mature” critics are supposed to do. The phatic is what criticism is made of; it’s where creativity comes into criticism. It’s this kind of effort that Tom Spurgeon revealingly (and phatically) denigrates as “mak[ing] shit up.”

For Tom, making shit up, in reference to me, is a synonym for lying or, more kindly, for inadvertent but systematic misrepresentation. But, of course, making shit up is also what artists are supposed to do. And it’s what critics have to do as well; there’s an imaginative effort to figure out what the author or artist is and isn’t saying, and how that can be rephrased, rethought, recreated. The emphasis by Tom, Gary, and Jeet on intentionality, the nervousness around interpretation, does precisely the opposite of what Gary seems to hope for it. It doesn’t make writers about comics look adult and serious. It makes them look petulantly childish.

Not that Gary would necessarily be opposed to that entirely, I don’t think. After all, you don’t go around calling someone a 12-year-old if you aren’t enamored to some degree of schoolyard taunts. And Gary shows other signs of waffling around the issue of child/adult when he notes that

If Jeet has any fault as a blogger, it’s that his posts are virtually impossible to argue with — smart, literate observations that are by and large uncontroversial.

There’s a sense there that Gary wishes Jeet were maybe just a little less grown-up; that there was more juvenile, phatic pep in his posts (though, as we’ve seen, Jeet provides plenty of phatic goodness if you’re willing to look for it, and so Gary’s criticism in this case is really just unfairly projecting his own emphatic dullness.)

The emphatic point here, of course, and at length, is that I am right and everyone else is wrong. But secondarily, I want to note that the central place of interviews in comics criticism which Jeet points out seems to me to be of a piece with the tentativeness in this conversation around phatic meanings. To see the artist as the best or most important interpreter of his or her own work inevitably privilege intentionality and emphatic meaning. There’s a feeling in these discussions that phatic readings may undercut everything Gary and his cohorts have worked so hard for; that if you start playing with too many meanings you’ll end up acting like a child. Artists know best what artists say, and that emphatic meaning is and always will be, “we are not just precocious 12-year-olds, damn it.”

And that’s right, actually. Precocious 12-year-olds are smart, they’re fun, they’re surprising. If I have to choose between the 12-year-old and the intellectually stupefied eminence defending his turf…well, it’s not a hard choice to make. But really, and overall, I’d rather not pick one over the other, but just put bustles, and petticoats on both. The excess on life is art; the excess on art is crit; and the excess on both is the blogosphere with its endless rustling of frills.

166 thoughts on “Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

  1. This is a really good piece, Noah. Thanks for taking the time to really tease it all out. The phatic/emphatic framework works well.

    The emphasis (ha) on emphatic meaning is one of the biggest forces keeping comics criticism from being like the criticism Gary cited as exemplary in the original thread. Even old-fashioned New Criticism paid attention to phatic sense.

  2. There’s a sense there that Gary wishes Jeet were maybe just a little less grown-up

    I laughed when I read this. In Jeet’s younger days he used to piss off Gary so much that Gary once threatened to inflict collective guilt on the Canadian people.

    A major problem with the comics field is that, overall, it doesn’t believe that criticism serves any function beyond the evaluative. That goes hand in hand with it getting hung up on emphatic meaning to the exclusion of the phatic, as well as the lionizing of technical finesse at the expense of issues of content.

    This is a really good piece. Thanks for taking the time to write and post it.

  3. Really, Robert? That’s hysterical. What did Jeet do that Gary hated so much?

    Will the collective guilt about Noah accrue to all barge haulers?

  4. I don’t know about barge haulers, Caro…but I think it has already accrued to you, alas.

    Thanks for the kind words Robert. I think I’d heard that about Jeet and Gary, but had totally forgotten. So many feuds — it’s hard to keep them all straight.

  5. Yes indeed it did accrue to me. I think you owe me a beer. Which we will then pour over Tim Hodler’s head.

    Somebody fill me in on the Jeet/Gary feud! (Like sand from the sandbox, so are the Days of Our Blogs.)

  6. Gary v. Jeet was way before the blog era. It was in the late ’80s. Gary had published an essay that trashed Will Eisner’s graphic-novel work. In the piece (maybe) and in the letter responses that followed, he got off into this pretentious, pedantic tangent about how Eisner wasn’t the least bit influenced the highbrow intellectual culture of the late 1940s. Jeet jumped in–he was more conspicuously right-wing then than he is today–and defended Eisner by basically smearing every major public intellectual of the period as a Stalinist. As such, Eisner was right not to pay them any heed. The whole thing degenerated into a contest between Gary and Jeet as to who could more knowledgeably drop names from Partisan Review‘s contributor list. If memory serves, Gary characterized Jeet’s letters as “snotty” and “obfuscatory.” He also threatened to inflict collective guilt on Canada by raising TCJ’s Canadian retail price to stratospheric levels unless Jeet quit sending in letters.

    Michael and Kristy really should scan and post the articles and letters that constituted TCJ’s great feuds. The whole Eisner controversy was just hilarious to read as it unfolded. I think the only thing that topped it was the extended brawl between R. Fiore and Harvey Pekar

  7. There was one between Suat and R. Fiore too which is semi-legendary I think. I’d love to read that.

    Caro, I would be happy to buy you a beer. I don’t want to dump it on poor Tim’s head though. I’d much prefer a negotiated truce before we actually get to violent outpourings of liquid.

  8. I think, sadly, Noah, your Hamas reference is right. They’ve got that neocon thing going on where they can’t talk to us except through propaganda.

    Robert, that makes my day; I’m seriously going to track down what Jeet had to say about the Partisan Review (which was Trotskyite in the 40s, but which was also the birthplace of the Neocons…). Wonder if he’s changed his position on that history in the intervening years?

  9. No need really for the phatic/emphatic binary, is there? Jeet’s “If…then” sentence does actually say that IF interviews are considered, THEN comics criticism might be said to have significant value. Isn’t this a matter of simple logic–pointing out what someone has actually said (even if, perhaps, they didn’t “mean” to). I don’t see this as taking on any kind of elaborate or clever reading….

    I tend to agree with Jeet that interviews can be useful for criticism (and as criticism)–but not that this is the only valid avenue of criticism (or that only by considering this kind are other kinds validated). He did kind of say the latter—thus spawning Noah’s whole original response–for good or ill.

  10. Hey Eric! I don’t think anyone has disputed that there can be useful criticism in interviews (and of course you would have to think that since you’re editing a book of them!)

    As I said in the post, the phatic/emphatic divide isn’t ever hard and fast, and folks can easily agree or disagree on where it lies. The point (or one point) of going into the difference is to show the limits of using intentions as an absolute arbiter.

    I’d also agree that taking account of phatic meanings isn’t at all tricky — it’s what critics do all the time! Sharon Marcus (the person I use for the examples) talks a lot about how the readings she’s doing are actually very much surface readings — she’s not a Freudian or anything like that. I think she calls them “just readings”, with the implication that they’re both fair and not looking for counterintuitive meanings

  11. Hey Eric — nice to see you ’round here again! I’m personally generally reticent to use New Critical strategies on blog posts and comments, mostly because it degenerates so quickly into fisking and makes it hard for writers to clarify phrasings that aren’t optimal. A blog post — and certainly a blog comment! — isn’t a well-wrought urn: you kind of have to hit at the spirit rather than the letter, unless you’re actually just trying to be a helpful editor rather than getting one up on the author (but that’s so rarely the case).

    That’s why I didn’t take the bait in Jeet’s comments to me to point out that I never actually said he did or didn’t read any particular writer and in fact said outright that my statements described impressions and might be wrong: it’s taking the conversation down into the weeds of prose, when the whole point was the forest of ideas. I’d rather just recant it all and start over. Unless the writer has really worked the prose and really does have decisions behind every turn of phrase, it’s just quibbling and will never really get you anywhere.

    It’s certainly their strategy for reading us, though, which is why this “feud” kind of feels like 1976…

  12. Caro–

    Thinking back on it, what Jeet wrote was a bit more nuanced than saying all left-leaning public intellectuals back then were Stalinist. However, the gist of it was that they’re all a bunch of commies, so who cares?

    My recollection is that Jeet sent in two letters that were published in the 120s-range issues. They weren’t really all that serious. I think he was just being a smartass and trying to jerk Gary’s chain–something he definitely succeeded at.

  13. Sigh. I’ve gone over this before but it seems I have to repeat myself. For the record, I did not say that interview are “the only valid avenue of criticism (or that only by considering this kind are other kinds validated).” Here is what I wrote: “If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.” You’ll note that there are several important differences between Eric B.’s gloss and my comments: firstly, in this post I was being descriptive rather than prescriptive: I was describing the fact that nearly everyone engages in criticism (broadly defined as discussions of art) even if they don’t care to read analytical essays about art (which is, in fact, a minority interest, even if one might wish it weren’t). So the distintion isn’t between analytical essays (held to be inferior) and interviews (celebrated as essential to validating criticism) but between analytical essays (which only a few people read) and discussions of art (which I think almost everyone takes part in one way or another, even if to say that a movie or TV show is good or bad). Expanding the definition of criticism to include interviews is part of a larger point that criticism also includes discussion of art in general. The quote I gave from Henry James, which seems to be lost in this epic game of misreading, starts with the simple statement “Art lives upon discussion”: that’s the core arguement I wanted to make.

    In a subsequent post I made an argument as to why interviews were especially important in the history of comics (because it’s a field where the quality of criticism has been quite low for a variety of historical and social reasons). Again, this is not to say that interviews are necessary to validate criticism but rather in the history of one particular art form (in North America, I perhaps should have added) interviews have played an inordinate role in helping inform critical discourse.

    Not to be pedantic about this, but here’s exactly what I wrote: “The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history. As I said in the previous post, without all those great interviews with Kane, Crumb, etc. our sense of the history and canon of comics would be very different.”

    Again, these are very simple points written in plain a plain English style which many readers, notably Gary Groth, were able to understand without any great difficulty. Why the writers for this blog persist in misunderstanding these points is mysterious to me.

    It often seems like HU is an online version of the “telephone game” where a message gets passed along from person to person, getting more and more distorted along the way. That’s one reason why it seems so fruitless to engage in any sort of conversation with the writers on this blog, despite the interesting and enriching points they might otherwise make.

  14. Jeet: I talked about your Henry James quote in my response on the original thread, and said not only that it did complete your point but that it “resonates very nicely with Jeet’s point about artists and critical thinking.” There was no further follow up from you, though.

  15. @Robert Stanley Martin. Your right, my debate with Groth appeared in The Comics Journal sometime in the late 1980s (if I’m remembering rightly, either the Bros. Hernandez or Sergio Aragones were on the cover). I suppose I could dig out the issue but I’m too embarrased to read what my prose was like back then. However, my arguement was, not surprisingly, quite different from what you described. As I remember it, Groth wrote a very critical review of Will Eisner’s The Dreamer. During the course of the review he made what I took to be an essentially political critique of Eisner (that he had done propaganda comics for the Pentagon during the Vietnam war). I believe that my response was that artists shouldn’t be judged by their political beliefs and cited Theodore Dreiser, a novelist Groth had praised while dismissing Eisner. Dreiser, I pointed out, had been a Stalinist fellow-traveller in the 1930s, but we shouldn’t use that fact to dismiss his fiction (I could have added that there have also been many fine writers who had flirted with fascism, notably Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis). So, my point was not “they’re all a bunch of commies” but rather that aesthetic judgements can’t simply be made along political lines, a position I still adhere to.

    My memory of all this might be blurry but that’s what I remember writing.

    By the way, you can be anti-Stalinist without being a neo-con. The Marxist writers I admire the most (E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton) are all anti-Stalinist and don’t have a neo-con bone in their body. I did write a controversial piece once arguing that there is a connection between a certain style of Trotskyist thought and neo-conservatism, but that’s different from conflating anti-Stalinism with the neo-cons.

    Also, I am rather embarrassed by that late 1980s debate with Groth about Eisner, not beause of anything I wrote about Stalinist intellectuals but rather because I’ve since come to the conclusion that Groth was perfectly accurate in his assessment of Eisner’s weaknesses as a cartoonist. So if we are going to dredge up a 20 year old discussion, I’d like to note that I repudiate (or refudiate, to use a Palinism) what I wrote back then.

    Finally, the idea that I’m “conspicuously right-wing” will come as news to the editors and writers of National Review, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard. These are all publications that have attacked my political essays over the last few years.

  16. Jeet–

    The only reason I brought up your Eisner debate with Gary is because I think it’s amusingly ironic that he’s so fond of your work now. That’s it

    My recollection of those exchanges is, if anything, worse than yours. I doubt I’ve read them since they were first published. I didn’t intend to revive the issues you and Gary discussed. Caro wanted to know more about it, and what I wrote is what I remembered off the top of my head. If you say I misrepresented you, I in all likelihood did. Twenty-plus year memories can play tricks on people.

    However, it is my impression (and I’m pretty sure Gary and Fiore noted it in their replies to you) that your political perspective at the time was quite right-wing. It was more “conspicuously right-wing” then.

    I don’t see much in the way of political leanings in the more recent stuff I’ve read by you. My sense of you being of a right-wing bent now is based on the fact that you contribute frequently to the National Post, although I admit I haven’t read anything you’ve written for them. If I jumped to an erroneous conclusion, I’m sorry.

  17. Hey Jeet. Thank you for stopping by again.

    It’s very clear what your intentions were; you’ve stated them numerous times. However, as I said in the post, there is phatic meaning beyond your intentions. Your insistent return to your own intentions, your equally insistent claim that what you said is “in plain English style” and therefore in need of no intervention or interpretation by reader, and your final reliance on authority (Gary and Henry James) and the wisdom of crowds all merely reinforce my point in this post.

    That point, being, again, that comics criticism is leery of phatic content and fetishizes authority and the intentionality of the creator.

    The telephone game analogy seem revealing too. Again, you move to infantilization, and see differing interpretations as imperfect reception. Rather than wanting to engage with different readings, you dismiss them as inaccurate because they don’t perfectly mirror the creator’s intent.

    You suggest that you want to have a fruitful discussion, and you insist that you don’t want to be pedantic. I will, in this case, take your intentions as gospel, and make a helpful suggestion. Try engaging with what I’ve written rather than defensively insisting that I accept your own reading of your words as absolute and unquestionable.

    There are many, many topics of discussion in this post. You could talk about phatic/emphatic and whether you think it’s a useful way to look at criticism. You could argue with the point about whether comics criticism is leery of phatic readings, perhaps by referencing critics who do in fact use phatic readings in a useful or exciting way. You could talk about why you do or don’t think that the reliance on interviews is or is not bad for comics criticism in light of my points in that regard.

    None of this would prevent you from first stipulating that my reading didn’t match your intentions. But by making it a matter of honor that your reading be the preeminent and only, you bog the conversation down in pedantic assertion and repetition. (For an example of a more fruitful way to approach this sort of disagreement, see Ken Parille’s response to me here where he first notes that he doesn’t agree with my reading of him…and then goes on to riff on the differences between my general take and his, arriving at a brilliant two-word summation of Crumb’s Genesis. Because Ken is just that cool.)

    You say it seems fruitless to “engage in any sort of conversation with the writers on this blog.” But you only want to have one sort of conversation, Jeet — the one where you say what you mean and what you imply, and everyone else accepts that. That isn’t how critical conversations work — hell, it’s not how any conversations work, unless you’re talking solely to like-minded people who are looking to pat you on the back rather than challenge you.

    Finally, I’d point out that HU has a lot of writers, and as far as I know you’ve really only got a beef with me and Caro. I know I do this same thing when talking about CC…and I’m going to try to stop. I think conversations, even heated ones, are good…but feuds not so much. I’ve had differences with you and Tim, but CC has a number of great writers, and I don’t want to pretend I’m disagreeing with some sort of blog hive when really I’m only arguing with a couple of individuals.

    Thanks again for coming by.

  18. I don’t think Gary was unable to see that you were interpreting the implied content of Jeet’s argument. He was just disagreeing with your interpretation. (And so does Jeet.)

    Sure, there can be “phatic” content that even the author isn’t consciously aware of but I think it’s the critic’s responsibility then to call out in his/her criticism that the response is aimed at that secondary meaning, which gives readers of the criticism some context to understand the point.

  19. I remember Jeet’s letter, and it wasn’t right-wing. It said that anti-Communist liberals had it right.

  20. Hey Jesse. Phatic and emphatic blur into each other though. Critics don’t normally separate them because it’s just assumed in most venues that you’re speaking to both.

    Gary and Jeet were both endeavoring to nail me to a wall of denotations. I didn’t see from either of them much interest in exploring implications or connotations. But if you want to do an alternate reading of their comments (or mine) I’d be happy to see it!

  21. Noah, I think the “wall of denotations” has something to do, in general, with the idea that criticism is not itself an artistic genre. We expect to see creative thought, a contribution of the reader, an expansion of the text that further conversation and discussion and opens up a field where meanings can play and the text can become relevant in myriad ways. Criticism as art recognizing Art.

    Journalistic and historical criticism — which I always previously called scholarship or “literary history” if it was about writing — is more factual.

    We’re treating Jeet’s post as if it is a piece of writing, just as much a piece of literature as a comic or a novel. Jeet wants us to treat it like it is an editorial in a newspaper, and he’s responding to us like we’re Glenn Beck and he’s the Czar for Comics.

    It seems clear to me from your post that we’re thinking of criticism as writing not reporting, but it doesn’t yet appear to have gotten across.

  22. (Of course, that perspective makes Gary’s objections all the more odd…I’m sure there’s more going on that I’m not catching…)

  23. Jack–

    My recollection is that Fiore said Jeet’s letters were of a piece with the right-wing campaign to delegitimize everybody to the left of Howard Baker.

    I also remember Gary characterizing them as being rooted in right-wing ideology. He also complained, somewhat polemically, that Jeet unfairly smeared people as communist sympathizers.

    Is my memory of this wrong? I suppose we can always dig out the issues of TCJ in question, and scan and post the relevant sections.

    And even if my memory is off about the political observations, I am absolutely positive that Jeet’s letters infuriated Gary. The joke about collective guilt and jacking up TCJ’s Canadian cover price was in response to them. My only point is that Gary’s present admiration for Jeet’s work is ironic in light of that.

  24. For Heer completists, the letter in question (headlined “In Defense Of Eisner”) can be found in the Comics Journal #128, p. 44-49. Although as I said before, I wouldn’t stand by what I wrote in defense of Eisner back then (and would probably word the political points differently as well). I was, as Robert Stanley Martin wrote, being a bit of young smartass.

    @Caro: I forgot you had notice the James quote (see what I mean about the “telephone game”). So, apologies and thanks!

    @Noah. I agree that any text is open to multiple interpretations. But the question is whether the new interpretation leads to a productive new way of thinking or arguing. I just don’t think the way you read my blog posts is leading to anything fresh or interesting.

    But live and let live, I always say. You’re free to find all sorts of wild implications and connotations in my writing, and I’m free to point out, pedantically and repetitively, that the plain sense meaning of my words doesn’t have much in common with implications you’ve found in them. Or to put it another way, I think one of Shakespeare’s sonnets could easily generate an endless stream of commentary, with each fresh new intpretation discovering an interesting new shade of meaning. I’m not sure that my posts for Comics Comics would repay that level of creative interpretation and re-interpretation.

  25. @Caro. I think this is mostly right: “We’re treating Jeet’s post as if it is a piece of writing, just as much a piece of literature as a comic or a novel. Jeet wants us to treat it like it is an editorial in a newspaper, and he’s responding to us like we’re Glenn Beck and he’s the Czar for Comics.”

    I should add that I’m flattered to have my blog posts treated as pieces of literature, even though I also think there is something misguided about all this. To put it another way, I don’t think the blog posts I’ve written repay the level of scrutiny and creative interpretation that they are currently enjoying. Better to apply all this energy on comics!

  26. I’ll reread the letter tonight. Obviously, “right-wing” is a relative term, but I think he explicitly praised Cold War liberals. My memory has been wrong before, though.

  27. Hey Jeet. The line you draw between “wild implications” and “plain sense meaning” simply isn’t as hard and fast as you want it to be. Every piece of writing has phatic content, whether Shakespeare’s sonnets or your blog posts. It isn’t a matter of reinterpreting or discovering new shades of meaning or that texts are open to multiple interpretations. It’s a matter of the fact that every reading is an interpretation. Your suggestion that your posts won’t repay creative interpretation, therefore, is just another assertion (on the ground of plain-folks humility) that you should be allowed to dictate others readings — that your creative, wild interpretation be seen as plain sense meaning.

    What’s interesting or not interesting is obviously also a question of interpretation. I think it’s worth debating (for example) whether the role of interviews in comics criticism is mostly positive (filling a gap, as you suggested) or whether it’s effects have been more negative. There were a whole list of other points for you to engage in my comment above. I guess if you don’t see any of those as worth even marginal attention, that’s your prerogative. To me, though, it seems like the difficulty isn’t that there are no interesting issues to discuss as much as that you’re reluctant to engage when you aren’t setting the agenda. That seems like a really unfortunate stance for a critic — especially in comics, where the critical discussion has long been painfully insular.

    Anyway, I probably won’t live and let live in the sense that I’ll probably write about something of yours again at some point. But I’m certainly willing to live and let live in the sense that I hope I’ll do it without animosity…and I’m always pleased to have you come over here to set me straight, whether pedantically or not. Thanks Jeet.

  28. Noah,
    I’m pretty sure that the real problem is that you’re using uncharitable interpretations of other people’s writing as springboards to make the arguments you’re interested in making. This has the effect of muddying up what are often very good points, and blunting your critical edge. That is to say, what could be a clarion call to phatic criticism turns into a sprawling suggestion for what, exactly?

  29. I think I understand what you’re calling for in this piece. It’s that criticism needs to move beyond surface evaluation and dig into the richer meanings a text can yield, and that this attention should be applied to all serious criticism, be it of comics or critical writing about them.
    My point is that your arguments too often take the form of so-and-so says (insert uncharitable reading here), but I think (insert NB’s argument here). As a result the point your making gets lost.

  30. Well, it couldn’t have gotten that lost. You parsed it well enough!

    This is actually a theoretical argument I’ve heard argued before. My advisor the one year I was in grad school (for history) was very chary of including others arguments in his writing; he preferred to just go to the sources, write history,and ignore more thoretical disputes and arguments — not unlike what Jeet does more or less in his historical writing. (Though different from what he did in his Craig Yoe review, for example.) Another professor I worked with, on the other hand, was very much engaged with others interpretations, both theoretical and factual. He maintained (and I basically agree) that writing (whether critical, historical, or creative) is a conversation, and in order to make your point, or to have your point make sense, you need to engage with other voices specifically.

    In other words, I’m not losing the point in the conversation because the point, in a lot of ways, is the conversation.

    Whether what I’m doing is misinterpretation is obviously open to debate. I can say, though, that (speaking to my own intentionality) the point about the centrality of interviews to comics criticism, and the implications of that (mostly negative from my perspective) weren’t things I had thought about a ton before Jeet’s post. I have lots of axes to grind, obviously, but this particular ax, and this particular grindstone, were really (in my experience of it at least) handed to me by Jeet. In other words, from my perspective, I didn’t think of what to say, read Jeet, and fit him to my thesis — the thesis sprang out of reading Jeet. So take that for what it’s worth.

    In that vein, I think this from Jeet is revealing:

    “To put it another way, I don’t think the blog posts I’ve written repay the level of scrutiny and creative interpretation that they are currently enjoying. Better to apply all this energy on comics!”

    It’s a comment I’ve seen more or less by writers about comics before. That is, comics aren’t in fact any more valuable or interesting or likely to be worthwhile than criticism or blog posts or (according to Jeet’s emphatic meeting) Jeet’s blog posts in particular. With which I pretty strongly disagree. Creativity is creativity; it can be well done or poorly done, and there are lots of reasons to engage with it whether its good or its bad. I’d agree that Jeet’s posts here were not his finest moment — but it’s still much superior to many, many comics. And even if it weren’t, it expresses an opinion by a thoughtful guy and an influential scholar, which makes it, to me, worth discussing.

  31. I’m stunned that nobody in this dustup over denotation and connotation has remarked on the fact that Mr. Heer openly confessed to, at one point in his career, discovering subtle links betwixt certain elements of neoconservative and Trotskyist dogma. As the spokesman for plainspoken expression, I would be really impressed to find a talking point on which both the editors of October and National Review affirm unambiguously and without controversy.

    But of course no such point exists. By which I mean to say, no Trotskyist and neo-con would admit having any viewpoint in common. But that doesn’t make Heer wrong in describing and defending a link between them. Individually analyzing the aporia in the liturgy of sundry totalitarians and imperialists is far less interesting than comparing them.

    Just like Noah describing the bustle-ogling of Victorian ladies in the context of a critics’ takes on other critics’ takes on critical takes makes it a much richer and enjoyable point. It’s the peanut butter and chocolate model of meaning. Emotional content is the substance of semiotics, all proselytizing, advertising, and performance, and trying to ban feelings from discussions of culture is so depressingly pointless as to be absurd.

  32. FWIW, I also tend to agree with Jeet that, in practice, much of the best comics criticism has been through the interview form…just because of the history of comics criticism (which has been pretty spotty). It’s Jeet’s “if…then” statement that does seem to imply that interviews are, by their nature, better, or more revealing (or, more “central” anyway), than the “minority interest” of analytical essays (interviews with most comics creators would be minority interest too, wouldn’t they?–even people who love Peanuts aren’t crawling all over every Schulz interview).

    Noah’s beef with the fetishization of author intentionality is interesting. Virtually no school of literary criticism takes author intentionality seriously as an interpretive lens–On the other hand, everybody (or most everybody) uses it. It’s one of those things that is both fetishized and disavowed. Still–I think Noah’s eagerness to reject author intent can lead him to both ignore its usefulness–and claim it is absent, when it may not be (as our discussion of Swamp Thing may, or may not, reveal). As usual, there’s probably a middle ground that may be less fun to scream into the blogosphere, but is nevertheless more sensible. At least that’s what Trotsky tells me.

  33. I don’t even remember our Swamp Thing issue re authorial intent!

    I think authorial intent is fine as a data point. I think using it to shut down other discussions or points of view is problematic.

  34. Actually, I was only responding to your two blog posts! I admit I haven’t read any of the comments to either. My reaction to Gary’s reaction was based solely on your quote of his you supplied here.

    So no, I’m not trying to take a side in the resulting war; I’m just saying that the point you made in this post (that you weren’t reacting to what Jeet wrote, only to a subconscious implication you feel he made) was not at all clear in the first post. You drew an interpretive conclusion about the essay and, instead of providing supporting evidence for the conclusion itself, just reacted to it and described your opinion about it. I don’t think it’s unfair then for someone (in this case Gary) to question the initial conclusion in the first place.

    I don’t think anyone is saying it’s illegitimate to interpret the author’s underlying meaning and not just take his word as gospel. But you do have to support that “alternative” reading (or, if you choose not to, you at least can’t be surprised when someone replies with, “hey, that’s not what he said!”). Actually, you can do whatever you damn well please with your own blog! But if you want the discussion to be useful I think it’s important to lay all your cards out on the table.

  35. I’m not advocating for writing in a vacuum. I’m arguing that to engage in a critical discourse on a topic you should always offer the most charitable interpretation of your opponent’s argument. If you’re going to expand on its implications (phatic meaning, connotative dimensions, whatever) then try to make it stronger and clearer, not weaker and muddier. This is what most working academics do when they write a lit review, and this is what (I think) you are aspiring to do here.

  36. Oh, and though my above thoughts were specifically about person-to-person conversations (as your reaction to Jeet’s post was an example of how discussion works on the internet), where the entire point is to understand each other, thereby necessitating clarity, I also think this kind of cards-on-the-table transparency when constructing arguments is necessary for criticism of art and literature, as well. When were we ever able to get away with making unsupported analyses in any lit crit class we ever took, ever? Isn’t, “Hey now, Sparky, just where exactly did you come up with that idea?” the first question any literature professor asks of his/her students?

  37. Incidentally, Heer’s description of criticism as “unavoidable and essential” is a clear reference to the unfortunately exiled and rather dashing king of Zembla, who once used the phrase to describe some of the more wonderful manly traditions of that distant northern land.

  38. I say this with no intention of derailing Bert’s excellent point, but the Trotsky/neo-con connection isn’t unusual, is it? Alan Wald’s 400 page book on the rise and fall of the New York Intellectuals is about 375 pages of that point in great detail, and that’s from 1987, and I think Kristol and Podhoretz were pretty straightforward about their Trotskyite sympathies until around the time Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism. What I don’t know is to what extent they disavowed what they’d believed before: I thought it was a less abrupt transition than that.

    Is this going to boil down to disciplinary differences between history and literature/art history? I did not realize academic history had remained so unaffected by the theoretical turn: the couple of history seminars I took in grad school incorporated that perspective — less so than English obviously, but still a good bit.

    Jeet, I’d be very interested in knowing what exactly you think is not interesting about where Noah ends up and if you see it as having anything to do with your training as a historian. Do you feel the same way about academic work in literature or art history journals like October?

  39. Nate, if you think academics are interested in charitably interpreting each others work at all times, you have not read a lot of academic writing.

    And…if you feel the readings are wrong, then tell me where you differ and we can discuss it. Otherwise it’s just accusations and impugning my motives — which is no doubt fun, but isn’t something I feel I have to respond to in detail.

    Jesse, I’m not talking about conscious/subconscious. I’m talking about what the text says and implies. You don’t need Freudian readings to do that. And is you point is that the first post wasn’t sufficiently clear — well, that’s why I went back and wrote this one!

  40. I don’t think people should neglect the authority carried by Eric’s pragmatist idea of truth through compromised approximation– even if it lacks the sexiness of hyperbolic harangue. It certainly goes along with approving of interviews as a form of critical dialogue. Except when interviews are cloying marketing ephemera, which is most of the time.

    And I hope Noah’s attempts at collegial reconciliation are not be mistaken for him abrogating his B.S. detector. It’s a useful apparatus to keep around.

  41. Hmm. Maybe I’m actually missing the point of the clarifying post, too, then! :)

    If you’re saying that Jeet’s intended point is not his entire statement, and you’re also not saying that he’s also making a sub-textual, subconscious implication, then where exactly did this implication you picked up come from? I was so proud of myself when I finally figured out that your point is that Jeet subconsciously feels only artists can accurately criticize art, and now I’m wrong about that, too! Help! :)

  42. Jesse, I think subtextual and subconscious aren’t the same thing. I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but Noah’s talking more about the logical relationships between statements rather than just the statements themselves. Not subtext or subconscious, but the “algebra” of syllogisms:

    All animals are mortal. (MaP)
    All men are animals. (SaM)
    All men are mortal. (SaP)

    is the same thing as

    Major premise: All M are P.
    Minor premise: All S are M.
    Conclusion: All S are P.

    Jeet’s post isn’t strictly syllogistic, but you can still look at the logical relationships between the ideas. And that’s where you get to the point that Eric’s making: why is there this point in there about analytical essays being of minority interest? If that’s a premise, what conclusion does it support? Is it a major or a minor premise?

    I think, ultimately, the truth of the matter is probably that Jeet wasn’t really thinking of that as a premise at all for his argument: it’s more likely a bone to readers with a bias against analytic criticism, trying to get them to pay attention to the notion that “criticism” doesn’t have to be a dirty word.

    My problem with that is it’s inverse: that strategy makes “analytical criticism” the dirty word, which is one of the things that everybody here objects to.

    And when you add in the line about Spiegelman and the shelf of academic books, that’s where the “subtext” comes in — there’s an overall sense of being anti-analysis. But I’m not sure any of us would say it was “subconscious”: I’m sure Jeet knew he was sacrificing analytic, academic writing a little bit, and just felt it was worth it in order to promote more accessible writing like interviews…

  43. Noah, much as I sympathize with your basic attitude to criticism, this is just sophistry.

    However important you take intentionality to be, and whatever strange dichotomy you may set up to defend it, there’s something basically dickish in attacking somebody for something that can only be extrapolated from their writing via massive abstraction. Better merely to raise the issues it makes you think of separately, without the antagonism, I would say.

    Then we could perhaps have had an interesting discussion about comics criticism, rather than this exhausting shambles.

  44. Hey Caro,

    I’m picking up what you’re putting down. That’s a legitimate way to attack an argument, to call out the logical conclusion that the author may not have intended, at which point the author can disagree with you or say, “Oh crap, you’re right … that’s NOT what I mean, so let me formulate.”

    What you can’t do is assign that conclusion to the author’s intent (“What Jeet is saying is…”) and then not accept the author’s rebuttal when he sees where you went and tries to clarify (“Sorry, Jeet … your opinion of what you meant is suspect because you’re the author.”)

    I do however think it’s legitimate to criticize an author’s meaning the author might not have been aware of, especially if that subconscious meaning is something negative that requires challenge (like this idea that we all have an unhealthy fixation on what the artist thinks). But you can’t say the author intended it and then say it doesn’t matter what the author thinks when he challenges that. If you go to the mat on his intentions then you have to back it up.

    And again, if Jeet didn’t intend that point or make the point subconsciously then how is the statement following “What Jeet means is …” at all legitimate? I think that’s the only reason people keep picking on this point; illegitimate arguments make for inaccurate, not useful discussions. And I would wager that HU readers particularly value accurate, useful discussions.

  45. Matthias: Is it the reading-through-abstraction that bothers you — do you also take issue with Marcus’s reading? — or just the attack?

    I’m asking ’cause one’s a matter of tone and the other of approach. I strongly disagree with the idea that this type of reading shouldn’t be anchored in the source material: it is a reading and should be presented as such, but that’s not necessarily what you were saying…

  46. No, I don’t mind the reading — or, rather, I find the issues Noah raises potentially interesting — it’s just the attack that I find unnecessary and not a little unfair, in that it takes a lot of ill will to read into Jeet’s post what Noah is talking about.

    Not saying it’s impossible, merely that it seems to me slightly perverse to insist on it as a defect of his argument.

    Sorry, which one is Marcus’ reading? I’m a little lost in this interblog hash.

  47. Marcus is the writer on women’s fashion who I quote in the post.

    I don’t think anything I said about Jeet’s post qualifies as “massive abstraction.” The phatic content is quite close to the surface — so much so that Eric came down on me for even bothering to qualify them as phatic. The things I hit Jeet hardest for (talking to Spiegelman is better than a shelfful of academic books, for example) he hasn’t repudiated or even mentioned. Nor has Gary, for that matter. And calling me “dickish” is meaner than anything I said about Jeet, I’m pretty sure.

    Why do you find the emphatic/phatic dichotomy strange? It seems pretty reasonable to me, but if you have objections it’d be interesting to hear them.

  48. Marcus wrote the book on the Victorian fashion plate that Noah quotes from, the “Victorian dresses” bit above.

    I’m still so pissed off at how big a bully Tim Hodler was (and still is) in both his post and the comments that I don’t think I can speak lucidly at all to issues of courtesy and fairness on the Internet. Noah’s post didn’t seem any more hostile to me than the exchanges between your average TV pundits (and far less than Glenn Beck).

    Jesse: I’m ok with the idea that you can’t assign it to the author’s intent; I’m generally one of those critics who eschews intent. I advocate the Barthes/Foucault position that the text is the text and what the author meant to say isn’t really the point…

    I think the stories of authors and what they thought while they were writing are mostly interesting as inspiration rather than interpretation.

  49. The phatic/em dichotomy depends upon the notion of being able to separate author intent from the content of the writing. Otherwise, all you’ve got are “meanings” generated from the (author’s) writing– The attempt to do this seems dubious—(where are we getting said author’s “intent” if not from the writing–(I guess in the blogosphere you get it from the comments threads–but such things are not always available)). The dichotomy seems strange to me based on that problem…but I doubt that’s the same problem others are having.

  50. Eric, I’m not following you…can you expand a little bit on why the dichotomy depends on separating out author intent? I’m also bothered by the possessive “author’s” before “writing” as it seems to me em/phatic works just fine within the Barthes/Foucault paradigm; it’s just that the agency shifts from the author to the sign. (Sorry, I know that’s really jargony; I’m really tired…)

  51. I also think it’s worth pointing out that Noah has fostered an environment here that’s so friendly to open communication that Matthias feels ok telling him not only to his face but in front of all of us that he disapproved of something he did. Would that all (ahem) blog editors encouraged that much honesty…

  52. Caro, I talk about artist intent a bit in relation to emphatic meaning in the post. I don’t think it’s necessary to the definition; you could just say “the most obvious meaning” or in some cases “the utilitarian meaning” (what the art is designed to accomplish — i.e. sell clothes for the fashion plates.) Pointing to (apparent) intention is a useful short hand way of suggesting all of that, I think, though again not necessarily essential to the distinction.

    Matthias, where does the ill will come in or the attack? It seems like you’re more or less making the same criticims Nate is — I’m unfair and possibly duplicitous. If you’ve got specific differences of interpretation we can talk about them, but as it is, it just seems like an attack on my polemical tone made in a polemical tone.

  53. Caro…I appreciate the compliment, and I don’t want to make a big thing of it, but…if you’re talking about CC, they have open disagreements among themselves on their blog.

    And now…back to people telling me I’m an idiot!

  54. Noah, I’ll be honest: If you were talking about something I said, and you analyzed it as “he said this, but he ALSO meant this”, and I replied with, “no, I ONLY meant this” and you continued to insist that I meant things that I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with you either. Nobody likes it when people put words in their mouth.

  55. Yes, that’s pretty much it — you’ve pushed far beyond breaking point an argument against Jeet’s post that wasn’t all that interesting to begin with. Or, rather, might have been interesting if it had been framed differently, i.e. if you used it as a positive springboard for discussing his expanded, and not unproblematical, view of criticism.

    Instead you’ve been way too occupied with proving that you can extract from his piece the opinion that he criticism is justified by artists doing it. First of all, I don’t see it, not even after your extended post above, and second, why is attributing to him that point interesting in the first place? It just seems, yes, a little dickish to be going to such lengths to put an opinion into someone’s mouth that they (claim?) they don’t have, when you could have made the same points more clearly if you had let off that part of it. (That being said, the ‘shelf of books’ thing was rather unfortunate).

    And yes, I do follow your legimitization of this approach in the above post. The reason I find the emphatic/phatic distinction strange is that it seems to me unduly rigid, dividing into two something that it incredibly hard to parse accurately, and perhaps not all that useful to parse when it comes down to it. We all do ‘phatic’ readings/interpretations all the time — Jeet does it too — so I don’t find it particularly elightening to attach to them an unwieldy binary.

    And sorry for blanking on Marcus for a moment there, I got confused. Her interpretations of that image, and of Great Expectations, seem to me very interesting, but also potentially far-fetched. I would have to know more about the context of her argument to be able to judge whether I find it convincing. But I have no problem with her methodology, as I understand it.

  56. Chris, people really don’t control their own words, or even their own intentions. You put words in your own mouth all the time, and they don’t always say what you mean, or what you want them to mean. Refusing to have a discussion with folks who see different meanings in your words than you do is, as I said, a way to avoid having conversations with people who see the world from a different perspective than you do.

    And yes, people misread or misrepresent my words in arguments. And I don’t make a big deal out of it because why should I? It’s what happens in discussions.

    Hey Matthias. Well, I’m not going to go into the argument again since you’re already sick of it!

    But…I did use it as a springboard for discussing his view of criticism! In two big honking posts! If I’d sprung any farther I”d have hit the ceiling and Gary Groth would have broken my neck!

    I said the emphatic/phatic distinction was not hard and fast, and could be hard to parse (you’re misrepresenting me! Waaaaah!) The reason to split it up is because it seems to me that *other people* are splitting it up. That is, in the ways I discuss above, folks like Jeet and Gary and Tom privilege intentionality and plain readings. Thinking about emphatic/phatic helps explain *why that division is problematic*, not why it’s hard and fast.

  57. Caro, glad you see the point about the danger in assigning intent to the author where there is none. That’s exactly what was said in Noah’s first post though I don’t think it’s what he meant (actually, strike that — I’m not too sure what he meant). See! I almost assigned intent and then stopped! Conversational lubricant!

    Noah — no one is saying that it’s wrong to interpret what someone is saying and then formulate that interpretation intelligently, with all the caveats that the speaker may or may not have intended the meaning you’ve picked up. Heck, SKIP the caveats if you want (sacrificing clarity in the process) but to insist, over several thousand words, that the author really did intend that interpretation is really . . . weird.

    Chris and Matthias are enviously expressing this much better than I am, but here are the legitimate ways one could read that inferred statement about artists being the only valid critics:

    1. Jeet consciously intended to convey that meaning
    2. Jeet subconsciously intended to convey that meaning
    3. Jeet accidentally conveyed that meaning through his incorrect assembly of words

    And here are your reactions to each:

    1. Jeet did not consciously intend the meaning (this is confirmed by Jeet)
    2. Jeet did not subconsciously intend the meaning (you said above that it had nothing to do with Freudian stuff)
    3. Jeet’s formulation was not an accident because you won’t accept his clarifications and you’ve spent a whole second blog post logically proving that it was an intended message, contradicting the above two assertions

    So with all due respect, what the heck is going on here? :) This is an incredibly thoughtful thesis about the difference between stated and unstated meaning that doesn’t at all address the original concern people had; that regardless of what category of meaning it falls under, you assign it to Jeet without evidence or support, and then negatively criticize his writing for it.

    At any point you could have said, “Jeet wasn’t careful and wound up accidentally making Point X in the subtext” or, “Jeet is a subject of his artist-fetish culture and therefore couldn’t understand that he was subconsciously making Point X in the subtext.”

    Since this wasn’t said (and still isn’t), people detected the shaky foundation on which this assertion was based and called it out. See, they saw your phatic, sub-textual mistake and brought it to light! Hey now, watch it, you can’t comment on my reading of your subtext because you’re the author! (Eww, I tried to be, as Matthias said, dickish, and it didn’t feel good. Please strike those last few sentences. Now I’m gonna go read my Batman comics.)

  58. Hey Jesse. I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about Jeet’s intentions. As you say, your welcome to your own reading of my words, and to draw what conclusions you would (I didn’t say (ahem) that authors couldn’t comment — I said that other interpretations can be valid too — though of course people will distinguish based on which seems better argued/more useful/more pleasing or on other criteria.)

    All I’ve really been arguing (on this point) is that my interpretation of what Jeet said is reasonable (whatever his intentions) and doesn’t make me either immature or dickish.

    I accept Jeet’s intentions as what he claims they are. I think he has very conscious beliefs that made their way into his post in ways he wasn’t perhaps intending. For example, I think Jeet generally believes that creators of comics and what they have to say are more important than what critics have to say (the Spiegleman vs. academic books suggests that fairly strongly, yes?)

    Jeet didn’t mean to imply that the critical participation of comics is the buttress for criticism’s worth — but in constructing his argument, he works off of presuppositions that point him, and the reader, in that direction. That’s not intentional perhaps; it’s not subconscious — but it’s not entirely accidental either, if accidental is meant as a “random mistake”.

    The point in these posts (from my perspective) is not to show that Jeet’s intentions aren’t what he says they are. It’s to show how and why what he said, whatever those intentions, connects to a particular view of comics and of criticism. The controversy this has generated could well be a sign of my limitations as a writer (an admission Gary will gleefully pounce upon should he find time to respond here, I’m sure.) But I’m also attempting to show that I believe the resistance here is tied into the view of comics and of criticism which I’ve identified as a problem.

    For instance; your view of intention as conscious/subconscious/accident seems…well, let’s say it seems like an odd position to take to anyone who has engaged with any critical conversations over the last century, at the very least. The failure to engage with that critical conversation, or to see it as having much value, is exactly what I’m saying is a problem in my posts (in part through phatic examples — that is, by engaging with a recent critical text that I’ve found helpful and inspiring.)

  59. Thanks, Jesse: I do likewise see the danger, though, in authors feeling protective about either their intent or their writing. It’s like a kind of psychological copyright that locks down ideas and interpretations behind limitations that are fundamentally social rather than intellectual.

    Those social expectations tend to derail conversations into this kind of “I said; you said” and into quibbles that are really just copyediting questions over turns of phrase. Focusing on copyediting issues because of their social implications turns discussions that can be a lot of fun into something enormously tedious. It seems like we could be less sensitive and defensive and give each other the benefit of the doubt, especially in situations where the author clarifies that no bullying or insult was intended. If someone feels bullied or insulted, a writer should apologize for the tone and phrasing that led to that, but that doesn’t require complete capitulation to that other person on the point.

    That’s what Noah’s getting at when he says “I don’t make a big deal out of it because why should I? It’s what happens in discussions” and also when he talks about “creative misinterpretation.”

    More philosophically, if you look at that link I sent, it talks about an “author function.”

    To illustrate this point, Foucault develops what he describes as “the author function”. He argues that the author exists as the creator of a work but his individuality becomes irrelevant upon the coming together of the text, because it is language which defines a text; an author is simply a name, not a code of meanings.

    Foucault maintains that the author himself is a character; a work of fiction, who, in the process of writing, adopts certain personas and emotions: “Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, nor the present indicative refer exactly either to the writer or the moment in which he writes.”

    So you’re right when you call the implication of intent a “conversational lubricant,” but it lubricates by preventing a critic from having to say “Jeet’s text says” over and over and over, just to avoid what is essentially a social nuisance.

    I don’t mean to imply that respect isn’t important, it’s vital. Apologies and a willingness to set defensiveness aside are invaluable. But it’s just that a little flexibility — quicker to forgive than to snark — on this issue probably wouldn’t have many consequences…

    But the inverse, prioritizing the social over the intellectual, does have consequences: it’s one of those things that makes the comics blogosphere feel like merely an outpost of the subculture rather than a place where professionals talk about valuable things, where you can find online magazines equivalent to Salon or Slate or Senses of Cinema (etc. etc.), and where the level of discussion is stimulating and high.

  60. Noah,
    I’m writing this on the fly, so please excuse the sloppiness…
    I didn’t mean that all academics read charitably at all times, though I can certainly see how it might seem as though I did.
    What I did mean was that even when academics disagree (or even disparage) an argument, they tend to be more persuasive when they give the other party a fair reading before railing on them. Again, I read plenty of academic writing that does not do this-it’s part of my job as a professor. The problem with many of these articles is that the writer, when she does a good job, displays a lot of knowledge but provides a fairly simple point and doesn’t elaborate it, and needs to revise and resubmit. Or the author does a bad job, misreads the other author’s argument, and the article gets rejected in peer review.
    So this is a blog… a different genre. The closest thing it has to peer review is a comments section. Your reading of Jeet received a mixed response int he comments section, and now any point you wanted to make about criticism is hanging out at the edges of a bigger argument. This is fine for a blog, but it seems bad for focused discussion about criticism, much less its practice. And yes, I realize that focus can be overrated, and that (to extend the university metaphor) a blog (this one in particular) has more in common with a graduate seminar than an academic journal, I do think your tendency to misrepresent other people’s arguments (for example, Gary distancing his magazine from the fanzine’s origins) makes the discussion more combative and less productive than it might otherwise be.

  61. Hey Nate — this isn’t a response to the points in your comment but I’m just wondering in light of the discussion earlier (about the assumptions of history versus literature) what discipline you work in? Would you mind sharing that with us?

    I agree with you it’s more like a graduate seminar: I personally tend to think of HU as the Best Beatnik Coffeehouse in the Blogosphere…and you know, occasionally Jackson Pollock gets in a fight.

  62. Hey Nate. I really did just misunderstand Gary. I think I said as much, or tried to (it was maybe hard to hear over the horrible rending noise of Tom Spurgeon and me clashing.)

    Your faith in peer review is touching and made me smile — but come on. Beyond that, I’d actually vigorously contest your suggestion (phatic, at least) that the best place to have these discussions is behind the dispassionate walls of the ivory tower, whether an academic journal or a graduate seminar. The current split between the academy and an audience of any sort is a huge problem.

    This discussion here is messy, sure…but that’s because it includes different kinds of people who have actual different views and perspectives. Taking it to a place where everyone is collegial and knows who Foucault is would make it a different argument…but it wouldn’t just be different because it was more focused.

    What it comes down to is that you’re taking exception to my polemical tone. But polemic is the popular genre for intellectual controversy — not the only one, sure, but one of the biggies. You seem to think more combative must mean less productive. I can’t do better in that regard than to refer you to Bert Stabler’s comment above.

    Caro — You win the award for most insulting thing said about me on this thread. Comparing me to the Beats…that’s just low.

  63. You’re craaazy, Clyde. The Beats are illumination. And you’re our very own Dean Moriarty…Dean Mor-i-ar-ty…

  64. Sorry to imply that this discussion should be held behind the walls of the ivory tower. I really did not mean that. Nor do I have some sort of naive faith in peer review (show me an academic in the humanities that does… especially one in the humanities post-Sokol). Nor do I have a problem with polemics, or a polemical style.
    You actually do pinpoint what I have a problem with, and its a small problem, a problem that has yet to stop me from reading your blog. What bothers me is when the polemic follows from a misreading (or misunderstanding) rather than a genuine target. This is, I think the case, with the Heer post that set this all off. I, like others who have detailed the exchange in detail, did not think you represented Heer’s argument accurately. As a result, your points about what constituted good vs. bad criticism, or what constitutes a legitimate basis for criticism, gets drowned out by the rending you cite above. This isn’t to say that good things haven’t come out of it. Just that some (probably avoidable) anger and working at cross purposes limited the dividends.
    And to answer Cairo’s question, my specialty is contemporary rhetorical theory, which places me variously in the fields of English and Communication (I’m presently in the latter). Did you have a specific question re. the theory/history discussion? I can say that I don’t think my theoretical assumptions diverge too much from your own.

  65. Ah, but again, misreadings are subject to interpretation, I’d say. I’ve tried my best to explain where they come from in this case, with the result that some have continued to lambast me for my conclusion, others have said that my interpretation seems reasonable, and at least one has said that I’m being overly defensive since Jeet in fact said flat out what I said was only implied phatically. But so it goes.

    I can speak to the place of theory in history actually, at least to some extent. History in the academy is divided on the place of theory. Many historians embrace it, and do work that isn’t far removed from literary or anthropological studies. Still, there’s more skepticism about those approaches than in some other disciplines, and I believe you can still get by without really embracing theory in history in a way that would be a lot harder in literature.

    I was in grad school 15 years ago or something, so things might have changed…but my impression is they haven’t all that much, at least not in that regard.

  66. Hey Nate — you answered my question; I didn’t have any specific followups about it and didn’t notice much divergence either.

    One place where our assumptions might diverge a little is in the extent to which orality enters into the reading protocol for prose: I tend to read even the most formal prose on a blog mostly as if it were spoken in a conversation — hence my coffeehouse analogy, and my desire to bracket copyediting. But it’s an intellectual sociality (hence my reference to the Beats), so some of the assumptions from reading protocols for more formal writing come into play.

    I type fast — I worked my way through grad school as a transcriptionist for the Dean’s office — so when I write a comment, about 80% of the time it’s essentially an IM. Is IM speech or writing? Which rhetorical protocols apply there?

    I think that the fluid blurring between writing and speaking that happens on IM is very characteristic of this blog, especially in the comments but it filters into the posts as well; it’s one of the things that I like so much about it, but I also think it’s one of the things that gives people heartburn…

  67. Noah, I must say it doesn’t surprise me a bit that history is more skeptical of theory…

    I should have said, Nate, that you answered my question but you’re welcome to expound upon the role and place of theory in the academy and out if you like!

  68. Many folks with varying opinions on psychoanalysis would say that, unconsciously or not, people tend to not only say what they mean (even when it’s fiction, lying, etc.), but more than they intended to mean. They didn’t intend to say it, but they still *meant* it.

    Noah sort of already said that, but all this talk of rhetorical transparency and reasonable compromise just seems to keep people from discussing anything about artist interviews or corset-ripping or Trotskyists in the Bush Administration or anything fun.

  69. Oy, one more thing:

    Nate: I disagree that Noah’s post didn’t hit a legitimate target when he picked up on an over-emphasis on conversational criticism versus analytic. I think that’s a very legitimate target.

    It seems to me that the argument you’re making is a rhetorical one: that Noah didn’t successfully get the audience for the post to the point because of the rhetorical choices he made. A lot of people got derailed by the discrepancies among their reading of what Jeet said, Jeet’s reading of what Jeet said, and Noah’s reading of what Jeet said.

    I think that’s different from saying it’s a misreading. I don’t think it is a misreading, at all, of anything except Jeet’s intent (which is besides the point IMO) but as you say — peer review indicates that the audience couldn’t get past the rhetorical assumptions to understand why it was a valid reading.

    We never managed to really talk about Noah’s point because of all the communication interference. That doesn’t mean Noah’s point started from a misreading though: it means Noah’s writing presumed different assumptions than his audience actually had (or at least a vocal subset). This post was an attempt to correct that, and it’s been fascinating to me to see how deeply those assumptions diverge…

  70. Yeah. Bert’s basically got it. And I think, for what it’s worth that folks are pretty much blaming the victim when they accuse me of dragging the conversation into endless rounds of nothing. It’s precisely my effort to move from individual statements to broader theoretical concerns that causes people to freak the fuck out. The “misrepresentations” are where I see Jeet meaning more than he says — pointing to differences of interpretation that matter even when he’s bent on making fairly innocuous points. (And yes, that happens with Nate too, whose academia/blogs dichotomy means more than he says even when he later disavows it. Discourse will take you places.)

    So…anyone want to think about the insufficient queerness of comics discourse, which is one of my more phatic points in the essay? About the sadistic desire implicit in critical discourse and the implications thereof? About my last line which implies that criticism is more art than art and blogging is more art than either? About the specter of adolescence and senescence in comics criticism, and whether either of them are positive or negative? Or would we rather all shake our fingers at me for being interested in that stuff and thinking that despite himself Jeet speaks to those issues as well?

  71. Caro…the post is also about communication interference though…which means that I’ve been able to use a lot of the interference to do further explication. As such, I actually think it’s been a lot more productive than the first go round, despite various bumps (and Bert’s irritation…and mine to some extent).

  72. Only Horton the Elephant can actually say what he means…and mean what he says.

  73. I agree, Noah, but notice how much communication interference there continues to be: the assumptions that led to the interference in the original post go very deep. And they’re the same, deep assumptions that lead to the point you originally noticed: the valorization of interviews over analytic essays.

    That’s why Bert’s Purloined Letter reference is so apt: the letter always arrives at its destination – writing always means what it says, even when the writer didn’t mean to say it.

    The comments thread here has largely been about decoding the resistance to the ideas in both your original post and here, rather than decoding the ideas. Although I think your explication is indeed productive, I think the resistance is still pretty strong…

  74. Well, that’s the way it goes. It’d be nice if everybody read it and suddenly wanted to cross-dress — but I can’t say I exactly expected that to be the outcome….

  75. Ugh! Just lost a comment due to lack of captcha phrase.
    I think you’re right, Caro, in noting that my primary issue is with Noah’s rhetorical style. I think it is too often self-defeating. Hell, Noah more or less makes the case for me at the end of post #74, when he bemoans the fact that people are taking him to task over style, and not for the substance of his argument. I’d submit that this is because the substance of his argument-inasmuch as we want to make style/substance distinctions-is underdeveloped. How can you expect to have a fruitful discussion about the vexed relationship about art when the call to do so is tacked on to the end of a response to another critic about another blog post?

  76. Sure, but doesn’t it speak specifically to the role of adolescence — or rather of intellectual maturity — in comics criticism?

    This is a resistance deeply tied to nostalgia and to nostalgic identification — the “retrospective idealization” of the author or creator as the anchor and truth of meaning. That’s one thing you lose if you topple the interview from its pride of place.

    I think this is probably the mechanism by which the art comics subclique has managed to reproduce the dynamics of the larger superhero subculture: they’ve simply replaced the superhero with the Author, without actually disrupting the nostalgic relationship to the comic art form. That’s how you get the “fetishization of interviews” you reference in the original post.

  77. But actually the discussion of the other blog posts are tacked onto the critical discussion.

    And, moreover, the subject is actually about comics discourse. As Bert notes above, I’m talking about comics critics looking at comics critics looking at art in the context of women looking at women. The split between style and substance you’re talking about is thematized in the post (in multiple ways.) You’re complaint that the content is undeveloped manages to entirely fail to engage with the content. I don’t see how that is my fault.

    Basically, no one is willing to extend to me the courtesy I extended to Jeet — that is, doing a reading which goes somewhere. I would argue that, far from misrepresenting Jeet, I did what good readers do — thought about his argument and responded creatively. There’s a lot of frills and bows for you to put on in that post up above. If you insist on ignoring them, I can’t help you.

  78. We’re only at comment number 83, Noah, c’mon. We have at least 100 more to go before you give up on us!

  79. Re: queerness in criticism… The Huffington Post has a thing today about great homoerotic photographic moments in sports. Someone should get their intern working on that for comics.

  80. I’m senior to you whippersnappers– in age, if not in wisdom– so my training in criticism and analysis of text was classical, i.e. pre-Foucault (pace the British school of ‘new criticism’ of the late ’40’s that never reached my Lycéee.)

    Thus I assert my olde fogeyism by registering my abhorrence of the lazy, complacent subjectivity involved in treating all texts as ‘readerly’. This is particularly mendacious when using text ‘readings’ as tools to attack one’s opponent.

    If not entirely ad hominem, it’s sure as shit not ad rem.

    If Jeet states ‘x+y=z’, you may prove or disprove his statement; but when you insist that he REALLY said ‘w+y=z’ because that’s your ‘reading’ of what he said, I cry foul.

    Sorry, but to put it vulgarly– in argument, connotation drools, denotation rules. To assert the contrary is to elevate rhetoric above reason: sophistry. And, Noah and Caro, I’m sorry to say that your continued efforts to justify mis-stating Jeet’s actual meaning smack of the sophist.

    A minor point– Noah, be careful with your metaphoric transpositions from one field of discourse (linguistics) to another (polemics);

    ‘Thank you’ and ‘You’re welcome’ are not phatic statements, they are performative statements. ‘Nice weather’ is a typical phatic statement.

    I really don’t understand or accept your use of ‘phatic’ to describe all accessory/extra/connotative elements in either a picture (cf your Victorian fahion plate) or a verbal statement (Jeet’s original CC post). Please enlighten this grasshopper.

  81. Alex:

    “To assert the contrary is to elevate rhetoric above reason:”

    You call it sophistry; Derrida calls it truth.

    You can’t dismiss 50 years of philosophy with a aphorism, no matter how catchy! That’s lazy and complacent for sure…

    I don’t understand your bit about the British school of “new criticism”, though…can you explain?

  82. I’m not sure why the burden should be on the reader to do a reading of your post that goes somewhere, and I’m not ready to concede that you did Jeet a courtesy by using him as a platform for a your meta-criticism.
    But in the spirit of cooperation, here we go. As noted earlier your point is that for comics criticism to grow it must take itself seriously as an art… as something more than boosterism (team comics) or evaluation that results in a buy this/not that conclusion. One way to do this is to pay close attention to the excess of meaning in the text, and to explain how they can outstrip in their capacity for meaning the author’s intent and insights into them. One way to do this, according to you, is by training the lens of queer theory on the object. This all seems sensible enough to me. The thing is, I just don’t see it as particularly controversial. The controversy, at least as I saw it, had to do with the reasons underlying HU/Groth dust-up. Is Noah/Gary?Jeet mean or mistaken… is this a substantive disagreement or a flame war? This is the conversation to which I was trying to contribute.

  83. But they’re the same conversation, Nate. And if it’s uncontroversial, maybe you could explain to Alex why the last fifty years of theory (not just queer theory) could be productively utilized by comics criticism.

    The burden is always on the reader to interact with the text. The text can’t read.

  84. Noah: fantasy is exactly where I was taking it next: it ties into your point in this piece about the very self-conscious effort to get rid of any juvenile connotations. Supplanting the Author for the superhero is getting rid of the explicit (emphatic?) elements of fantasy — instead of taking these fantastic figures as the object of the nostalgia, it gets displaced onto a real figure, so that the nostalgic person can ground him or herself in the “grown up” categories of history and intent.

    What bothers me about this is not in fact that it’s anti-intellectual – it’s that it is anti-imagination. It grounds the criticism of comics in a realist, objective epistemology that doesn’t resonate at all with the powerful imaginative and subjective epistemology that is suggested by the art form. I suppose that brings us right back to your oft-made point that criticism is art.

    I have to wonder whether this is a problem primarily in North American comics criticism: it seems like some of my issues with the hyper-realism of NA art comics (emphasis on autobiography, politics, etc.) may be connected to this mis-identification of where the perjorative “juvenile” label is coming from: it’s doesn’t come from fantasy, it comes from nostalgia. Maturity isn’t about replacing fantasy with reality: it’s about appreciating the difference…

  85. “The hyper-realism of NA art comics”

    Could you expound on this? I feel like you’re using a narrow definition here, but maybe I’m mistaken?

  86. Two fundamental issues are at play here as far as I can see (although I might have just forgotten one of them).

    First (and maybe, now, last) is Noah’s notion that one should read criticism/blog posts the same way one reads “art” (however one wants to define that tricky term–humorously, to me, Noah’s definition seems not dissimilar from Scott McCloud’s). Above, Alex (?) argues that “in argument, connotation drools, denotation rules”. That is, “in argument” the point is all that matters. Making the point clear, then, is the only responsibility (not to entertain, etc.). In art, obviously, the reverse is usually held to be the case. Many (most?) would argue, for instance, that “dogmatic” art is bad art. If something tells you what to think or believe (like George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm), then it may be a good “argument”–but it’s crappy “art,” since art is all about subtleties, ambiguities, complexities, etc.

    This kind of division comes out of a variety of places (Romanticism, New Criticism), but clearly it’s one Noah wants to “deconstruct.” That is, he wants us to see criticism as art (and, potentially, art as criticism). So, criticism is not some “end product” which tells us whether to buy, read, or view art…rather it is a performance in itself. If this is the case, all the rest follows. To read Jeet’s blog post as art is to say that it is potentially as ambiguous, rich, beautiful, and “connotative” as old Mona Lisa. Making it art is as simple as “reading” it as art. Jeet never thought he was making art, and just wants to be understood denotatively…but Noah insists otherwise.

    Some of this is built on a deconstructive view (as Caro mentions above with the Derrida reference). That is to say, a deconstructionist (or poststructuralist if you prefer) will note that a strict “denotative” view is impossible. Words themselves have so many meanings that they will always “exceed” any strict intent (or strict denotation). Try as you might in “comments” sections, you will always say more than you mean to (and less) because of the nature of language. It can’t be pinned down.

    Some folks above don’t buy into this and think/say, “Hey, Jeet was pretty clear–Why all the bullshit ‘interpretation'”.

    Others (Caro/Noah) will continue to insist that in any language there is some “excess”. It is this “excess” that Noah finds interesting, that he associates with “art,” and which he sees as “productive” (in that it creates more language, utterances, posts–themselves “excessive” of any denotative meaning…and therefore, productive of “beauty” or “art.”

    All of this makes sense to a “theory-head” who reads Derrida (and other sixties French philosophers) in his/her spare time. For those who don’t tend to think about those things, it just seems that Noah is getting off on misrepresenting other bloggers. As usual, the truth may lie somewhere in between.

    For my own part, I see the point Noah’s making. It’s part of a continuing effort on his part to break down various hierarchies in art and comics. Making so much out of an “innocent” blog post indicates how that much could be made of anything…and not just the familiar icons of “high art.”

    Still, I tend to agree with Jeet that there may be diminishing returns in treating Jeet’s post this way. Maybe there isn’t that much “there, there”–Would it have been more productive to just begin with a comic Noah likes and to tease out meanings of various kinds one can find therein that probably weren’t “intended.” By affixing his point to a flame war about comics interviews, Noah’s point about the “excess” of all signification seems bogged down in a flame war about the flame war (ok, maybe this doesn’t qualify as a flame war–but it’s an argument more than a discussion). Affixing the same points to a different “object” might have been more productive…but what the hell.

    Those two points, again, what were they?

    1) Does it make sense to read criticism/argumentation and “art” identically? Noah says yes–Many here say no–I’m not so sure.

    2) Is our goal in reading/commenting/blogging “communication” (understanding each other transparently)? Or…is such a goal “sophistry”–an impossibility given the excesses of language/signification. If we’re not aiming for communication, what are we aiming for? Beauty? Is this the place to find it?

    FWW- The most interesting points Noah makes are about infantilization…about how Gary, etc. try to infantilize him…and how Gary is always expressing anxiety about the infantile nature of comics past and present. That showed some interesting insight on why this “argument” may actually “matter” to some degree in the broader context of comics criticism.

  87. Somehow I still think the answer to all this has to do with Podhorentz and other Partisan Review pinkos turning into imperialists because of Hannah Arendt. Is that what happened?

    And is there any associated need to parse why fascism is so much homoerotic than socialism, which is in turn ever so much more tolerant of non-traditional and/or promiscuous everything?

    And now that Christopher Hitchens is an imperialist, does that make him more like a superhero?

    Unrelated note: Always save your comment before you hit “submit.” This captcha regime is brutal.

  88. Yeah, that’s bad phrasing Cole; you’re right.
    Hyper-realism is probably wrong: just hyper-emphasized realism. A lot of importance is put on realism and a lot of critical credibility is given to realism. Much of what people admire about Maus, for example, comes from the ways it represents real events and reactions to them and their significance – it’s realistic in the same way that Rushdie is realistic. Even magic realism is realism… I don’t mean documentary, just that concern with things as they are, depictions of everyday experiences.

    I also don’t mean to assert that this is unique to NA comics — European art comics may share this realism. I just don’t know…I only know it’s very common in NA ones, and often very, very critically appreciated. It’s the critical appreciation I’m saying is “hyper” though – not the comics themselves: there are lots of cartoonists working in non-realistic modes in the US.

  89. TECHNICAL TANGENT

    On the captcha thing — I’m using Chrome and if I get a captcha error when I click the back button my post is still there, unless I somehow stupidly refresh the page…

    If I refresh the page it does disappear, but just going back and forward doesn’t erase it. In Chrome at least. Dunno if that helps anybody.

    /TECHNICAL TANGENT

  90. Or, to respond to Eric, the truth is perhaps not “somewhere in between.” That kind of neutralism is a stance that denies itself as a stance and pretens to be some kind of meta-lens, or filter. Caro’s excellent point about boring grownup realism in art comics as aestheticized insecurity makes this point too.

    So yeah, I would say this is a philosophical (epistemological) discussion. You can’t be a Trotskyist and a neoconservative. If you go from one stance to the other, the truth isn’t a static spot in between– it’s in that movement.

  91. “Chris, people really don’t control their own words, or even their own intentions. You put words in your own mouth all the time, and they don’t always say what you mean, or what you want them to mean. Refusing to have a discussion with folks who see different meanings in your words than you do is, as I said, a way to avoid having conversations with people who see the world from a different perspective than you do.”

    Except you’re not “seeing the world in a different perspective”, you’re not leaving anything open to interpretation, you’re saying that your interpretation is the correct one and that Heer is either lying or he’s ignorant about the words that he wrote in the first place.

    You can interpret Heer’s words six ways from Sunday but once you start claiming you can read his mind, everything falls to bits. Heer, Groth, and everyone who doesn’t believe that you’re a psychic are going to rush to his defense, and I can’t believe that you wouldn’t understand why.

  92. Jeet: Ezra Pound “flirted” with fascism? And I suppose Ted Bundy was executed for heavy petting. I had a professor in college who was one of Pound’s students and a longtime devotee who made it pretty clear Pound was a dedicated and unrepentant fascist who escaped being executed for treason only by friends dummying up an insanity plea for him, but the mental hospital where he was incarcerated (and where my professor regularly visited) provided him with his own private wing that was outfitted like a palace, where Pound regularly held court for the literati and the various prostitutes and female students constantly brought in for him.

    Now, PG Wodehouse, HE was just a dotty old idiot…

  93. Steven — reeeealllly? That’s a marvelous story. I’d never heard the bit about the mental hospital. Do tell us more…has anybody written about it? Better yet, are there pictures of this place?

  94. Hey Chris. I keep saying that I don’t think Jeet is lying and that I don’t think I can read his mind. What I can do is read his words.

    And I do understand why people can’t see that. I explain why in the post.

  95. Oh…and yeah, I missed that “flirted with fascism” thing. That’s ridiculous; Pound did radio broadcasts for Mussolini during the war (thus the treason trial.) He was a vicious anti-Semite too.

  96. I had to give up on reading these comments, but Noah’s dual categories (in the original post, mind you) reminded my of the types of meaning David Bordwell discusses in his book on criticism “Making Meaning”.

    Some notes on the book at my blog: http://madinkbeard.com/blog/archives/making-meaning-notes

    The relevant portion (me quoting me summarizing Bordwell):

    Bordwell looks as criticism as a practical art and an act of problem solving in building up an interpretation from a film. He differentiates multiple types of meaning that are made from a work (film):

    1. Referential: This the meaning created by constructing the diegetic world, that is the basic putting together of images/words/sounds/etc to understand the work literally. This can be pulling together the connections between characters in a realistic work of fiction or figuring out the rules of a fantasy or science fiction world. Generally this is an easy process though in some cases this could be very complicated (like Last Year at Marienbad, or perhaps Mulholland Drive).

    2. Explicit: This is the direct “message” of a work, the “point.”

    Bordwell considers the referential and explicit meanings the “literal” meanings and part of “comprehension.”

    3. Implicit: These meanings are more in line with the traditional idea of “theme.” These are indirect, symbolic, hidden, etc.

    4 .Symptomatic: These are “repressed”, involuntary meanings, often showing the opposite than the explicit or implicit meaning. Often economic, political, or ideologically based. This is the kind of thing you’ll see where the critic makes the film say something that seems the opposite of what is shown. Heavy Freudian influence.

    Bordwell considers the latter types of meaning as part of “interpretation,” which is his primary focus in this book.

  97. Not that this should be surprising– I went to the Alan Wald book about the rise and decline of the New York intellectuals Caro mentioned in Google Books, and the strategic shift seemed to have quite a bit to do with neoconservatives maintaining the embattled stance of their youth, but switching out old terms for new ones: replacing “Stalinism” with the “New Left,” making support for Israel the only escape from anti-Semitism-baiting, and substituting atavistic patriotism for Leninist utopianism. And thus, “reasonable” reformism morphed into racist homophobic neo-colonialism.

    The point being that how you say things can have a lot more to do with what you think you’re saying than the actual signifiers that happen to slip in there, according to which side your bread happens to currently be buttered.

  98. Problem with #’s 1-4 is that you can’t separate them out. One persons explicit, is another’s implicit and (more importantly), vice versa. If you could actually sort these things out easily, there would never be misinterpretation…but all interpretation is misinterpretation. The only way for Noah (or whoever) to represent Jeet’s point accurately and wholly would be to cut and paste it. Even doing this would change its meaning though. Seeing Jeet’s post cut-and-pasted into the HU blog (for instance) could be read as parody/satire, etc., where it is unlikely to in its own “original” context.

    Still, at some point, this becomes more “game” than anything useful. Despite Bert’s shot at my supposed “neutralism,” to ignore the possibility/actuality that language can actually communicate meaning from one place to another (and not just “create” new meanings) is attractive theoretically, but impracticable, and decidedly unattractive, at times, in practice. Wilfull misreading may be “fun,” but it pisses people off unnecessarily. Occasionally, there is benefit in doing so, insofar as the slaying of sacred cows is beneficial, but sometimes the cows are too small to make a burger out of. Jeet’s post makes a pretty small burger…

  99. Oh, and, from Wald, a golden quote from Heritage Foundation member Owen Harries, who, in a guide to rhetorical etiquette for the political class, insists that one never “confuse polemical exchanges with genuine intellectual debate.”

    I would be hard put to so effectively tar the compromise-truth and the authentic-truth arguments with the same brush.

  100. RE. Comment #89… the point seems uncontroversial to the eyes of this pomo whippersnapper. My main point was simply that Derridian play, when deployed in the wrong discourse community, can derail the critical train. And yeah, the train wreck can have value in itself (Limited Inc.), but it can also be plain nasty (dysfunctional conference paper).
    Eric summed up what I was trying to get at when he wrote:
    “I tend to agree with Jeet that there may be diminishing returns in treating Jeet’s post this way. Maybe there isn’t that much “there, there”–Would it have been more productive to just begin with a comic Noah likes and to tease out meanings of various kinds one can find therein that probably weren’t “intended.” By affixing his point to a flame war about comics interviews, Noah’s point about the “excess” of all signification seems bogged down in a flame war about the flame war.”
    I’m pretty sure this isn’t a flame war, but it isn’t Limited Inc either.

  101. Gah! Can’t keep up! It’s kind of amusing that one of the memes semi-frequently deployed against me in this and related discourses is that if I don’t shape up no one will want to talk to me.

    Alex (from way back when) asks why I’m using emphatic/phatic incorrectly. As I tried to say at the beginning of the post, my use of the terms is pretty emphatically a creative misreading. I still like them though; they’re obviously less specific than Derik’s categories, but I think that’s maybe not a bad thing in this context.

    Eric and Nate…you academics are all the same! Seriously though — I think you’re both somewhat missing the point here in few ways. Maybe the best way to get at that is to say that the emphatic/phatic doesn’t map onto truth/beauty the way Eric wants it to. That is, Eric suggests that I”m interested in beauty, plenty, etc., and that therefore I should focus on something other than Jeet’s post, which doesn’t have as much to offer in that regard as, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets.

    The problem is my post is about comics discourse; that’s the subject I want to talk about. The choice of topic isn’t a neutral way to generate beautiful content; the nature of the content matters to me. And the reason it matters is that phatic isn’t just frills…or rather, more accurately, phatic is frills, but the frills are truth too. Meaning isn’t the hidden truth inside the writer’s head; it’s the surface with where you see the bows and the ruffles and the desire. When I said the emphatic contact was that I was right, I was sort of joking, but not entirely. Truth is part of beauty and vice versa. It isn’t a choice between one or the other. You need emphatic and phatic for both.

    Bert’s pointed out some ways that this is the case…but Steven Grant’s brought up maybe a clearer example. Jeet referred to Pound as having “flirted with facism” — a good frilly metaphor.

    “(I could have added that there have also been many fine writers who had flirted with fascism, notably Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis). So, my point was not “they’re all a bunch of commies” but rather that aesthetic judgements can’t simply be made along political lines, a position I still adhere to.”

    What did Jeet mean here? He tells us what his point is; it’s that aesthetic judgements can’t simply be made along political lines. However, as Steven implies, the particular rhetorical strategy here loads the dice. Pound “flirted with fascism”, so it makes sense to continue to respect him (and his intentions, presumably) and not make rash aesthetic judgments. But as Steven points out, Pound was not merely a flirt; he was a committed fascist and a traitor (and, as I noted, an anti-semite). If you don’t pay attention to Jeet’s rhetoric and phatic content here (as Steven did, and I did not) you can’t follow one of the truths of what Jeet’s doing…which is making weasily excuses for an extremely unsavory fellow — presumably because said unsavory fellow happens to be a canonical poet (as Steven notes, lots of people made excuses for Pound along those lines.)

    The point here is not that Jeet sympathizes with fascism even a little bit (which I’m sure he doesn’t.) The point isn’t even that he seems to pretty consistently want to give artists whatever benefit of the doubt he can (which I think he tends to do, but isn’t necessarily the issue here.) Rather, the point is that, as Bert suggests, phatic content is important not because (or not solely because) it’s phatic, but because it’s content. How you say what you say is part of what you say. As a reader and a writer, I think it would be not only less enjoyable, but also actually dishonest not to respond to both phatic and emphatic content.

    So if you’re encouraging me to go off and write about sonnets rather than blog posts because that would be more productive, my response is — I am looking at this now. Not just because it’s the pretty thing I happened to pick up, but because it’s important to me for various reasons, which are somewhat explicable (I’m a comics blogger, so thinking about comics criticism matters) and somewhat mysterious (as truth and desire and art are always mysterious.) Something else might be more productive if the goal was just to generate random bits of dialogue…but that’s not the goal.

  102. I wrote “flirted with fascism” because I love alliteration too much, not because I want to deny that Pound was a fascist. So, if I had been more more accurate and less alliterative I would have said that Pound and Lewis were pro-fascist. But again, I don’t know where this gets us since the fact that I think we should make a distinction between politics and aesthetics is made stronger, not weaker, if we say that Pound was a great poet as well as being a fascist.

  103. It does make your argument stronger. I was actually going to point that out in the comment. I don’t disagree with your argument overall in terms of politics and art. My point is that what you said (out of an understandable love of alliteration) has meaning, even if that meaning is something more or less than what you intended.

  104. I couldn’t get through all the comments- you people went to too much college, but I guess I wanted to say that, for me…

    -Jeet’s point that “…then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.” is a completely foreign worldview, although I would bet dollars to doughnuts it is one that HU agrees with emphatically.

    -Noah, the emphatic point of your argument is, as I see it, that you can take Jeet’s words to mean anything you damn well please, that any attempt he makes at clarifying his original position or solidifying the argument he intended to make is beside the point, your responsibility as a critic is to scour his asides and allusions and presume to know his own mind better than he does. I anticipate you disagreeing with that assertion, but as far as I can tell it pretty much sums up what you have said above. When Jeet stops by with the express purpose of explaining himself, he is rebuffed, with quoted evidence and close reading.

    -the phatic interpretation of your post, to this lay-critic, is that you are perfectly within your rights to treat any writing as a frog awaiting dissections, but that you come across as a prick while doing it. That could be the increased hostility and loathing I am surely misquoting you as saying all art deserves, although I will say our definition of art is quite dissimilar. At one end, I think I understand you as believing that we should demand quite a bit more of our art than people traditionally do, and at the other, you criticize (in the more neutral sense) everything you see as if it deserved the ‘art’ treatment. If you treat such a large quantity of things as art, yet believe that we should demand so much more of it, the you are setting yourself up to be quite hostile to quite many things. Get yourself in some arguments that way, I’d bet.

    -your method of criticism seems at one end to take the death of the author to its very end-point, pushing all instances of biography and intent to the veruy back of the woodshed, but then at other points seems very intent on encompassing every bit of information as ammo. Not a complaint, just a poorly worded thought/observation. You guys are the educated ones, I don’t know, I got kicked out of high school.

    -I keep hearing you take offense at all the grown-ups infantilizing you with their references to boyish things, but these ARE comics, and considering your kind words about twelve year olds above, I thought a subtle reference to sophomore science class could be a fine compliment. Plus, frogs!!

    comics are soooooo cool!

    (in this instance, all snarkiness fully intended, and expected in return. I think it is pretty cool that at HU, your thoughts will be acknowledged and responded to. You may alway be itching for a fight, but most bullies wilt at confrontation, something y’all never do. I like that a lot.)

  105. Hey Mateo. How am I supposed to follow through on the snarkiness when you’re so sweet in the last paragraph? I can’t do it, man.

    I don’t exactly think that criticism or art are either unavoidable or inevitable. I guess I’d maybe agree that both are…but I’d add that that’s not necessarily at all the semi-lyrical thing Jeet suggests. It could be bad criticism after all. It could be bad art. If art is unavoidable, that’s a challenge, not a triumph — and a challenge we often fail at, being human.

    Pointing out that there are phatic meanings doesn’t suggest that all meaning is subjective. I think it’s legitimate to read what someone writes and interpret it without necessarily being limited by their later (or earlier) statements of intent. For example, you’ll note above that I never said “Jeet loves green puppies.” He may or may not, but there’s nothing about it in anything he’s written here, either phatically or emphatically.

    “At one end, I think I understand you as believing that we should demand quite a bit more of our art than people traditionally do, and at the other, you criticize (in the more neutral sense) everything you see as if it deserved the ‘art’ treatment. If you treat such a large quantity of things as art, yet believe that we should demand so much more of it, the you are setting yourself up to be quite hostile to quite many things. Get yourself in some arguments that way, I’d bet.”

    That’s all pretty much the case, and very clearly stated. One of the things I like about this blog, though, is that I can think all that above and still have people tell me regularly that I lack critical standards and am too lax in my judgments. That makes me happy.

  106. Mateo: I’ve always needed an expression for “I wanna talk about theory now so start concentrating” and I am heretofore gonna use “go college.” My husband the neuroscientist thanks you for the easily parseable shorthand.

    I dunno, Eric. I see where you’re coming from (in comment #4). And in the end, you may be right. But I also think that there’s value in asking whether engaged public discourse really does require such a philosophically inconsistent step back from theory (philosophically inconsistent with theory, I mean).

    Is there a way to be both broadly lucid and theoretically consistent? Lacan and Derrida could go on TV in France, but here we can’t even sustain something like the Dick Cavett show…why is that?

    I think there’s a wide presumption that the demise of the public intellectual coincided with the advent of theory, that public discourse simply couldn’t handle the pressure of theory’s more counter-intuitive elements. But I’m not so sure: I’m unconvinced that the theoretical turn wasn’t a response to an already-occuring decline of the public intellectual. In that IJOCA interview with Gary, Ana Merino said:

    I don’t know in the case of the USA how the formations of the intellectuals who confront the system articulates itself, but in the case of the European or Latin American tradition, the people that the military or any repressive government will want to control will be the academics. For me, academia has a value, because it is people who are thinking to change things, who believe in changes. But of course, you were in the late ‘70s, and it is true the way you see passive academics in your country that don’t really get involved in politics during the Cold War.

    Intellectuals are far from being scary in the US; they’re utterly irrelevant. I think they (we) were becoming irrelevant before the theoretical turn, and my gut tells me that the retreat into theory, and the concomitant professionalization of intellectualism, was a form of retreat, of laying claim to a small territory that we could defend.

    Someone prove me wrong, please. I like the idea that we were victims better than thinking we’re all cowards.

  107. The “advent” of theory? Literary theory’s been around since Aristotle.

    I think you’re annexing the general term ‘theory’ for whatever particular theory you subscribe to…

  108. Slavoj Zizek is a contemporary televised intellectual in Europe, he gets lines around the block when he speaks in the U.S. he is the subject of a Facebook campaign to force him to host SNL. He’s not a Sunday talk-show beltway pundit (we’ve got those too), but he uses the power of dialectical irony (everything secretly contains its opposite) to hack through continental theory, academic multiculturalism, and Hollywood movies with the same blunt machete. How I love him. (He’s the neuroscientist husband I never had.)

    And what would he say? As a far more enthusiastic believer in psychoanalysis, he would certainly take far, far more liberty than Noah does with Jeet’s statements. He wouldn’t shy away from odd insights, perhaps that arguments about culture often are about people trying to excuse themselves from being products of that culture, which we worship without revering.

  109. Caro:

    The same thing happens in Europe. Those days in which Derrida appeared on television are definitely gone. I think that Bernard Henri-Levy tried to be the last public intellectual. He made some tiny difference during the Balcan’s war, but I’m not even sure of what I’m saying. The last huge intellectual presence in the media was Sartre, I guess… (A long time ago.) The public intellectual disappeared from view when an infotainment, mass art, be fun at all costs, ideas are boring, etc… kind of attitude took a hold on things. The media are owned by extremely rich people, after all, they don’t want nuisances using *their* media to shake the status quo. Democracy? Bah!…

  110. Hey Bert – Zizek is fantastic. I had not heard of the Facebook campaign but will have to go support that.

    One of my favorite books ever is Contingency, Hegemony, Universality which is a serious roundtable discussion with Zizek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau. They each write a piece and then they each write a response — old school critical style. And, you are so right: they riff on each other — exactly like Noah did to Jeet, but on steroids. It’s gorgeous, brilliant intellect on display, and I think it’s the standard bearer for intra-critical discussion.

    A pretty good chunk is online at Google Books.

  111. Yeah, Zizek would have fun with the Pound thing, that’s for sure. You’re accused of apologizing for a fascist because he’s an aesthete, so you come back and say you only apologized for him because of your love of figurative language. And cliched figurative language at that; flirt is pretty much the verb of choice when you interact with fascism. So it’s better to paper over fascism in the interest of banal aesthetics than if you paper over it in the interest of great poetry? Because banal aesthetics are meaningless while great poetry is supposed to matter, so if your reason for downplaying the fascism was half-assed we shouldn’t take it seriously? There’s a philistinism there that links up with Jeet’s insistence that his own blog posts shouldn’t be read too closely; that we’re wasting time on them. Why do them then if you don’t have pride in your work? Or is the lack of pride and the slackness the point; the author (like Pound) is actually reified by banality. That jibes with the deliberate lack of ambition and the ugliness of many alt autobio comics; frills and bows and fascination would distract from the adolescent power fantasy of authorship, the glorious blandness of (pseudo) adulthood.

    Zizek might say something like that. And Jeet would (and may) come back and say, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with that, I should know because I’m the author and my intentions were banal. And Zizek would laugh at him.

    Jeet? Another go round?

  112. Thanks Caro! A great quote from the introduction to that Contingency book that readily relates to this discussion (skipping ellipsis): “We thus differentiate ourselves from the effort to discover or conjure a pre-established universality as a presuppostion of the speech act, a procedural form which presumes that the political field is constituted by rational actors.”

    In other words, these three people (who manage to still have a collegial conversation) are willing to imagine that people don’t know exactly what they mean when they themselves speak, and that transparency is an often necessary fiction. There’s always math and other technical idioms, which cuts down on some ambiguity, but at the cost of even a pretense of universal communication.

  113. I think public disinterest in/dislike for “public intellectuals” might be a good thing. It seems like a huge percentage of them turn out to be reprehensible assholes, like Ezra Pound and the Trotskyites-turned-neocons mentioned earlier. Also, I could be wrong about this, but my impression is that a lot of this brilliant critical theory (like the radical feminism that Noah likes so much) just doesn’t fit with actual life and tends to turn good people into objects of derision. So my admittedly half-assed impression is that postmodernism, deconstructionism, queer theory, and all of these other terms that I don’t understand describe poisonous nonsense that will eventually lead to people like me being put in concentration camps.

  114. Hey Jack. Nice to see you again.

    Actually, fascists were very pleased to gin up anti-intellectualism. Plain folk didn’t need all that dangerous (Jewish) namby-pamby intellectualism and Freudianism. Pragmatist anti-intellectualism is really the ideology of capitalism, though, pretty much. It has some benefits (safety, assurance) for people like you and me, less for folks in other parts of the world.

    Intellectuals are reprehensible assholes at about the same rate as anyone else. But it’s kind of you to come over here to demonstrate to Nate that, yes, the points in my essay are in fact extremely contentious in comicdom.

  115. Hi, Noah. Do you think that some of your intellectual interests have benefits for the ideology of capitalism and can harm people in other parts of the world, too? I mean, if you’re focused on theories about lesbianism in Victorian England, you’re not going to do anything about, say, U.S. not living up to its AIDS funding obligations as mentioned on Democracy Now yesterday.

    Having made my previous post about five minutes ago, it’s slowly starting to sink in that, once again, I’ve demonstrated in public that I’m a complete idiot.

  116. Oh absolutely. I don’t think it’s necessarily a “why are you spending your time on that instead of this” kind of thing though. Charitable work has its own problems, after all. But the gay utopia and capitalism are absolutely in sync in various ways, which can be good and/or bad depending how you look and where you’re standing.

    The point is that you don’t get out of those kinds of questions by forswearing thinking about them. And, I think, in general, intellectual engagement is important for a host of reasons, even if that engagement is just figuring out which theories you think are nonsense.

  117. Hi Jack: I think the academy has not placed any pressure on academics, or provided any rewards for academics, who try to think through the implications of the linguistic and cultural turns to “actual life.” As a result, the conversations people have about those topics, in the US at least, tend to pander to the narrow interests of the academic class.

    I think that’s a shame, but I don’t think it’s endemic to the theories — I think it’s endemic to the culture of academia. It’s worth trying to figure out which theories work and which ones don’t, beyond academia.

    The problem is that there are very few forums to do that, and they don’t pay anything, and the pressures of an academic job are immense. Most academics don’t have time to take on anything else. And most people who aren’t academics lack either the training or the interest to spend their free time grappling with this stuff. It takes a certain kind of masochist to eschew easy entertainment for philosophy.

    There’s those pesky conditions of production, again!

  118. Caro: “It takes a certain kind of masochist to eschew easy entertainment for philosophy.”

    I hope that you’re joking or being ironic, Caro. If you’re serious I’ll have to say that you were attained by the infamous, brainless, “fun ideology” that comics people like so much. This is cause for a serious alarm, I’m afraid! Call your doctor… now!…

  119. A bit of irony indeed, Domingos. It would be easier to play than to think. One has to be able to enjoy the work, to believe in it, to set aside easy, playful things for it — and in our culture that is greeted with far greater shock than any sexual perversity (and is far less common). So “a certain kind of masochist…”

  120. While most of the time, I’m fairly irrelevant, I do think the complete irrelevance of academics/academia is somewhat overstated. I teach plenty of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan (etc. etc. blah blah) and, every time I do, students get excited, “turned” on, etc. by these ideas. (Yes, plenty of students are also completely uninterested, or resentful). We also discuss their real-world application and interest, etc. Some percentage of those people take those ideas forward with them into their life pursuits–not all of which end up in academia (most not, I would venture). The influence of “theory” is not “direct” of course, but it does bleed through through the educational system to some degree.

    Having met Zizek, I don’t see him as a likely host for SNL…but I’d watch if it happened.

  121. Lacan? Don’t get me started. That man has caused immense harm to his patients.

  122. Speaking of Zizek and concentration camps– he mentions as evidence of how Marxist and fascist totalitarians constituted the subject differently the fact that Siberian gulag prisoners had to sign birthday cards to Stalin, while Jews in Birkenau suffered no such indignity. Therefore the revolution is genocide that *cares*.

    Anyway, when the effete grad-student hordes charge the barricades and scale the mighty frictionless prosthetic phalluses of capital, I will gladly go before the truth and reconciliation committee and repudiate all denunciations of Dan Clowes as inferior to Luis Bunuel.

  123. To explain where I was coming from with the stupid concentration camp comment–recently, I read an interview by the late Mary Daly in which she said of men, “I think there’s something wrong with that life form.” It doesn’t seem like such a huge leap from that point of view to exterminating People with Penises. I know, cry me a river, someone with absolutely no political power whatsoever said something mean about a group that you belong to, keep whining about infinitely distant threats of extermination you obscenely privileged douche. But the fact remains that her views were creepy.

  124. Creepy indeed. Creepy generally means perverse– being destructive just to be destructive. But without going into a catalogue of comparative traumas (for women, landless peasants, refugees with AIDS, etc,), it’s clear that the order of our world always depending on the repressing of traumas, and thus the exclusion of perverts.

    Whether he sees himself this way or not, Noah I think comes across as a grand pervert of the orderly prestige-accumulation in the ghetto of sequential print. To the extent I care about these things, I thank him for that.

  125. Coming quite late to the party here; if I may backtrack quite a ways…

    ——————-
    Noah Berlatsky says:
    I think the crux of [Groth’s] argument…is this:

    “Jeet never said or implied that interviews should be relied upon as critical touchstones…nor did he [Jeet] ever mention or imply that artist[s] should be substituted for critics.”

    But Jeet said this:

    “The simple fact is that because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics, infected as it is with fannish boosterism and journalistic glibness, the interview form has been the crucial venue for comics criticism and comics history. ”

    Which suggests that in comics, interviews are (perhaps through sad necessity, but nonetheless) the touchstone for criticism (or as Jeet says “the crucial venue for comics criticism.”)

    He also said this:

    “you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books”.

    Which suggests that artists are better at criticism than critics are, that interviews (or the related genre of spoken lectures) are better than academic writing, and which overall seems to me to elevate artists over critics in an anti-intellectual vein…
    ———————

    Doesn’t sound to me like Jeet is saying that, now and forevermore, artists are inherently better at criticism than critics are, or should take their place.

    But that, “because of the intellectual poverty of most writing on comics,” and the dearth of truly comics-knowledgeable folks in academia, reasonably articulate and perceptive comics artists found themselves filling the gap by default.

    Could the reason why interviews with the more articulate comics artists – particularly in substantial venues such as “The Comics Journal” – were so valuable for providing insights about the art form was that both interviewers and subjects were, at a time when comics critics were particularly rare, far more knowledgeable about comics, and therefore often able to be analytically perceptive about ’em?

    In contrast, even nowadays, consider the literary names which the otherwise admirable “New York Review of Books” picks to write cringe-worthy essay/critiques on comics. Who have impressive academic and critical credentials, yet only a rudimentary understanding of the qualities of that particular art form. And therefore make piss-poor comics critics.

    Is it “anti-intellectual” to say that Art Spiegelman is a better comics critic than 99.999% (at the very least) of academics or literary critics out there? Nah, it’s very likely to be the case. Likewise, Gil Kane or Burne Hogarth would surely not have been more intellectually brilliant than the gathered academics of Oxford; but when it comes to understanding the art form of comics, they’d make those learned Brits seem like ignoramuses.

  126. I think to suggest on the strength of his work as an artist that Spiegelman is a critic in a million is an anti-intellectual act of hagiography, yes. You could as easily argue that artists are too close to the subject matter, too invested in their own particular battles and interests, to be effective critics as you could argue that they have some sort of special dispensation.

    Of course, you’re also basing your argument on Spiegelman’s critical writing, I presume. Lots of people I respect (Brigid Alverson, Gary, Jeet) have said he’s an astute observer of comics. I haven’t really seen it myself. The main thing I’ve read from him as a critic is his discussion of old strips in Shadow of No Towers, which was of historical interest but theoretically couldn’t have been much stupider if he’d scooped his brain out with a trowel. The Plastic Man reissue project he was involved in also struck me as deeply idiotic critically. RAW showed an impressive editorial talent, but it’s “we’re high culture! we’re low culture!” shtick, which passed for a critical statement of purpose, was lame (and yes, I know it was supposed to be a joke. It was still lame.) And bits and pieces of his speeches and public pronouncements…well, it hasn’t led me to want to seek him out for insights on comics, I have to admit.

    The fact that public intellectuals who write for major publications don’t know jack about comics is a problem. The fact that comics people think Art Spiegelman is a reasonable excuse for a critic is also, to my mind, a problem. Though, obviously, mileage differs, etc.

  127. Oh…I don’t actually think artists can’t be good critics. I’m just saying the argument for it is as solid (that is, not very solid) as the reverse.

  128. I have no strong opinion one way or the other about Art Spiegelman’s critical abilities, although they were not on display particularly the one time I heard him speak. He was more a historian than a critic, which is perfectly respectable.

    However, the statement that anybody can learn more from “listening to a person talk than reading a shelf of academic books” is just a slam on academic books, no matter who the person is. That is what I object to – I don’t think it was required that Jeet derogate academic books in order to praise Art Spiegelman.

    We’ve actually never gotten an explanation for why the tone of those two pieces was anti-academic, why it was necessary to say that analytical writing was “marginal” or to derogate academic books in the Spiegelman quote.

  129. Spiegelman’s most famous (I don’t know if it is also his best) piece of criticism is the essay he did on “Master Race” (with John Benson and David Kasakove). You can read it and decide for yourself.

  130. Hey Suat — thanks, especially for the art pointer; makes the article a lot more sensible!

    It doesn’t really address Jeet’s point, though, does it? I mean, that essay would be one of the things on the shelf…one of the things that you could skip reading and still learn more by going to a Spiegelman talk.

    I’ve been thinking about it for, what, two weeks now? And I still can’t tell what Jeet’s point is in that statement. Does he mean that:

    a) comics academics in all disciplines are really shit academics so all the writing on comics doesn’t measure up to the talking on comics? (that’s the point he seems to be making, but he’s a comics academic, and it would have been a helpful caveat to actually say he wasn’t pulling in all academics everywhere…)

    b) “literary” academics are shit and academic writing on comics is all from the literary perspective, so Spiegelman’s talks, rich with fascinating history and biography and anecdote and some personal reading, are more valuable? (this is the point that seems to be embedded in the resistance to the “linguistic turn”, but there’s no disciplinary framework at all in his original essay so it seems far-fetched)

    c) lectures, regardless of topic, are more important and useful than any sustained writing, regardless of topic. (That’s obviously too blunt a reading but it’s also not hard to see someone using the statement that way.)

    It’s just really hard with what we have before us, even his clarifications, to pin down exactly what his beef is with sustained, highly intellectual essays. They get the short end of the stick in the passages we keep quoting, and shafting them doesn’t really seem necessary for the argument he says he’s making.

    I’d still really like to know what’s going on with that stuff. If he’s just anti-academy, he should come right out and say so. If he has a critique of the academy, he should come right out and say that too. Oblique little digs just put people’s back up and invite creative misinterpretation.

  131. Yeah; the Master Race essay isn’t online in complete form, and the updated Suat link didn’t take me where I think it was supposed to…so it’s a bit dicey, but I don’t think it’s hard to get the gist.

    It’s a basic close-reading, done with care though without any particular elan. The prose is serviceable; there’s no theoretical point to speak of except “Krigstein is great.” They use the phrase “infinitely complex” at least twice, I think; there’s a lot of anxiety about demonstrating that this is great art, manifesting in a desire to distinguish Krigstein from other cartoonists — a move which prevents them from really talking about his sources, it looks like. Great man produces great art; complexity and great art go together; critic’s role firmly situated as showing how the creator achieved his effects. Check, check, check.

    Really it’s more connoisseurship than criticism in a lot of ways; identifying greatness by looking closely at stylistic markers. It is clearly congruent with fannish hagiography — though in some ways the fannish hagiography would probably be better, since it wouldn’t be forced to jettison stylistic verve in the interest of bland academic professionalism. (Jesse Hamm’s article on Frazetta, for example, was in this vein but more fan-oriented, which allowed it to take some more leaps and be generally better.)

    This Master Race article is certainly better than the critical parts of Shadow of No Towers. It shows that Spiegelman and his co authors know a great deal about comics style and technique. It’s completely serviceable criticism. It’s fine.

  132. Caro: No, it doesn’t. Those were some links in response to Noah’s comment that he hadn’t read much of interest from Spiegelman criticism-wise. So now’s his chance to see the best of Spiegelman even if it is in truncated form. That article has been reprinted a few times in various books – it’s supposed to be a classic of comics criticism.

    As for Jeet’s comments from way back in early July, my impression hasn’t changed much since I first linked Noah to those blog entries (Noah doesn’t read Comics Comics that often as you know). The gist of my email exchange with Noah minus some extra bits as follows: Joe Matt’s thoughts on criticism (in whatever form) are typical of readers who feel that their intellects are large enough (or their community of friends with whom they discuss such things broad enough – they exclude such conversations from their definitions of criticism) that they do not need to even consider the thoughts of others. This is their choice and should not be argued with. For those who believe strongly in the acquisition of knowledge and their own ignorance (like I do), criticism in any form is essential. Concerning Jeet’s first post, I would say that those were clearly very rushed or poorly articulated thoughts on the subject of criticism.

    As to his comment that “you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books”, all I can say is that there’s no bloody way you can learn more from a 2-3 hour talk than you can from reading a good book on art history. A talk can point you in the right direction certainly but not what he indicates. This applies to all fields of knowledge – medicine, comics, Christianity…whatever. I can’t help him if he decides to choose the wrong book or doesn’t like reading (note to detractors: yes, I know Jeet likes to read; this is addressed to the hypothetical person of Jeet’s statement). As I’ve implied, all this would be much easier to understand if we viewed some statements in those two blog entries like hastily written comments.

    Noah – there are 5 pages of Master Race OA in the gallery at the link. Not the whole story.

  133. Suat — got it. Makes perfect sense.

    I absolutely agree they’re hastily written comments. I think that’s why the fisking back and forth aggravates me so much. Hastily written comments trigger discussion and require expansion. I still really wish he’d clarify them, though: there are too many genuinely anti-intellectual statements floating around for them to just stand out there unqualified if he doesn’t really mean all those implications.

    Speaking of Shadow of No Towers – has anybody read Delillo’s Falling Man?

  134. I think the academic well re:comics has been somewhat poisoned in people’s minds by a proliferation of stultifying “media studies” pieces, basically sociology lite, such as those churned out at Bowling Green University.

  135. Hi Alex — would you give me some examples of the media studies criticism that’s so bad? (Feel free to email me offline if you don’t want to knock anybody publicly…)

  136. If our anti-intellectualism were going to rail against an academic liberal media elite, I could get into that. But a media studies conspiracy doesn’t seem too threatening.

    I’ll only be scared if they start interviewing art comics people on “Fresh Air.” No, don’t tell me if they have. I’m anti-intellectual, knowing things offends me.

  137. I don’t think most comics criticism is from a “literary” perspective at all. Some is. Some is more “sociology” or “media studies.” Some is “Communications.” Some is Art or Art History. Most, for whatever reason, doesn’t stack up to the best criticism in those fields. I would chalk it up to a fairly short (concentrated) history. While academic comics criticism has existed, it used to be pretty rare and not respected in the academy. It’s only recently that a critical mass of people have started doing it. It’s likely to get better, I would assume.

    As there aren’t many “comics studies” programs, though, some of the work is kind of hit and miss…combining training in other disciplines with a kind of “fan” appreciation. (i.e., “I grew up reading comics…I was trained as a literary scholar…Now I combine those things (along with some classes on art history, independent reading on comics, etc. etc.”–this is my own experience, anyway. Others, obviously, will differ–but my guess is that this less-than-thorough training is not uncommon.) The Krigstein piece isn’t bad (you can read it in the Comics Studies Reader, I think, if you’d rather pay for your reading material), but it’s not blowing anyone’s mind either.

  138. Not to mention that there are some problems with it like ignoring its production history completely. It’s a typical EC surprise ending story: the thin sinister looking man is the good guy, after all, while the normal looking fellow is the monster. There are also some caricatures (in the worst sense of the word) of the Nazis as monkeys. But that’s hagiography for you: great artists can only produce great art, right?

  139. Bert, media studies rule the world. It’s all about radio waves. Also brains.

    Domingos, man, you’re such a sourpuss. You make me happy.

    I don’t think it’s illegitimate to just do a close reading like they do, more or less focusing entirely on formal issues and bracketing context. I can see why some people find it valuable…but, yeah,like you I have a lot of trouble getting excited about criticism that doesn’t make some effort to seriously engage content.

  140. Hi Eric…yeah…I think you probably hit it when you talk about the ad hoc training. It’s really work to figure out art history with a literature background: they’re close in so many ways but still very different discourse communities.

    I want to read some of these media studies articles. I don’t even know what media studies is! (I mean, I can guess, but I’m really deep down hoping it’s got something to do with Network and I know that’s all wrong.) If it’s related to Communications, is it interdisciplinary social science?

    I don’t know any “media studies” keywords to search for, and I think ImageText is the only one of the comics journals I know of that is available online. I’m not sure about that – does anybody know if the others are archived anywhere?

    I read the first three paragraphs of the Master Race essay and I’m bothered by the mix of the very matter-of-fact prose styling, suitable for academic writing, with the non-specific praise, like: “make this story the classic that it is” or “finest stories to appear” or “a story with such density and breadth of technique.”

    That’s really not an academic introduction, conceptually – but it’s also not a terribly well-written introduction by any standards but the academic. Academic prose is matter-of-fact like that because the ideas are hard to parse and need clean prose to actually sketch them out. If you layer a metaphorical idea under metaphorical prose, you really end up leaving your reader baffled: c.f. Irigaray’s Marine Lover.

    But this is matter-of-fact and the ideas aren’t hard to parse, so it just seems like it’s not targeting advanced readers.

    It’s probably not targeting advanced readers, and it definitely gets more complex as it gets more formal…I agree with Noah et al that it makes no effort to seriously engage content, but it was written in 1975, and it’s fairly typical of the New Criticism of that time. But is it weird for Spiegelman to emulate the New Critics rather than…well, the New York Intellectuals? That seems weird to me…there has to be a story to why that article reads like it does. Who are the co-writers?

  141. And my retort: “not targeting advanced readers” is one of the funniest damnations by faint praise I’ve heard in quite some time.

    Why would we “assume” that some crackpot humanities discipline is going to “get better?” Like sociology came to exist once everyone agreed that the public sphere was essentially a fragmented orgy of competing fetishistic desires.

    I bet media studies spends a lot of time on Marshall McLuhan. Are comics “warm” or “cool?” America needs to know!

  142. Minor point– that Spiegelman analysis of ‘Master Race’ dates from the ’60s, not from 1976 (when it was reprinted in ‘Squa Tront’).

    As a close reading in the tradition of the British ‘New Criticism’, I think he did a masterly job.

  143. Oops, dangling modifier alert–

    “As a close reading in the tradition of the British ‘New Criticism’, I think this is a materly job by Spiegelman”

  144. Aaargh! Still got it wrong!

    “As a close reading in the tradition of the British ‘New Criticism’, spiegelman’s analysis is a masterly job”.

    Whew.

  145. “Likely to get better” in the sense that the more stuff is actually written, the more likelihood that some of it will be good. This tends to be the case (although, admittedly, the logic isn’t fullproof). Most literary criticism is pretty run-of-the-mill (probably including my own)…but so much of it is produced that some of it is likely (though not guaranteed) to be interesting and enlightening. The percentages are low…but I have found this to be the case (i.e., keep digging and reading and something will make it worth your while). So far, I’m not sure this is really the case with comics criticism. More often, I find some good ideas/nuggets in the pieces I read, even if the pieces as a whole are often mediocre (no doubt, including my own)

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