49 thoughts on “I Think Ganges Is Boring”

1. “I’d like the industry to be shaped like the Comics Reporter’s tiny distorted titan rearing up to declaim “Happy birthday! I am sorry I cannot attend your promotional event!””

   Nice one. I burst out laughing at that one.

2. I’m so confused.. .which beautiful young male cartoonist should or shouldn’t I fuck in the mouth now? And will Art Spiegelman give me a reacharound while I do it?

3. *Ganges* is one of the best things currently being produced in comics. So fuck *you*.

   OK, now that that’s out of the way… I’m hard-pressed to think of any other work in comics — or in any medium, for that matter — that does a better job of representing the wanderings of the thought process. It is a thoroughly introspective work, in the best sense, concerned with exploring the nature of thought and the sensations associated with the mental life. It’s graphically and formally imaginative, too, which is one of the many things that separates it from so much of the navel-gazing indie junk that it might be superficially lumped in with. Sure, it’s easy to crack jokes about a comic where the main character literally spends 20+ pages just lying in bed and thinking, but the things Huizenga does with this simple set-up are astonishing.

   That said, I have no idea what these other guys are arguing about. Why does everything always get related back to superhero comics?

4. This is the Smell the Glove of Noah Berlatsky posts. It’s like, how much more Berlatsky could this be? And the answer is none. None more Berlatsky.

5. Ed, fuck me? No — fuck….

   Oh, never mind.

6. Hi Noah. Hope you had a good week off.

   Give this a few more posts and we’ll be able to codify the “Berlatskian boring”, like the Hegelian negative, which we can then use to illuminate an specific constellation of attributes in any given work, or as a shorthand to confuse people who haven’t been paying attention.

   Speaking of paying attention, I remain entirely bewildered why any of you pay more than a passing chuckle’s worth of attention to Tucker Stone. He’s not a critic. He’s not really even a reviewer in any systematic sense. He’s a pundit: an amusing but selectively informed and self-interested gadfly.

   He’s capable enough with English syntax to hold the attention of a reasonably smart person, I suppose, but smart people don’t pay attention to him to get smarter. Or to get jargon, for that matter, unless @#$$^%$ is the new buzzword for “punk-tellectual poser.”

7. Hey Caro. I disagree entirely about Tucker; I’ve learned a ton from reading and writing with him. He’s way, way more widely informed about comics than I am (for what that’s worth)…and I don’t really see how he’s any more self-interested than the rest of us. You should read the interview about Ganges if you haven’t; it’s very thoughtful.

   Even if, you know, only fucking shitheads like Ganges. Because it’s boring.

8. Only boring people think Ganges is boring.

9. Only boringer people use Sean Collins’ talking points.

   Boringer boringer boringer!

10. This is the boringest. I’m gonna go re-read Ganges now.

11. I did read the interview about Ganges, and I was at the SPX Roundtable STC mentions. TS’s record reviews appear to privilege his subjective experience and impressions of whatever he’s reviewing a little less than his comics stuff does. However, sorting out the “Tucker” from the “point” (such as it is) is labor-intensive enough that I would rather read someone else who knows a lot about comics but isn’t quite as fond of the word “I”.

    I’m sure he knows a lot about comics. Most pundits on TV know a lot about whatever they’re talking about too. But he doesn’t appear either to know — or perhaps more accurately to care — about concepts outside his comfort zone, and the result is he really REALLY comes off to me as “hey, you, stop talking about what you’re talking about and listen to me, because I’m cooler and I know stuff, and I can talk fast, and I can cuss with style, and that’s better than your ‘well-thought out analysis…'”.

    He was completely, arrogantly, and childishly dismissive of the point Rob was trying to raise in the SPX Roundtable, and managed to show not that he had a better way of thinking about the “critical discourse” than Rob did, but that he really didn’t know what Rob was talking about and mostly wanted to run away from a conversation that didn’t play to his sweet spot.

    Entirely unimpressed.

12. I should answer your point about self-interestedness: I think he’s more self interested than, say, Sean, because of that last paragraph in Sean’s piece:

    Finally, Tucker’s coup de grace is the fact that most of the audience doesn’t really care about critics or critical approaches to what they enjoy reading anyway. But so what? Most of the people in the theater with us at Up in the Air yesterday have never read Pauline Kael. But criticism is not therefore an egomaniacal waste of time, any more than making art that most of the audience for that art form doesn’t really care about would be. Kevin Huizenga shouldn’t hang it up just because he’s not Jim Davis; similarly, we shouldn’t crumple up the idea of analyzing art and arguing for standards and throw it in the trash because many people would just rather read/watch/listen and then do something else.

    Clearly Sean sees value in criticism besides the reading audience. Stone in contrast seems primarily interested in talking about comics to entertain himself and others — hence my use of the word gadfly — and to some extent in promoting his own website and the books he likes.

    Pauline Kael came up at the last two roundtables, the two without Tucker, mostly by Gary to make the point that Kael was ambitious in her criticism: she wasn’t just reviewing movies, she was putting them into conversation with the larger culture, reaching out to audiences who might not necessarily be as interested in movies as she was. It didn’t come up but Kael was also part of a conversation WITH ARTISTS and filmmakers — they responded to her criticisms, argued with her, wrote back in response to her, they defended themselves against her arguments when they disagreed because her arguments were powerful enough that it was worth their time to say why she was wrong. That kind of criticism is part of the process of making better art. Punditry is not.

    That kind of “criticism” might make you — and even me if I could stomach it — more knowledgeable about what comics are out there and how people read them. But it’s not going to make Kevin Huizinga write better comics. Because Stone doesn’t put anything in that writing that’s so new and meaningful and rich and thoughtful that Huizinga probably hasn’t thought of it already.

    I don’t think Stone is interested in getting to the point 10 years from now that he can draw meaningful conclusions about art and culture, and even comics on their own terms, than he can now, based on those years of acquiring knowledge. If he IS interested in some agenda about shaping the way people think about art, it is NOT an agenda that I agree with, because it’s an agenda that privileges the (impressionistic) knee jerk over the (critical) circle jerk. And where’s the fun in that?

13. As the treasurer of the Tucker Stone fan club, I agree with everything said in this post and all the comments. Except that last one. That one is dumb.

14. Sigh. Thank you, Tim, for proving my point.

    If Tucker Stone is still writing in 5 years and I am still reading, I will give him a second chance. For now, I’m just going to think of him as your annoying grad student, Noah, and hope that he learns as much from you as you claim to have learned from him.

15. Oh come on. Tim didn’t prove your point. He told a joke.

    “Clearly Sean sees value in criticism besides the reading audience. Stone in contrast seems primarily interested in talking about comics to entertain himself and others.”

    Ah, well, I’m with Tucker there, you know. Isn’t it fairly apocalyptically narcissistic to think that you should be the tastemaker moving other people’s preferences around like chits to suit your own vast design? And why should influencing artists or being in dialogue with artists be more important or interesting than talking to other people? Artists aren’t inherently more interesting or worthy than anyone else, that I can see. And, anyway, getting read by artists is largely a function of venue and networking and overlapping in-groups as far as I can tell. The size of your audience (which is what it comes down to when you’re judging an artist by who reads and responds to their work) is way more about luck and karma than about inherent ability (not that I dislike Pauline Kael — or have any opinion one way or another about her honestly. If I’ve ever read anything by her I’ve completely forgotten it.)

    Tucker definitely sees writing more as performance than academic analysis; he’s more in a rock critic vein than a film critic vein, I guess. If you can’t abide it you can’t abide it, but to me it seems more like a difference in approach than a sign of moral degeneracy.

16. This was an awesomely hysterical post, and led to some interesting discussion in the comments section, so I guess we all win. Except Tucker Stone, he really got the smack-down, so to speak.

17. I found this very entertaining and did not understand it at all. Is that what reading Ganges is like?

    P.S. Um, could you actually provide the links to whatever the fuck you all are referring to? In this case perhaps, the Ganges interview? I followed some of the links, but it all seems like a confusing mess, only relevant to an insular circle of internet comic critics. I’m actually interested but…yeah. No real clue what you’re on about.

18. Argh. I’m sorry. The link is here. I put it up in the post as well.

    “it all seems like a confusing mess, only relevant to an insular circle of internet comic critics.”

    Yes, that’s about the size of it.

19. I can’t be sure myself, Mr. Nedelsky, and I write on his blog. I think this could be Noah trying to write like an alternate world Tucker Stone doing speed while bungee jumping. It’s the anti-Ganges of review writing (see Wolfman and Perez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths for details).

20. “Oh come on. Tim didn’t prove your point. He told a joke.”

    Yes, a joke — which proved my point. My point having been that the Tucker Stone School of Not-Criticism is not criticism but entertainment (such as, ahem, a joke).

    Call it performance criticism if you want…I would not use that term to describe someone in a professional setting derailing a colleague mid-sentence just so he could say the word cunt in public. That’s drama, but “performative” is a stretch.

    “Isn’t it fairly apocalyptically narcissistic to think that you should be the tastemaker moving other people’s preferences around like chits to suit your own vast design?”

    Isn’t it incredibly contemptuous to presume that people’s “preferences” are that readily malleable?

    Let me be clearer: Culture is dialectical. But the dialectic depends on thesis and synthesis, and you don’t get very far very fast if the thesis isn’t ambitious. There’s no ambitious thesis in that Ganges piece. There’s some spattered close reading and a theory that criticism should lay off judgment and not really have a thesis at all. The result of that attitude toward criticism is criticism that does not participate in culture.

    Mid-century filmmakers read Pauline Kael and Cahiers du Cinema. Writers read Northrup Frye. Artists read Clement Greenberg. Ambitious criticism became part of the artistic conversation. Everybody benefitted, critics and artists and readers alike. So no, I do not consider it apocalyptically narcissistic to set that as the standard for what criticism should be. And I do not consider the difference between Cahiers du Cinema and Lester Bangs to be “approach.” I think they were after different goals.

    I especially don’t think it’s any more narcissistic for me to sneer at Tucker Stone for being facile and bullying than it is for Tucker Stone to sneer at formal critics for being judgmental and manipulative. My refusal to legitimize my sneer by deploying his tone against him? Take it as a testament to how truly, deeply sincere my sneer is. I don’t think he is bad at the type of “criticism” he writes. I think the type of criticism he writes is bad.

21. You’ve got the Gary Groth allergy against the word “entertainment.” Which is ridiculous, IMO. Art is entertainment. Criticism is entertainment. You don’t get out of capitalism by using words like dialectical and sneering at people who make jokes.

    “Isn’t it incredibly contemptuous to presume that people’s “preferences” are that readily malleable?”

    But I wasn’t presuming this. I was making fun of the notion.

    “Mid-century filmmakers read Pauline Kael and Cahiers du Cinema. Writers read Northrup Frye. Artists read Clement Greenberg.”

    I mean, except for the large number who didn’t and don’t. And even if they do, big whoop. Again, why does it legitimize the criticism that artists read it? Are artists intrinsically more important than other people? On what grounds?

    “Ambitious criticism became part of the artistic conversation. Everybody benefitted, critics and artists and readers alike.”

    Readers didn’t benefit from Lester Bangs? (Those who enjoyed his writing, I mean.)

    I just feel like criticism’s main obligation is to its readership and to its writer, not to artists or to some fairly arbitrary standard of theoretical seriousness. My goal, personally, really isn’t to reach such a level of overwhelming cultural importance that Chris Ware has to deal with the fact that I don’t like his comics. Were I to reach that level, would comics and Chris Ware be better off? I don’t see how myself.

    I always think about the Gunther Schuller critique of Sonny Rollins; he wrote a piece about how miraculously and perfectly constructed a Rollins solo was, and Rollins spent the next several years trying to duplicate that and getting so completely messed up it crippled his playing. And no, that’s not a parable about the superiority of artists and the ridiculousness of critics, for the simple reason that I think Sonny Rollins is pretty dreary in any context, whether hampered by criticism or not.

    I think healthy genres or artistic periods tend to be open and not hermetically sealed. But that openness can work in various ways; it doesn’t have to have much to do with criticism. As an example, contemporary poetry has nothing but serious theoretical criticism. This has not resulted in anything good.

    “There’s no ambitious thesis in that Ganges piece. There’s some spattered close reading and a theory that criticism should lay off judgment and not really have a thesis at all.”

    The discussion of the importance of size to comics is definitely a theoretical take, and one which I thought was pretty interesting. It’s expressed entertainingly, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

    You’re also misreading him on the issue of judgment. Sean does this too. Tucker doesn’t think you shouldn’t judge. He judges works all the time. He thinks it’s ridiculous to wring your hands because others aren’t reading the things you happen to like. Those are tangentially related but at heart very different arguments. The fact that folks seem unable to tell the difference is not, I would submit, because Tucker’s the one working with the impoverished theoretical framework.

22. “openness can work in various ways; it doesn’t have to have much to do with criticism.”

    Of course, plenty of artists have always been uninterested in criticism. That’s why I don’t understand your emphasis on “legitimacy” — there’s no mechanism to “legitimize” any of this stuff in any but the most reductive capitalist sense.

    But criticism is at its best when it aspires to be interesting to the people who know the most about the art form: the creators, other critics, and readers of both knowledge and sophistication.

    So I don’t think the issue is being so “important”, so “legitimate”, that anybody in particular “has to deal” with you. That will never happen.

    But to set a goal of being so “interesting”, so thought provoking, that people “want” to deal with you? That they want to talk back and argue? That’s what criticism has traditionally done very well. Close reading, no matter how valuable a pedagogical tool, is never going to interest someone who is actually closer to the work than you are. You have to be giving something back, contributing ideas that those “most sophisticated” members of the community can’t readily come up with themselves. Or at least stirring something up.

    “As an example, contemporary poetry has nothing but serious theoretical criticism. This has not resulted in anything good.”

    Contemporary art suffers from similar problems to a lesser degree. However, I think it’s not insignificant that many of the people working in contemporary art and poetry at the moment came of age during or after this bifurcation of criticism into “serious” criticism in the academy and consumer-oriented criticism outside of it. The uncommonness of fairly rigorous “criticism” that isn’t academic writing and isn’t just entertainment damages both sides: academic criticism becomes more and more abstruse, with academics talking to themselves, and popular criticism becomes more and more haphazard, with subcultures also talking to themselves.

    “Criticism” has historically been the discourse that bridged that gap – and I think the best artists also live in that gap. So when well done, they are natural compatriots. Critics over the last half century have badly failed the artistic community by bifurcating themselves into these two professional groups with their polarized aims.

    “The discussion of the importance of size to comics is definitely a theoretical take, and one which I thought was pretty interesting. It’s expressed entertainingly, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.”

    I would consider that to be close reading: it’s a pretty formalist point. It’s not a bad point. It’s quite a smart point. But it’s a POINT. It’s not a THESIS. It might even be the germ of a thesis. But it’s not there yet in the interview. And it’s not really all that strikingly and remarkably original or provocative…

    “The fact that folks seem unable to tell the difference is not, I would submit, because Tucker’s the one working with the impoverished theoretical framework.”

    Did you read the roundtable? I don’t think Stone’s working from an “impoverished theoretical framework” that prevents him from drawing conclusions. I think his theoretical framework is largely a formalist one that privileges the work and the reader experience and all that other jazz that formalism privileges. That’s not what I object to.

    What I object to is that he displays contempt for the ways other critics try to move beyond that. I object to his privileging his own perspective to the point that he isn’t willing to engage in conversation with critics who think that’s not enough – except to cut them off and say their point is meaningless. His attitude isolates critics into talking only to their narrow “target demographic” by fighting any of the ways more catholic critics attempt to bridge the gaps between different forms of art.

    I think that, because both Sean and I are coming at this from the standpoint of more traditional criticism, we are meaning something more specific by “judgment” than you. Sean specifically talks about being able to evaluate works in relation to one another, against a considered, and contestable, critical standard. Critics do “wring their hands” about things that matter to them being ignored, but more than that they take the measure of objects against culture at large and against ideals of quality in the art form. Contesting for those ideals of quality is the heart of the critical conversation. But Stone doesn’t want to contest for them. He doesn’t want to back up why he thinks his ideals are better for the art form, because he thinks it’s all just opinion. It’s all just about enjoying comics for him.

    If Tucker were off like most “rock critics”, doing his entertaining thing and letting other critics do theirs, I wouldn’t really care beyond the abstract theoretical point. But he’s noisy. He gets on panels and in interviews and he makes these aggressive statements against the kind of criticism he doesn’t like. And when we come back at him with equally aggressive statements against the kind of criticism he writes, we get mocking jokes and accusations of arrogance and misunderstanding and all the other lazy crap that the Lester Bangs of the world have ALWAYS leveled against more theoretical critics.

    That is doing precisely to criticism what he complains that critics do to comics: saying that one kind of criticism is less worthwhile than another. It’s NO DIFFERENT. It’s still shutting people down. It’s still bullying readers into preferring his approach to Sean’s. It’s still yelling so loudly that he’s in the way of people who want to have a different conversation. It still, apparently, forces critics like Sean to spend a column saying “Christ, not this again.”

    If you don’t give a damn about criticism, don’t talk about it. Go talk about books. But don’t accept offers to sit on “critics roundtables.” Don’t call yourself a critic, call yourself a writer, a reviewer, a pundit, or a comics journalist. Or better yet, just write your stuff and leave the people who are trying to do something else alone. I will think you are less intellectual and ignore you but I really won’t care.

    But writers who try to shut down theoretical conversations and take down theoretical critics on the grounds that they’re full of themselves or whatever are to the profession of criticism like Small Government Republicans are to the profession of statehood: they’re doing nothing except trying to undermine it from within. And anybody who actually values criticism is going to get seriously pissed off at that.

23. “anybody who actually values criticism is going to get seriously pissed off at that.”

    I think this is perhaps the nub of the disagreement between us. I don’t value criticism qua criticism, any more than I value poetry in itself, or comics in itself, or any genre or medium, really. I like individual examples of all of them, obviously, but it really is a case by case basis. As a result, Tucker or Lester Bangs taking an ax to “criticism” — it’s not something I’m likely to get worked up about.

    I do think the desire to put value in aesthetics in the way you (and not just you, obviously) seem to be doing is really problematic — I’d even say “blasphemous” if I wasn’t a wishy washy atheist. I think it debases transcendence, which is one of the reasons you end up backing and filling to defend totalities that don’t exist. If art is God, consumer choices are moral choices — which is an equation that is, I’d argue, bad for moral choice, bad for consumer choice, bad for God, and bad for art.

24. Caro: “What I object to is that he displays contempt for the ways other critics try to move beyond that. I object to his privileging his own perspective to the point that he isn’t willing to engage in conversation with critics who think that’s not enough – except to cut them off and say their point is meaningless.”

    Just wanted to interject here without disagreeing with your main points.

    I have no idea whether there is any evidence of this from Tucker’s writings in the past but I think it’s incorrect with respect to his current views on comics criticism as the next 1-2 weeks will show (sorry to be cryptic here).

25. Cue mysterious swelling strings….

26. Okay, I can’t hold out. I”m going to spill the beans.

    Tucker is undergoing elective surgery to turn himself into Jeet Heer and/or Rob Clough. Jeet and Rob have generously agreed to donate various perpectives/limbs/internal organs to the effort. Starting in March, the resulting Teet Stough golem/abomination will begin blogging regularly at Comics Comics.

    Advanced Common Sense will, unfortunately, be canceled, as Tucker’s new visage is too hideous to gaze upon without becoming irrevocably insane.

27. Suat — that’s the best news I’ve heard all week. I’ll look forward to being proven wrong.

    Noah — isn’t there some territory in between the “don’t matter none” and “is God” binary that you’ve set up there?

28. I didn’t say it didn’t matter none. On the contrary, I think that in order for particular works of art to matter, you need to acknowledge that art qua art isn’t a moral/transcendent issue.

    Individual artwork can link up to transcendent/moral issues and ideas in various ways, which is why art can be worth talking or thinking about. But art isn’t a value in itself. If you make it one (and I believe that’s what you were doing), it turns into a false idol (or a fetish), whose only value is its totemic power, rather than the way it points to, or thinks about, or engages in conversation with the transcendent on a case by case basis.

29. Noah is a cancer to comics criticism.

30. I prefer to see myself as the comic of cancer criticism.

    Thank you! Thank you! I’ll be here all night.

31. Noah: Have you read Zizek’s book on Contingency and Universality, the one where he has the conversation with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau?

    I think the actual nub of the disagreement up to this point has been that I consider criticism to be a professional practice, rather than a genre of writing. Critics are professional writers and they should not limit themselves to a single genre unless they just want to. But criticism is in the act, not the product. It can occur in lots of genres, but the approach is what’s “critical,” not the outcome.

    So this question of whether you have to choose radical contingency and reject a transcendental absolute in order to avoid landing squarely in totemism is indeed illustrative of what I think has been lost in the shift toward more contingent critique:

    In order to ever be anything more than a close reading, criticism requires some relationship that can’t be as contingent as you claim. Particular, yes. But not contingent. Rather, what Zizek calls the “concrete universal”: “all particular examples of a certain universality do not entertain the same relationship to their universality.” That’s why it can be universal without being totemic.

    At some point you have to posit the universal — a universal, some universal — in order to capture the ways in which the universal and its particular example do not match up and therein create…change, individuality, the Symbolic order, Reality, whatever you want to call it. I usually call it “Culture.”

    Critics are experts in art (or whatever). But they are students of Culture. If all you want to study is the art object on its own terms, and not the ‘relationship it entertains with its universality,’ then yes, I think that fails to rise to the standard of what the Act of Criticism is. I don’t think that position is totemic. I think that is “Soyons realistes; demandons l’impossible.”

32. Before this gets derailed: I do not mean “professional” as opposed to “amateur” in the sense of getting paid, having some degree or certificate or title, etc. I mean professional as opposed to dilletante, in the sense of treating it as work, taking it seriously, holding it to a standard of performance.

33. Haven’t read that Zizek book. I’m going off a semi-remembered second-hand Zizek quote from a friend, because I am half-assed like that.

    “So this question of whether you have to choose radical contingency and reject a transcendental absolute in order to avoid landing squarely in totemism is indeed illustrative of what I think has been lost in the shift toward more contingent critique:”

    I think terms have gotten slightly scrambled here. I’m claiming you’ll end in totemism if you *do* reject a transcendental absolute. That is, you need the transcendent to avoid totemism. Right?

    “At some point you have to posit the universal — a universal, some universal — in order to capture the ways in which the universal and its particular example do not match up and therein create…change, individuality, the Symbolic order, Reality, whatever you want to call it. I usually call it “Culture.”

    I agree that you need a universal in order to discuss/make sense of the particular. However, I don’t think that universal can be immanent. Calling “culture” the universal means you’re worshipping the/a material, which is totemism. When you do that, you make art (i.e. culture) into an object of worth/worship regardless of its particularity — you’re elevating the category of “art” which is (I’d argue) at the expense of individual bits of aesthetic jouissance…and also at the expense of something that might hold actual value.

    I think to get out of fetishism, you need a non-material universal. This presents a problem if (like me) you’re an atheist, as it more or less suggests that only theists can be art critics. But that’s the way it goes. As a stopgap, I worship metal.

34. Hm. Caro, I think you’re privileging an unknowable–the critic’s intentions (taking it seriously, holding oneself to a standard) and process (difficult to know objectively unless you’re standing by their chair), which is the Act–over the product, the result, the Product, which is the only thing that is knowable.

    But I find Tucker both thoughtful and well reasoned.

35. Culture isn’t the universal: it’s the thing created when the universal and particular interact. Has lots of names; that’s just the one I like and feel is appropriate to this context. I think as such it would be the exact opposite of immanent, yes?

36. Vom: In general yes, to some extent, although you can sometimes deduce starting suppositions from outcomes….

    But when critics are actually talking about criticism and the why and how of what they do and what they should do and so on I think it’s out there for argument.

    But that’s again why I like the word “professional.” When critics talk about criticism they’re venturing into professional discourse: process, tools, approach. Might as well be Six-Sigma.

    It is entirely possible to goof and say something you don’t mean; it is as always entirely possible to misunderstand what someone says (as I hope per Suat’s post that I have.) But these more internal things at least do become somewhat more obvious in that context.

37. “Culture isn’t the universal: it’s the thing created when the universal and particular interact.”

    So what’s the universal then? And if you’re referring individual bits of art to “culture” without ever really acknowledging your universal, how exactly doesn’t culture itself function as the universal?

    It seems like you’re trying to avoid the charge of materialism by turning culture into Christ (where the universal and particular interact.) I don’t see how that’s “the opposite of immanence” exactly…but the real problem is that there’s no actual universal referenced — you don’t have any transcendent hiding behind that cross. As a result you’re back to just worshipping the world, and/or the bits of it you feel like privileging.

38. Hi! I’m a friend of Noah’s who reads just enough Zizek to be obnoxious. And it doesn’t take much.

    Zizek says that Lacan compares the Holy Spirit to a subsuming of all life under the Symbolic order, which is maybe where Caro was coming from in describing culture as an arena of transcendence. Zizek also talks about culture, maybe with more ironic distance on his part, as that from which we can maintain ironic distance– we don’t really believe in Mexican sugar skulls or sitcoms or Hunmel figurines or the syncopated sounds of stret wardare, so we can take comfort in them (objet-petit-a style).

    Personally, I think the space of art is rather transcendent– what is reality when a steel cube or a used band-aid or the act of combing your pubes can be a holy relic? Answer: capitalism.

    I certainly think there are lots of barfy reasons to make art, but the art permitted by capitalism is one of my favorite things about our economic death machine. And one of the things that puts religion and art on shaky footing– if you’re not willing to ignore pretty much the whole New Testament, Christianity is quite anti-capitalist.

39. If there were just one universal it wouldn’t be a universal, it would be a totality.

    Universals are just postulates about hypothetical totalized states, a concept that at some logical level contain “All X…”. Like “all readers of superhero comics are _____ (fill in the blank).”

    There are universal postulates about genre, about gender, about politics, about God, about…the color green in African textiles. You can pick which universal is appropriate as a reference point for any given critical problem.

    We are all part of culture and all born into a world with a history. (Look! Universals.) Culture and history are saturated with these “all x” kind of statements, true and otherwise. Any group identity is going to have at least one of them: the one that defines the group. Universals are a nucleotide in culture’s DNA: Culture is created and History evolves and changes through the mechanism of millions of these universal postulates clashing up against human will, tangible works of art, political conditions, etc. When an idea collides with something particular that supports or refutes it, both the universals and the particular people/art/conditions change.

    That is pretty much a definition of dialectial materialism, so I don’t think that I’m trying to avoid THAT charge…but neither immanence nor transcendence has much currency in this…

40. Hi Bert — didn’t see you there. That last was in response to Noah’s question about what’s the universal…

41. Going back to this thing that I apparently misunderstood:

    “Individual artwork can link up to transcendent/moral issues and ideas in various ways, which is why art can be worth talking or thinking about.”

    I think this is the thing: let’s say criticism is talking and thinking about art in order to make better sense of culture and better sense of art. “Culture” can be as narrow as the genre the art object is in or as broad as your transcendental morality.

    So you need to get those transcendent/moral issues (or whatever Big Thing, my universal, your transcendent/moral issue) into your conversation, and you need to figure out and state how your art object links up to them. Then it’s criticism. There’s a lot of latitude for degrees of sophistication in there. But you need to get to those links.

    “But art isn’t a value in itself. If you make it one (and I believe that’s what you were doing), it turns into a false idol (or a fetish), whose only value is its totemic power, rather than the way it points to, or thinks about, or engages in conversation with the transcendent on a case by case basis.”

    I guess I do think that one can say that the practice of art is a cultural value in itself without lapsing into totemism. Bert’s probably right about where I’m coming from on that. The practice of art is a way that people can burst out of that dialectical drive. That’s pretty transcendent.

    I don’t mean you can tie that to any particular art object. But like the construction worker who built the Watts Towers. I kinda think I’m ok with saying that doing that is “of cultural value” even if what comes out isn’t MoMA ready or as cool as the Watts towers. There’s something about valuing the result of human creativity enough to spend time making something, trying to make something beautiful, that I guess I think is as close to inherently good as it’s possible to get in the world. There’s at least something resistant-to-alienation about that.

    But I don’t think that’s what I meant in this context earlier when I was pushing value judgment, which I guess is what got you thinking I was assigning an inherent value to art, Noah? A critical value judgment to me is “how does it link up with the Big Thing and does that further a cultural good”? So I think you have to be able to identify your cultural good — or your cultural not-good — to weigh your art object against it. The transcendent thing would be more of a romantic value judgment…

42. What is this bullshit? Is there a new Ganges out or not?

43. Hey Caro. You’re still assigning an inherent value to art, yes? Human creativity is a good in itself, linked to transcendence; criticism gains its value by elucidating and enabling creative works; therefore Tucker’s sin is iconoclasm in that he mocks the idea that criticism has to or should do those things.

    Bert’s basically saying (I think) that the transcendent nature of art is essentially capitalism. That’s actually where Tucker is coming from too, except he frames it in terms of “entertainment”, and is (more) straightforwardly willing to belittle it on those grounds (at least in terms of transcendent possibilities, I think.)

    My Hegel is even more shaky than my Lacan, so I don’t know how competent I am to be debating dialectical materialism. But I don’t believe that artists have any more access to the divine than anyone else; I don’t think it’s the critic’s job necessarily to light candles in celebration of the artist’s (partial, possible) divinity, and I think treating people’s aesthetic peccadillos as moral failings is a sign of the collapse of standards, not of their apotheosis. You can substitute “dialectical materialism” for divine in there, I think, and it still works out, more or less.

44. Hey Shaenon. I don’t know if there is a new Ganges out or not. I don’t follow it…because I think it’s boring.

    Unlike long, abstruse Zizekian debates about aesthetics, which I think are interesting. To each their own.

45. “Human creativity is a good in itself, linked to transcendence; criticism gains its value by elucidating and enabling creative works;”

    Yes to the former, but like Vom says: insofar as creativity has a direct link to transcendence, it’s a personal and experiential transcendence, a way to stop experiencing capitalist alienation for a little while, not something that adheres to the object itself.

    No to the latter: criticism gains it’s value by elucidating Culture, not by elucidating and enabling creative works. Creative works are not Culture; they’re an example of those particulars that interact with universals to create and transform culture. Criticism gets its value from elucidating the ways in which creative works participate positively or negatively in the transformation and construction of culture.

    “Bert’s basically saying (I think) that the transcendent nature of art is essentially capitalism.”

    I didn’t get this from Bert: maybe I misread him. I would have to be convinced that capitalism could be equated with the transcendence of art; that rings very false to me. I think that would require the “transcendence of art” to mean the “transcendence of the art object”, which is really problematic. Transcendence is too much a property of the Real, and the art object is squarely Symbolic.

    “That’s actually where Tucker is coming from too, except he frames it in terms of “entertainment”, and is (more) straightforwardly willing to belittle it on those grounds (at least in terms of transcendent possibilities, I think.)”

    So if I follow you, you’re saying that the theory here is that there’s this equation between capitalism and transcendence (that I don’t get) and that the art object is somehow caught in this knot and is therefore subject to belittling, presumably because it doesn’t contain the possibility of transcendence?

    I don’t think I have that right.

    It really sounds like you’re saying he’s saying that the art object is just entertainment, not worth being serious about, because it can’t be transcendent. The only things worth being serious about would be transcendent things, but there are no transcendent things, so everything is subject to mockery and belittlement?

    Are you saying he thinks mocking et al. is actually a way of taking down the commodity, disempowering it, or that he just thinks we’re so far gone there’s no point to any critical perspective other than comic nihilism?

46. I have to admit, as I said, the Real/Symbolic distinction is not something I ever can be said to have a very firm grip on. But
    onward…

    Bert said:

    “Personally, I think the space of art is rather transcendent– what is reality when a steel cube or a used band-aid or the act of combing your pubes can be a holy relic? Answer: capitalism.”

    I think the point here is that art is not an escape from capitalist alienation, as you would have it. Or, if it is an escape, the transcendence it offers is also part of capitalism. That is, the little holy oomph that you get when you put the steel cube on your coffee table — that’s an experience within capitalism. It gives a value to human creativity, but that value is in a capitalist framework.

    I don’t think that invalidates art (as it were) for Bert. But it does undermine a certain kind of moralism associated with it. That is, the artist is not waging a romantic fight against capitalist alienation; he/she isn’t a hero or a saint. Understanding him/her, or understanding the holy art relic and demonstrating its links to culture — those aren’t moral tasks, necessarily. Art isn’t a gnostic process, where you’re freeing yourself from evil materialism/false consciousness and catching a glimpse of the transcendent. Rather, the world in which art counts as transcendence, or provides a bridge to transcendence, is precisely a capitalist one, in which transcendence is entertainment.

    Basically, you can judge art on various criteria (promoting fascism, being formally shitty, whatever.) But you can’t judge it, or fault it, for failing in artness. The question is good art/bad art, not art/capitalist crap. When Tom asked Tucker, “shouldn’t super-hero folks like ganges more?” he’s saying, don’t these super-hero readers realize that ganges is the real way to pierce the gnostic veil, escape capitalist crap, soar on into the ineffable? And Tucker’s response is..well, no, they’ve got their own brand of transcendence, which they’ve picked up in the capitalist marketplace just like your brand of transcendence, and it’s dumb to think that they should prefer brand X when clearly they’ve chosen brand Y.

    Which, again, doesn’t mean that you can’t fault brand x for any number of reasons, and even tout the superiority of brand y. But these aren’t denominational distinctions. Picking the wrong genre is not going to doom your poor soul.

47. “That is, the little holy oomph that you get when you put the steel cube on your coffee table — ”

    I agree. This is specifically why I keep trying to make the distinction between a transcendence associated with DOING something creative as opposed to OWNING something creative.

    The former has the possibility of a little break outside; the latter does not. I wouldn’t call that little holy oomph transcendence. I wouldn’t call it holy. It may or may not be jouissance.

    That’s why this relative equivalence of various types of transcendence isn’t compelling to me. I don’t really think there are multiple “brands” of transcendence. The relationship of the object — any object — to the capitalist gestalt is not one of being. It’s not this static thing: this book has it’s own brand of transcendence which they picked up in the marketplace versus this one which has a different brand of transcendence. It’s a never ending negotiation between the gestalt and the particular object — an exact structural parallel to the interaction between the universal and the particular. Something is created in that interaction, but it’s not transcendence.

    I don’t think that I would agree that there’s this general embrace of transcendence among traditional critics, at least not those of us under 40 (and probably under 50). I think most good critics aren’t saying “this thing is more transcendent than this other thing.” I think they’re saying that this thing is interacting with culture — dialectically or otherwise — in more ways, in more complex ways, and in more interesting ways. That’s not transcendent, but it is a value judgment. In this formulation, it sounds like Tucker is mistaking that for some assignment of “transcendence”.

    Mapping the relationship of the object to the culture that consumes it and the ways that the content of that cultural artifact challenges or reinforces cultural universals (dominant, transgressive or otherwise), is the purpose of criticism. Not claiming relative transcendence, let alone comparing the measure of transcendence.

    Transcendence is a red herring: If Tucker really thinks that art critics are out there making valuations on some 1960s-style middlebrow valuation of “art” over “pulp” then I can see why he wants those people to shut up already. But I think that mistaking their intentions, at least as a professional class.

48. I’ve really got to stop this, so I’ll try to finish with a couple quick points.

    Multiple transcendences doesn’t make much sense, you’re right. I was trying to follow through from Bert, and got lost in my own rhetoric. Surely a shock to all who know me.

    You might enjoy my semi-satirical take on the beauty of artistic creation, and/or my discussion of Celine Dion and art as displaced theology.

    Finally, I’ve done way too much talking about what Tucker might or might not think. But I will say, on my own wicket, that, whatever is the case in other portions of the critical world, the art/pulp distinction is still very, very much a live issue in comics and comics criticism. I know Sean tries to defuse this by saying “hey, Gary Groth likes Jack Kirby!” but, you know, Kirby’s old and dead, which makes a difference in such matters. I’m not saying it’s the case for everyone (it’s not for Jog, for example) but the long-time critical denigration of comics and the continuing market dominance of super-heroes have combined to give lots of people (creators and critics alike) very large chips on their shoulders.

    Anyway, it’s been fun talking to you again. Hopefully we’ll do it again soon!

49. Sorry to be gone, and I see that everyone has packed up and gone home. But the one thing I forgot to mention was how Zizek talks about how feces as art (one of my favortie topics, I wrote a thing here: http://blog.art21.org/2009/05/22/reflection-in-the-porcelain-pond/
    ).. anyway, how feces as art is a desperate attempt to salvage the transcendent status of the art space (not the object, really, but the cultural field-zone).

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