Tag Archives: criticism

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Critics Are Not Here to Make You Happy

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In response to last month’s comics criticism roundtable, R. C. Harvey has a post up on the main site in which he lays out his philosophy of criticism.

But, seriously, a critic does what he does for what is a very shallow reason.
When I first set out to make a living in the world, I did it by teaching English in high school. Years later, one of my former students wrote and asked me why I chose teaching English as a profession. I thought about it and realized that I had no messianic purpose. I liked literature and I liked talking about it with others who liked literature and liked talking about it. I taught literature because that was a way of creating others who could talk about it in ways that were congenial with my own passion. It was a way of creating a conversation I enjoyed.

Harvey adds, “The other thing that criticism does, apart from gratifying the passions of the critic, is to enhance appreciation of the art being critiqued. In fact, I suggest that enhancing appreciation is the only legitimate function of criticism (beyond a critic’s self-indulgence).”

Logically enough, he then goes on to argue that the purpose of art, like that of criticism, is essentially to increase enjoyment.

The function of art, to pursue this topic into tedium, is to enhance enjoyment of life. A wise man once said, “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.” Makes sense to me. Art—drawing, painting, music, and so forth—provide an assortment of things that one can choose from to like, thereby fostering one’s chances at being happy.

Harvey’s argument, then, as far as I understand it, is, first, that critics write for reasons which are shallow — because they happen to like things. Critics who claim to be writing for a higher (or lower?) purpose — such as, for example, to influence people, are fooling themselves. Or as Harvey puts it:

It would also be nice, and highly beneficial to mankind and civilization as a whole, if everyone would do exactly as I tell them—if cartoonists reformed and perfected their practices in accordance with my prescriptions, if other so-called critics started talking about comics as a visual art form as well as a narrative one, and if the Grumpy Old Pachyderm became the GOP of “Yes.” But—well, I, like most critics, may be self-absorbed, but I’m not delusional. Not yet.

The only legitimate purpose of criticism, then, according to Harvey, is to enhance appreciation of art. The purpose of art, in turn, is to make people happy. Thus, for comics critics, the goals are, (1) don’t delude yourself into thinking you have a deep and weighty purpose, and (2) make people happy.

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I’m going to take the second point first. Harvey presents this dictum (make people happy) as a common sense, non-weighty point (as he says, “Makes sense to me.”) I don’t think it’s either of those things, though. On the contrary, the rule-of-thumb that the goal of art and/or of life is to make people happy, and that making people happy can be tied to quantitative measures ( “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.”) comes out of a very specific philosophical tradition: utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is usually described as “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and while it may seem common-sensical, it’s implications lead to all sorts of crazy places. For example, if you take the logic of utilitarianism seriously, you could end up suggesting that starving parents eat their children. After all, the children would die anyway; if the parents eat them, the parents at least will live. It’s a common sense solution, right?

That scenario is, of course, a thumbnail paraphrase of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Swift’s essay is art, in the sense that it is imaginative. It’s also criticism, or at least a critique. And what it’s critiquing is, in part, utilitarianism.

So…is Swift attempting to make us happy with his essay? Or is he attempting to make us — particularly if “us” means utilitarian thinkers of his time — unhappy? Does he want us to laugh at his cleverness, or does he want us to recoil in horror at the logic he puts forward, in the hopes that, by making us unhappy with the world, we may act to change it? No doubt there’s some of both in there — but surely it’s an oversimplification to say that Swift’s purpose, or his effect, is geared primarily, or solely towards making people happy.

And, in fact, art can have many goals other than happiness. Art can glorify god. It can be part of an effort to create community. It can criticize society in an attempt to change it. It can advance particular political interests. It can be intended as a moral lesson. It can try to sell us crap. And so forth.

Caro made some of these objections in comments, and Harvey responded

Art wouldn’t work to do all the things you say it does, Caro, if it didn’t also, and probably primarily, enhance our enjoyment of life. We expect it to do that, and in that expectation, we attend to art even when it is chiefly selling us something or promoting a political position.

The problem here is the problem with all monolithic definitions of complex phenomena — it’s reductive. A gospel song which explicitly tells you to turn away from enjoyment of life and embrace a glorious hereafter — is that meant to enhance our enjoyment of life? You could say “yes”, I suppose, and argue that the gospel singers are deluded about what they’re doing, or that believing in a hereafter actually enhances our enjoyment of life…but why go through all those tergiversations? Why, in short, does the “enjoyment” have to be the base, the real thing, while everything else is a secondary superstructure built on top of it? If someone says their art is intended to glorify god, or to pursue truth, or to change minds…why are those reasons less valid or legitimate or more self-indulgent? Why do they have to be transferred to a paradigm of “enjoyment” if they are to win Harvey’s imprimatur?

Or, to put it another way, whose enjoyment is enhanced, in short, by a definition of art which makes enjoyment the highest purpose? Is the enjoyment of devout Christians enhanced? The enjoyment of starving Irish peasants? Or is what’s at stake here the enjoyment of those of us who have come out modernity’s backside, for whom art is a commodity and commodity is a fetish?

“A wise man once said, “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.” Who is this wise man? It’s not the Buddha, who would presumably argue that the fewer things you like the happier you’ll be. It’s not Moses, who told his people they’d be happier if they engaged in elaborate dietary rituals which certainly limited the number of things they could like. It’s not Kant, who believed true happiness was tied to not liking things. It’s not Marx, certainly…and not even, actually, Adam Smith, who believed fairly strongly that acquisition was not a simple game of numbers, but needed to be moderated by moral considerations. Indeed, it doesn’t, even on a commonsense level, seem to be the case that the more things you like the happier you are. Liking things can be fun, yes…but surely, liking and liking and liking in an acquisitive orgy of increase can, at times, get in the way of more important things. Like, for example, love.

I’m not saying here that Harvey is always wrong, or that it’s illegitimate to write criticism the goal of which is appreciation, or to create art the goal of which is happiness. My point is, rather, that these aren’t the only ways to approach art and criticism, and certainly not the only legitimate ways to do so. Aesthetics is about enjoyment in part, but it’s also about love, and faith, and even perhaps loathing and despair. To make it solely, or primarily, about enjoyment, I would argue, robs it of its enjoyment — turns it into a utilitarian and rather ugly machine.

So, again I ask, why does Harvey make this argument? Is he enhancing our enjoyment of life by presenting criticism as shallow and art as about happiness? Perhaps in part. But surely he also is doing exactly what he disavows; pushing an agenda, with at least some hope that it will affect or convince his readers. Humility can be a tyranny, too. “Shallowness” for Harvey is not just descriptive, but proscriptive —a stricture enforced by the waiting censure of “self-indulgence” and the accusation of “delusion.” It’s worth remembering, though, that another name for the self can be the soul, and that what one person sees as delusion, another may see as art.

Comics Criticism Roundtable on TCJ.com

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I just wanted to let readers know that Suat, Caro and I are all contributing to a roundtable over at TCJ.com on the book Best American Comics Criticism edited by Ben Schwartz. Ben himself is also participating, as are Jeet Heer and Brian Doherty. I think the roundtable will be running for several days, so check back throughout the week.

History for the Future: Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Francaise

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Comics needs an Henri Langlois.

As collectors, most comics geeks have nothing on Langlois. I don’t care how many storage units you have. I know the longboxes block the closet. But from the ‘30s through the ‘70s, back in the days when a single film could take up several cans and a couple square feet of space, Langlois and his wife accumulated and preserved over 60,000 films, using primarily their own money, creating out of his collectors’ obsession the institution known as the Cinémathèque Francaise.

His scope was omnivorous: “People, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything.” He rescued numerous nitrate prints of silent movies and the only existing negative of The Blue Angel; he saved early Soviet cinema and “decadent” films from the Nazis; he stole film prints from the back rooms of movie houses that were about to destroy them (theaters destroyed their film prints to prevent piracy). For decades, he screened three films a day in his house in Paris, carefully selecting the films for the resonance of their justaposition. His screenings introduced the auteurs of the French New Wave to the American cinema that would define them and to the early European art cinema that would inspire them to transcend Hollywood.

But his archival impulse, and even his passion for sharing his films, are not why comics needs a Langlois. (Bill Blackbeard has all that mostly covered.) Comics needs a Langlois because of his particular inspired belief, poetic, imaginative, and non-didactic, about how cinema’s history should inspire its future:

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world.

An odd sentiment for an archivist – to “start from scratch, demolish accepted norms.” Especially an archivist so intent on screening and programming, whose model for training in cinema was to organize one’s life around watching films, to complete immerse oneself in cinematic heritage and in conversation with other people who are equally immersed. This is the man who comforted Buñuel after the disasterous premiere of El at Cannes (and who introduced the film to Lacan), the man selected to pin the Legion of Honor on Alfred Hitchcock’s lapel. When protests broke out after the French government shut down the Cinematheque in 1968 for bad bookkeeping, Godard took a punch from a policeman on Langlois’ behalf (it broke his glasses, not his face, but still…)

Leaud speaking to the protesting crowd, 1968

 

How can we reconcile the historian archiving the past with the poet advocating the genius’ new world? Langlois himself suggests the answer in a story he tells about his childhood experience viewing Mèliés’ 1899 film Jeanne d’Arc:

As a boy in Turkey, they told me Joan of Arc took Paris. Knowing my dad was posted there, when I saw Jeanne d’Arc, I believed he was living in Joan’s Paris. Told that was wrong, I began to imagine parallel Parises: Joan’s, my father’s, etc. Hence, in my somewhat odd view, time isn’t time: it’s space.

Although the concepts are surely related, Langlois is not describing the relation of time and space found in Chris Ware – Ware’s use of space to evoke time, to transform our sense of time, and to highlight both pointed and sequential continuity through time, is still ultimately an exploration of temporality and its effects: of an experience living in history. Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense.

This idea of “history in the present tense” — omnipresent history — is both very French and very characteristic of Langlois’ time and his circle of friends. Forming in the years after WWII, the idea was influenced not only by Surrealism and Dada but by Sartre and Levi-Strauss and Lacan and their project of reimagining realism without materialism – the bloody, painful materialism of the wars and their aftermath. Structuralism’s forgetting of “history in the past tense” was an effort to find inspiration and humanity despite that trauma, and the result of their efforts was a concept of history that serves human imagination rather than subordinating imagination to the dictates of history and materialist historical thinking.

This sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in the Museum of Cinema that Langlois assembled in the last decade of his life.

An exhibit room at the Musée du Cinema

 

Langlois’ curatorial choices, although rich with minute historical detail, were almost completely non-chronological and non-genealogical. He cared about establishing composite effects among the films and artifacts, emphasizing thematic contiguity, resonance and suggestion. The result was a Museum that was itself a work of art, not of history, an experience that inspired questions and curiosity rather than a lesson that offered canned, approved answers. The 2004 documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (from which these English translations of the Langlois quotes are taken) posits convincingly that the museum itself was as much the work of an “auteur” as any New Wave film.

Notions of resonance and suggestion and composite seem very at home in comics, even more so than film. Images accrue meaning through juxtaposition far more than in the dynamic cinema or even in prose text, which always retains at least some small echo of the temporality of spoken language. Langlois’ approach to history – never for its own sake but always in the service of imagination, not the trace of the past but the texture of the present, always pointing toward the future – is particularly inspirational as an antidote to nostalgic minutiae, the biggest obstacle to the troublemaker’s new world:

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage – a film nerd – sits in the front row and writes down the credits. If you ask him whether it’s good, he’ll say something sharp. But that’s not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It’s incompatible with note-taking!

The documentary from which the quotes and stills in this essay were taken is worth every minute of the time spent watching it. It’s currently available on DVD and Netflix on Demand.

The Interview as Criticism: Gil Kane

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“One cannot overstate how significant [Gil Kane’s] 1969 interview in Alter Ego(conducted by Benson) was to those of us floundering around trying to make some critical sense of comics. I’ve spoken to literally dozens of people over the years who read that interview when it was originally published and they all had pretty much the same reaction: Kane’s was a jaw-droppingly invigorating way of looking at comics. He took the only intelligent path a critical mind could given the comics he had to work with; he dismissed the scripting out of hand and focused on the distinctive but theretofore recondite visual virtues of specific artists. He articulated what many of us impressionistically loved about Jack Kirby and John Severin and Alex Toth but couldn’t put into words — or even into cohesive thought. He provided a ray of hope that comics could indeed be admired without abandoning one’s brains.” Gary Groth

“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.” Jeet Heer

“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).” Eric B.

“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… 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…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.”  Caro

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

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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.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: First Thing We Do, Let’s Burn All the Interviews

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Jeet Heer has a post up about Why We Need Criticism. His basic premise, as near as I can tell, is that criticism is just people talking about art — so whether or not we “need” criticism, we’re unlikely to get away from it.

I don’t have any problem with that per se, but…well, look at 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. (my emphasis

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it. A second post privileges the criticism of artists even more strongly when Jeet says “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”.

I don’t deny that artist interviews can be interesting and valuable. And some artists, like James Baldwin and T.S. Eliot, were first rate critics as well. But…looking to interviews and artists for criticism is like looking to critics for art. It’s not totally crazy, but it’s not the best strategy either.

Criticism is a genre of writing. It’s a craft and an art, with its own history and its own integrity as a discipline. That doesn’t mean it has to be professionalized — on the contrary, I’d prefer that it weren’t. But it does mean that to write criticism, it does help to be interested in criticism, just as to write comics it helps to be interested in comics. When Gary Groth conducts a long interview in which he nails down where artist x was and who he worked with for every month of his life over the past four decades — that’s great and worthwhile work, but the result is not exactly criticism as criticism is generally understood. When Alan Moore makes some off the cuff remarks about Steve Ditko, that’s cool and Alan Moore is an insightful guy — but it’s not the same as an actual essay with an actual thesis which actually attempts to engage with a critical tradition.

So…who cares anyway? If folks wants to read interviews instead of criticism, where’s the harm exactly? If Jeet thinks people will get more from a Comics Journal interview than form one of his own essays, why should I kick?

Well, two reasons. The first has to do with this, again from Jeet:

“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. ”

For Jeet, then, interviews fill a critical gap. Comics journalism is so bad that we need interviews to save us.

Unfortunately, Jeet has this exactly bass ackward. It isn’t interviews that are saving us from critical poverty. It’s the fetishization of interviews that has led us into this critical difficulty to begin with. Critical comicdom is obsessed with interviews not because there’s nothing else, but because, historically, critical comicdom comes out of the fanzines. The reliance on interviews as critical touchstones is the result of “fannish boosterism” — and it’s also a cause, as critics scuttle around gathering up pearls of wisdom from the horse’s mouth rather than kicking the horse in the teeth, prying off the skull, and making out of it a thing of horror or beauty or ridicule of their own. And as for “journalistic glibness” — substituting five or ten sentence sound bytes by famous artists for an “analytic essay” seems to me to fit the bill.

And the second reason that substituting artists for critics is not ideal is that, besides being bad for criticism, it’s not especially good for art. One of the things criticism does is open up the conversation, both directly, by making artists communicate with people who have different interests and backgrounds, and indirectly, because ideally critics are connected to other critical communities, which are connected to other artistic communities. If you are always turning inward to have artists interpret themselves for an rapturous audience, you end up with a closed circuit — a world in which R. Crumb is not just a talented cartoonist, but a major Biblical scholar; a world in which a shelf full of books about, say, Buddhist ink painting won’t teach you as much about art history (or about the right art history?) as a few hours listening to Gary Panter.

I’m not saying that people should respect criticism. Criticism, like art, deserves not respect, but unremitting hostility. The real problem with Jeet’s discussion is not that he elevates art over criticism, but that he allows his fannish enthusiasm to cast a nostalgic glamour over both. Unless art and criticism are separated, it’s impossible to hate either with sufficient malice. Clubby amity is for interviews; what we really need from criticism and art is more and higher quality loathing.

Update: In reply to some comments below, I have a follow-up post here.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Walter Benjamin Lite

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“The gift of judgment is rarer than the gift of creativity.”
Oskar Loerke as quoted by Walter Benjamin.


In the tradition of appreciative stealing, this post will consist of a series of quotes by Walter Benjamin, one of the main ports of call for people seeking a voice of authority on art, literature, children’s books, toys, blogging and, of course, comics.

As one of the fathers of popular culture studies, Benjamin has been quoted and used liberally by comics academics and critics, largely with respect to his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“. Gary Groth relies on him in his discussion of Reinventing Comics, as does Ernesto Priego in his paper on comics and digital reproduction. I, myself, have used some of his statements on children’s books and nostalgia in a disappreciation of EC comics I once wrote. It should also be noted that our host, Noah, recently wrote a post making fun of Mr. Benjamin so this could be seen as another opportunity for him to laugh at a dead man.

Most of the quotations which follow are from notes and fragments which remained unpublished prior to his death by suicide. They provide a glimpse into the man’s unfiltered thoughts.

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