Tag Archives: theory

The Ants at the Picnic of the Arts

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Franklin Einspruch and Caroline Small have had a lengthy discussion in comments about theory, art, the academy,and related matters. Franklin Einspruch actually reprinted some of it on his blog, but I thought folks might like to see it here as well. (Note that there’s more in comments as well; I’m just hitting the highlights.)

Franklin Einspruch:

It’s trendy to be anti-academic. Sigh.

It’s not just that. For the last forty years at the picnic of the arts and humanities, academics have been the ants. Leaving aside the increasing systemic failures of college education as a whole described by Jane Jacobs and others, additionally leaving aside the fetid interpersonal culture and political monoculture of academia to which just about anyone ever involved can attest, it tends to revolve around an in-group of indoctrinated adherents given to name-dropping, hair-splitting analysis conducted in a mode that is wholly alien to both art and humanity.

As demonstrated by the fine art world, as academics gain power they make life increasingly impossible for creators who don’t make academic work. The vital phase of every movement of art for the last 150 years took place while the academics of the time were either paying no attention to them or speaking out against them. This is not an accident. Since then academicism has become, by definition, art executed according to a script. Academic criticism judges work based a checklist of vaunted, describable virtues, instead of the intuitive basis where aesthetic pleasure takes place. Lastly, academics and the academically minded who spend enough time assuming a universe in which nothing is inherently true, beautiful, or good finally become unable to make clear discernments about what is false, ugly, and evil, and they act accordingly.

Caroline Small

It seems to me that we’re missing a very important point here: Foucault and Derrida aren’t alternatives to Shakespeare et al. Foucault doesn’t send the Panoptican Patrol to snatch the Shakespeare out of your hands. If anything they’re alternatives to Locke and Kant et al. Theory isn’t not some sort of “new thing” in the humanities — it’s just interdisciplinary philosophy. It’s a subject and a discipline in its own right. It’s more like what came before than it is different.

Theory can’t be made into a scapegoat for poor quality work in academia. The crisis in academia isn’t theory’s fault – theory is what academics make of it, what they do with it, like any philosophy is what people make of it. The crisis in academia is the fault of a god-awful publishing structure and a system of tenure that rewards pretty much everything other than public engagement, including evaluating teaching in terms of enrollment and the opinions of 18 year olds, and “responsibility centered management” in university departments, and mass media and the academic versions of the same centralization of capital and influence and the same demographic pandering that’s happened everywhere else in our society.

As for the value of humanities education in the workforce, see paragraph 1. The sentence from the article says: “Graduates need to be able to show the ability to learn something specific and be able to handle that subject’s material knowledgeably and effectively. It doesn’t matter whether that knowledge is in French Literature, Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy, Danish History, or medieval music.” That’s absolutely true.

But Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, which is loosely what academia uses the shorthand “Theory” to refer to, also belongs on that list. I’ll wager that of the four of us talking here — Matthias, Noah, Mr Kurtzman, and me, I’ve got the most corporate job of any of us, and I’m also the one most steeped in Theory. And that training serves me just fine, because the skills I use when I’m facing down a team of 15 people with four days to produce documentation for a $45M contract offering are curiosity, agility of mind, and the ability to think critically and ask questions. My knowledge of Theory itself doesn’t get in the way of any of those things, and the work I did learning Theory is one of the places I got those skills. If academics fail to teach curiosity, agility, and critical thinking alongside their theory, the problem isn’t theory — it’s those academics and their priorities. Indoctrination isn’t education — but it’s largely irrelevant what you’re being indoctrinated into.

Theories in the humanities are heuristics – engaging with them leads to flexibility of mind through the attempt to reconcile contradictory perspectives and to map their intricate structures against each other. Theory in the humanities doesn’t teach you that Truth doesn’t exist — it teaches you that Truth is incredibly complicated. If all you do is memorize a Theory, believing it to be True, then regurgitate it back, or apply it bluntly and uncritically, you’re missing the point, and probably doing terrible work. BUT THE SAME THING is true if you memorize your chemistry textbook but never ask probing questions, never ask what stoichiometry or thermodynamics have to do with the atomic theory you learned in physics or the ecology you learned in biology. Agility of mind and curiosity is independent of subject matter.

I think the problem isn’t that there’s too little investment in Truth; it’s that there’s too much investment in being right — and in convincing people to believe you’re right for the interest of power, whatever sort of power you’re interested in or entangled in. And you see that investment among people in the humanities, from academics, but also from Creationists, from scientists, from political parties. Blaming that on theory is missing the truths that might actually make a difference.

Franklin Einspruch

The academy was just as bad for modernism. When I was down in Augusta last October I chatted with a painter associated with ASU named Philip Morsberger. Phil remembers going into a figure drawing class in the ’50s and getting scolded because his drawings looked too much like the model. Everything was supposed to be abstract, see? Suddenly I understood where all the irritation at Clement Greenberg came from. Greenberg himself was blameless. Droves of lesser practitioners turned the anti-method of modernism as described by Greenberg into a method, and brought it into the classroom. Better students rebelled, which is what real modernism indicates that you should do in the face of an aesthetically enervated method.

This is why I make a distinction between postmodernism and academic postmodernism. Postmodernism is a neutral fact about the intellectual landscape. Academic postmodernism is an aberration. The analogous phenomenon of academic modernism, which has pretty much disappeared at this point, was guilty of creating a similarly stultified creative environment.

So I mostly agree with Caro that we can’t blame Theory for poor academic work, with the caveat that Theory has a mark against it for never having existed outside of academia. Practitioners, not academics, gave us abstract expressionism, comics, jazz, and most of our more interesting creative advances over the last century. Some of those folks may have gone to school or taught at some point in their lives, but Theory is a different sort of thing, one that would have been inconceivable without academia to bring it into being. Academic postmodernism is a survival strategy for academia. And it has certain traits (particularly, stylistic tics) that make it especially suitable for that purpose.

Caroline Small

Franklin said: “Theory has a mark against it for never having existed outside of academia. Practitioners, not academics, gave us abstract expressionism, comics, jazz, and most of our more interesting creative advances over the last century.”

Across the disciplines, though, this isn’t entirely true. The body of work that America broadly calls “Theory” was in part created in academic contexts, absolutely, but it was also emergent from the culture of Apollinaire and Bazin and Langlois and Cocteau, and most of all from extremely lively French politics. The French academics who wrote much of this theory weren’t in an academic ivory tower; France has a different sense of public artist and public intellectual than we do. That isolation in the academy that you point to is mostly true just in the US context — where I think the problems you rightly identify with academia have distorted theory just as much as they distort art.

Likewise postmodernism in literature was a movement more like Surrealism or Vorticism in art — a product of practitioners who were also theoreticians. Pound and Wyndham Lewis (who also wrote about visual art), were modernist practitioner/theorists who directly influenced postmodern writing. Postmodernism emerged as much from writers like Burroughs and Ginsberg and Cooper and Beckett and Brecht — from their work and from their ideas about that work — as it did from non-practicing academics writing about them. Practitioners in architecture were grappling with these themes, as were musicians like Schoenberg and Stockhausen and Webern and Philip Glass. Think about the writings of Tzaba or Breton or Borges.

I think a lot of this is just the difference in disciplinary perspectives and cultures; there’s a long tradition in visual art of distaste for “academic art” — but there’s an equally long tradition in letters of the academy providing safe harbor, and stable employment, for experimental writers. More importantly, literary criticism and theory have long been part of the practice of fiction writing. It’s all writing — it’s not as either/or as it is in visual art. So the academy historically has simply not been all that stifling for writers, at least not until recently when the Program has introduced effects and stylistic pressures far more similar to the situation in art. But the Program is, broadly speaking, the least Theoretical environment in academic literature. It’s a different set of pressures, and the sources of those pressures are complex and historically situated, not some straightforward effect of Theory.

Theory’s ascendency in the academy coincided with the academy retreating from public life — but I don’t think that’s simple causality. Culture also became increasingly democratized, less interested in elites and less engaged with history, during the same period. There weren’t really any pressures from outside to prevent the academy from becoming insular and jargony, the way there had been when academics still regularly talked to the public in various wide-reaching forums.

I think there needs to be a careful distinction between “academic” and “theoretical” – because the problems with academic work and academic power aren’t all due to that environment’s comfort with theory, and the particularities of theory aren’t all due to its standing in the academy. It’s possible to tease out elements in academic work that are insular and serve no purpose other than self-perpetuation, but those elements are supported by structural factors like the systems of publishing and tenure. Without care to draw the distinction between the academy and theory, a valuable critique of academic power politics can too easily turn into a kind of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism that polices taste just as much as academic canons and theoretical posturing do.

People should talk about Philip Morsberger more — I have a wonderful book about his work subtitled “A Passion for Painting”: http://www.amazon.com/Philip-Morsberger-Painting-Christopher-Lloyd/dp/1858943760 Delightful stuff. How lucky you were to meet him!

Franklin Einspruch:

Derrida doesn’t literally snatch the Shakespeare out of your mitts. Instead, some boring, tenured potentate dangles a credential in front of your nose and says that you can have it if your Lacanian psychoanalysis of Henry IV sufficiently resembles his. Next thing you know you’re mashing Habibi through the postcolonial sieve with which you puree everything you read.

Ginsburg and Cocteau are hardly the central figures of Theory. Derrida, who is, hardly ever walked off campus from the time he was in his twenties. No, there’s a peculiar tenor to theory that can’t be blamed on academic publishing and tenure, as baleful as they are. What gets published and who gets tenured are not accidental choices, just as this confluence of shitty art and shitty criticism is not an accident. Whatever reasons that academia became “insular and jargony,” the fact remains that Derrida et al. were insular and jargony from the get-go, which serves the purposes of academic survival in a way that, say, romanticism does not.

Charges of anti-intellectualism are the defense of first resort among academics, for obvious reasons. It would be healthy if one of them recognized that turning your discipline into a massive exercise in confirmation bias is not a productive intellectual activity. (Oh look, I just got a press release from the Brooklyn Musuem that reads, “Video Installation Features Dialogue among 150 Diverse Black Men.” Video! Installation! Dialogue! Diversity! Blackness! I think I just had a postmoderngasm.)

Meeting Morsberger was pretty great. I’m selling him short by saying that he’s associated with ASU. He’s the William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art, Emeritus at the university, which is an appointment commensurate with international recognition.

Caroline Small:

It’s not that I’m disagreeing with you about the insularity of academic theory, Franklin. I completely agree with your point about confirmation bias — it’s exactly why I left the academy. I just think you’re underemphasizing how much of that insularity was there before 1968, and overstating how much it intrinsically corrupts the particular body of ideas that fall under the rubric of capital-T Theory. As Noah says, Derrida and Lacan and Althusser are not more abstruse than Husserl and Hegel and Koyre. They metastasized out of their disciplinary casing, I suppose, but reading Derrida isn’t that different from reading any other philosopher.

So I guess I just don’t see this tenor to Theory that corrupts it absolutely? Absolute fealty to any theory, especially heuristic ones, at the expense of imagination, is corrupting — but it’s corrupting regardless of the theory.

I think one of the things that gets in my way here is that there’s a distinction in literature between Theory and Postmodernism that doesn’t seem to exist in visual art. Postmodernism in art seems to traffic so much more in axioms than it at least used to in literature. Postmodernism really is an American writers’ movement in a way that Theory isn’t. You’re right that Theory has no organic roots in this country outside of the academy. But postmodernism does. So are you saying that postmodernism has a uniquely academic tenor that corrupts it, or just the Continental stuff? Because maybe what’s throwing me off is just this different perspective.

Ginsberg isn’t really “Theory” in the strict sense, to me — although he and Burroughs really are central figures to postmodernism. To imagine postmodernism without the Beats, without the experimental writers of the ’60s, without Sam Delany and Kathy Acker — I can’t do that. Any “theory” of postmodernism would evaporate without the contributions of those writers. It’s so deeply inmeshed in writing practice to me that I just can’t see it as academic in the same the way you do. I know there’s Theory like Lyotard on postmodernism — but that’s really poststructuralism (which is indeed extremely academic) talking about postmodernism. The fact that the academics eventually wrapped it in jargon as they are wont to do doesn’t negate the 25-odd years when it was a very organic part of American writing and expression.

Not that you’ve ever claimed to be talking about writing, and perhaps postmodernism has played out very differently in art. I just think it’s important not to see Delany and Acker and Burroughs as “academic” writers, especially Acker, who died homeless and very ill without insurance. I only wish the academy could have provided her the same succor in later life that it did to others of her generation.

But the truth is that something similar went on in Theory, if you widen your frame past the American academic version of it: Theory does not have organic roots in the US, but it does have organic roots in France. (Sometime next week I’ll be talking about Althusser and Godard…) Derrida is very much a Johnny-come-lately figure in what we call Theory; he’s just the academic celebrity who put it on the US map. Making Theory about Derrida is like giving Stephen J Gould credit for the theory of evolution — it’s not that Gould has nothing to do with how we understand evolution or how it plays out as a cultural force; it’s that you don’t get the big picture if you put him at the center of your analysis.

In US literature departments, Lacan is actually more central to Theory than Derrida, in truth, as fealty to Derrida is more axiomatic than anything (i.e., the details of his work rarely show up as an influence on any particular reading). Lacan was ejected from the French academy for being too weird. He hung out with Langlois and Godard at the Cinematheque. He was friends with and directly influenced Bunuel and vice versa. He showed up on French talk shows. Foucault and Althusser are probably the most central to Theory in the humanities overall — and although they were indeed academics, they were also involved in French political life in a way that academics in the US never ever are. They weren’t artists, but their work wasn’t ivory tower — it was directly responding to specific political debates and challenges over the status of French Communism after the war and in the wake of Stalinism, and to the realities of French life in the mid-century.

Not to imply that Derrida isn’t academic — Derrida took this constellation of ideas that was very lively, very organic, and very broad-based, he transposed it into an immensely esoteric philosophical context, and then he exported THAT to American universities. And Americans looked at the export and said “that’s the real thing, baby!” But it was actually pasteurized and homogenized in that uniquely academic way because the US doesn’t let raw food through customs, and because Americans, even academic Americans, especially academics in English departments which led the Theoretical charge, tend to be both romantically attracted to and slightly befuddled by politics in foreign languages.

I’m 100% behind your critique of the pasteurized, homogenized export and the way it’s been a bludgeon in the hands of people with incredibly self-serving and insidious interests. I left the academy because, in my opinion, the environment was every bit as stifling to imaginative, meaningful, engaged THEORETICAL work as it (apparently) is to imaginative, meaningful, engaged artistic work. But the solution to that isn’t to enforce some kind of artificial boundary where theory belongs in and to the academy and art belongs to the world. Those are incredibly false distinctions that lead precisely to the kind of theory you don’t like, and in the process aid and abet the power structures of the academy. Nobody wins there.

What do you think of a writer/philosopher like Sartre? Is he also corrupt in this academic way, because he’s revered in the academy and because he wrote both fiction and theory? He’s something of an archetype of the French intellectual tradition to me, and I think his influence on the emergence of Theory in France, especially his influence on the type of conversations these thinkers had with each other and with the society and his importance in establishing the context for the intellectual foment of France in the 1960s, is terribly underemphasized by academics, partly because he stands as a demand for public engagement that academics do not want to be responsible to.

Or Zizek, for example, who when slammed for writing copy for Abercrombie and Fitch magazine, replied “If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!” That’s the same spirit I think you’re seeing in and asking from artists — but there’s hardly anybody in existence who is more Theoretical than Zizek. Does he just not count because his imagination is analytical rather than expressive?

Bert Stabler on Blood and Earth, Lack and Void

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Our extended theory and art discussion seems to have wound down, but Bert Stabler got in some retty great last words which I thought I’d highlight. First:

“The advocates of method oppose the nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose that a little animal, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t yet able to see and will only be able to discern when they teach him to do so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student lost in his Telemaque, are not proceeding hit or miss. All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to: not as students or learned men, but as people; in the same way that you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.” Jacques Ranciere, from The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

The left-theory world has its populists, like Ranciere, Bordieu, Zizek, and Gramsci, and its formalists, like Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, and Greenberg. And it’s split up in numerous other ways too. And it’s like that in the art world as well, and in various areas of culture. But hierarchies of excellence are always conservative (even in a university), and totalizing universality is always radical (even when it’s just capitalism).

Barthes might indeed agree that image qua image needs to be recognized in some Platonic trinity of language qua language and math qua math, and freedom is the void that distinguishes and defines incommensurable multiplicities. I realize that that is a properly structuralist outlook.

But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern. Which I recognize as a conservative outlook– which, ironically for the feminists working with idealism, leaves them with nothing but nature and embodiment and the return to ancestral lore, the general revival of “witchcraft.”

And I have a great deal of sympathy for that, for blood and earth and haptic reflexive spasm within egoless harmonious chaos. And yet, there’s nothing about that that stands for an ethics that is itself ontological, rooted in the cosmos. I merely hope, without systematically promising, that image, the simulacrum of death, resurrected through the discursive language of art, can perhaps offer, as Caro says (echoing Hegel?), an ‘intervention that challenges the place to which poststructuralism has cast “primordial writing.”’

And here’s me in response.

In terms of your point about feminism…I think that gets at why Irigary, for example, who so radically resists the notion of biological determinism in some ways, in other ways seems so obsessed with embodiment, to the extent of seeing mathematics as gendered. Gender differences are metaphors, but there is no ontological truth beyond metaphors, so the women are not one because female lips are two, and the metaphor is the only truth there is. Bodies get erased by language and then immediately reconstituted in language. Logic is constantly swallowing bloody hunks of meat and then voiding them in a geyser of fluids, the pure grid eternally defiling itself, like Descartes pausing in his syllogisms to cut open a cow carcass, or Frankenstein birthing a shit baby. Derrida’s close reading is not an academic exercise; it’s a shamanic plunging of his orifice into sopping entrails; a violent and bloody ritual sacrifice to the hungering void.

And Bert again.

Barthes has a book about Sade, Fourier, and Loyola (called Sade Fourier Loyola), in which he describes them all as “logothetes,” inventors of languages; “It makes little difference how their style is judged, good, bad, or indifferent… all that is left in each of them is a scenographer; he who disperses himself across the framework he sets up and arranges ad infinitum. Thus if Sade, Fourier, and Loyola are founders of a language, and only that, it is precisely in order to say nothing, to observe a vacancy… Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the text as an intellectual object… The text is an object of pleasure… It is a matter of bringing into our everyday life the fragments of the unintelligible that emanate from a text we admire(.)”

This to me seems like a possibility in any discourse, to constantly defer Being through the proceas of Becoming, with the techniques of writing and erasing (sacrificing and consuming) functioning to constantly paper over the abyss on which we tread.

But the abyss itself persists only if we emerge ex nihilo, without reference to the gap that exiles us from nature. This lack that is the Real, perceived only in its effects, opposes the void, through trauma that makes necessity necessary and possibility possible. Language’s connection to pleasure is symbolic desire, which means anxiety and frustration for the phallus, but boundless freedom in lack.

Like I said, we may have exhausted this topic for now (though if people want to start off again, that would be cool too.) But in the meanwhile, thanks to Matthias, Caro, Franklin, Bert, and all those who joined in the discussion.

Caroline Small: Theory Is Not About Art

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The theory in art thread has once again ballooned to unacceptable lengths, so I’m going to post Caro’s last comment here in an effort to start again from zero. Also it’s a really interesting comment:

Theory is not about art – it’s about language (Derrida’s primordial writing). Theory is always reading. CLOSE reading. Closer than anybody has ever read before (which is why everybody thinks it’s not reading at all.) You have a tendency to see my desire for a challenge to Theory as an opposition between language and not-language, whereas what I’m hoping for is something that is less oppositional and more nuanced. Language through a different, visual frame. A different way of conceptualizing language, that is less “linguistic”, but still recognizably semiotic. What happens when you make the questions too much about something other than that slippery semiotic frame is you move out of epistemology and into ontology.

You commented that’s exactly what the visual image does — but that’s not Theory. Theory axiomatically denies that there is any ontology that is not always already epistemology first. You can make the dialectic move to elide those binaries — but you can also make the dialectic move to synthesize the binary of visual and verbal rather than collapsing it.

So I don’t want an alternate Theory, informed by Theory, of how art works. I want to know whether a rigorous stipulation of the epistemology of art would change the way Theory conceptualizes the epistem-ontology of language. It probably won’t be a strict semiotics, because of the openness of the visual sign — but it can be a strict epistemology. And art tends to think of itself and be thought of as ontological.

I’m thinking of Sean’s point about his “visual reading protocols” and how different they are from prose reading. So what is the linguistics of visual reading? That’s still a very linguistic question — but one that really explodes the reliance of semiotics on the linguistic sign. But it still needs to be formalist semiotics, or it’s not theory. Theory’s formalist semiotics claims that the sign can be both verbal and visual, but the structure is derived from the workings of the verbal signs, because as Bert said, the syntagm of nature isn’t as ordered. That’s the oversimplification that I think comics challenges so powerfully, and you guys both said that contemporary art assumes it…

 

Criticism Before Art; Lizards Riding Pendulums

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I’m probably overly pleased with this comment from the ongoing theory vs. art debate…but, hey, it’s my blog, and I will highlight it if I want to:

In terms of instinct…I sort of said this before, but…I don’t think the kind of instinct you’re talking about in terms of art is the same as the general understanding of the word instinct. That is, it’s not the same as the instinct which makes a lizard bask in the sun, or a bee go to a particular flower. Those are instincts that are outside of language; they’re innate.

Making art though isn’t instinctual. It’s learned. And what’s good and bad in art isn’t instinctual either. It’s part of a communal or social agreement or process. Art is like language; it’s a form of communication, which makes it shared, not isolated. That’s what Hauerwas is talking about when he says imagination is a communal project. It exists within a society, and that society gives it meaning (and, arguably, vice versa.)

When I make art (whether poetry, art, criticism, or whatever) it’s obviously something of a mysterious process. Any thinking is, because we don’t know ourselves — in large part because so much of ourselves are other people. In that vein, I’d argue that the praxis of art making is itself infused with ideas; what you create, how you create is, what you think is good and what you think is bad, is all dependent on a conversation with other artists, with other critics, with ideas and arguments. Art is made out of other art, the standards of art come from other art, and that making and those standards are a discussion.

My problem with making that into a shorthand called “instinct” isn’t that it’s untheoretical. As I noted before (and as Bert did), I don’t really know that artists necessarily benefit from reading theory. But…making art into instinct makes art seem like a lizard sunning itself, or a person urinating. Art’s not a natural process like that. It’s a social thing and a cultural thing. Which means that art is never one voice; it’s many different voices. Criticism isn’t an outside thing that takes away from praxis; criticism is praxis, and vice versa. Thought and intellect are what art is made of, just as they’re what people are made of, to the extent that people aren’t just animals (of course, people *are* animals too…but art is not the animal part.)

I mean…it’s possible that I’m misunderstanding you and that you in fact agree with all of that. But when you appeal to temperament or instinct, it seems to me like you’re trying to deny the social and communal aspects of art. The artist is alone with her instinct, creating a thing of beauty which is beyond analysis. Humans do arguably create things like that — they’re called children. And despite the artful comparisons of metaphor, art isn’t children.

The point is, when you say that without instinct art is nothing…that’s an aesthetic opinion, which one can agree or disagree with. But without intellect without language, there literally can’t be art. In that sense, criticism, or language about art, precedes art itself.

And, just to make this a little less solipsistic…here’s Bert Stabler talking about radical and conservative art.

Well, we just have, at bottom, a “conservative” and a “radical” stance. Zizek of course privileges the radical, but I don’t, out of hand. Franklin and Alex see an old order, a natural harmony, an organic tradition that surpassed language, invaded and overturned by an alien force, a new regime of arbitrary artificial homogeneity. Caro and Nate (and to an extent Noah and I) are agitating on behalf of a foundational tension, rather than a foundational order, within which Theory is only the latest in a series of attempts to cope symbolically (through language).

I think there’s kind of a historical pendulum (swinging but also rotating– you know, rotation of the earth and all that)– the Enlightenment gave us liberal universalism, and the 19th century reacted sharply, with conservative particularisms (colonial revolutions rather than domestic ones), fighting for sacred tribal earth. The twentieth century brought conservative universalism in the form of various large-scale assertions of absolute truth, and one might hope that this century would grant us some liberal particularism. That means that the totalizing arrogance of radical stances needs to start recognizing boundaries, and the vicious purity of the conservative will have to be redefined in humility.

Franklin Einspruch on The Limitations of Theory

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We’ve been having a spirited debate about the place of theory in comics in response to Caro’s recent post on the subject. In particular, Franklin Einspruch vigorously contested Caro’s position. It seemed a shame to leave his responses buried in comments, so I thought I’d pull a couple out and highlight them here.

Here’s Franklin’s first comment.

There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.

At least as far as visual art is concerned, Theory has totally failed to account for that aspect of art-making. In fact it has put concerted effort into demolishing the very notion of universal value, and replace it with these checklists. I recently learned that a friend of mine, a beautiful realist painter, is having a show of new work in which she has more or less discarded painting. The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition “will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory” and that she has been “gradually moving in a more conceptual direction.” A conceptual program, of course, is the major item on the checklist of contemporaneity as subscribed to by a certain species of art-worlder. People used to take it as a sign of progress when figurative artists went abstract. Now people expect them to go conceptual. This is mannerism at its worst. I nearly cried.

With all due respect to Caro, I suspect that her idea of “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” is in fact comics that better emulate the characteristics she finds attractive in a particular strain of literature. Someone who finds those characteristics exciting, and I mean genuinely enthused, butterflies-in-the-tummy excited about them, ought to have a go at it. The rest of us ought to be left alone to pursue our ambitions and literary inclinations as we see fit to do so. Something entirely new might arise, not dreamed of in her philosophies. I hope she doesn’t subscribe to the arrogant presumptions of historical inevitability, finality, and perfection that makes the culture of capital-T Theory the moral and intellectual sinkhole that it is.

One more observation: A picture is only worth a thousand words when you’re dealing with description. When it comes to dense, complicated fiction, words become noticiably more efficient. It distresses me that comics critics calling for Booker-sized ambitions seem not to notice this.

And after a bit more back and forth, Franklin added:

I have run into these notions before, namely that any kind of intellectual work done on behalf of art is theory, and that only theory stands in the way of sentimental or formal disasters. Both of them are mistaken.

Recasting traditional poetics and narrative as just another theory, even if you have to scare-quote “theory” to assert it, is certainly flattering to the culture of theory. Thus theory can be said to exist everywhere and at all times. I’ve even seen references to “Greenbergian Theory” as if non- or even anti-theoretical approaches to art merely constituted another theory. (For the uninitiated, the reference is to Clement Greenberg.) “Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged,” as Noah puts it. I’m sorry to be rude, but this is the sound of academic culture pleasuring itself. A finally fed-up Robert Storr wrote this in late 2009:

Speaking with a po-mo savvy young artist this week, I felt compelled to ask him what, given his approach to critical theory, was his attitude toward praxis? A puzzled look crept over his face, and, with a candour as admirable as it is rare among those who keep their verbal game up, he replied, ‘What’s that?’

The fact of the matter is that certain structures look good, sound good, or read well for some reason and seem ripe for reuse in an original way. Thus art progresses forward, by execution, not theory. When Caro claims that “You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster,” I have to ask her how many 600-page novels she’s written, because that doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’m going to guess from the longer nonfiction I’ve written that really do have to feel your way around it, and you have to feel your way around it so thoroughly, self-critically, and intensely that the ramblings, solipsisms, and all the other weaknesses expose themselves as such. Then you root them out. Theory doesn’t save you from this work. As far as I know nothing does.

Are there broad biases against “literary thinking” in comicdom? I’m just as inclined to think that the Booker-style graphic novel envisioned by Caro would have to be the size of a children’s encyclopedia in order to achieve the same scope of ambition, because for certain narrative problems a picture is worth about six words instead of a thousand. Can one really just use more words? In my experience the words and the images have to sync at a certain rate or you’re not making comics anymore. We like making comics.

There’s something more than a little silly about critics, having trained on a certain specialty of literature, calling upon comics creators to acquire the same training so they can make equivalent comics. This is getting the cart so far in front of the horse that they’re not even attached anymore. Look, Caro, you’re a writer, you understand the literary angle that you’re looking for better than anyone, so do what I did when I wanted to see comics done a certain way and make the damn things yourself. As it is you might as well be standing on the sidelines of a football game yelling at the players to start playing hockey.

Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon. Franklin mentioned Freilicher in the course of the discussion.

Comments Become Posts – Yesterday’s Thoughts on Literary Comics

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Long-time and frequent readers of HU will recognize the ongoing friendly disagreement I have with Matthias Wivel about the degree to which literary things — literary theory and its literary lessons, literary experimentation and its literary insights — are important for comics. I almost said for “literary” comics, but that of course would have begged Matthias’ question, which is in part why comics need to be literary at all.

Toward the end of the lengthy theoretical discussion that erupted in the comments section to his remarkably rich interview with Eddie Campbell (much of which we unjustly ignored in the comments!), Matthias wrote:

I don’t dislike Krauss; in fact I think some of her work is pretty great, but yes, I have at times found her unneccessarily laborious, caught up in linguistic issues that may have been relevant at the time, but now just get in the way of her otherwise good observations.

Is there a way of applying her method to less obviously linguistic insights in visual art? Probably, but my point all along has been: why is that so important?

Caro, you have a real preference for whatever theoretical insights any given work of art may give you, and I am not at all opposed to that — I find that stuff as fascinating as the next man, BUT there are so many other equally valid and compelling ways of experiencing and talking about art, ways that you can frame in exact theoretical terms, but which to my mind don’t necessarily benefit from it.

Art isn’t theory.

In the question about the importance of literary methods and insights to comics (I’ll limit myself here to the discussion of comics, rather than art in general, which Krauss herself has addressed quite often!), there’s more at stake than theoretical answers to ontological/epistemological questions, as interesting as they are. There are practical issues of the artistic scope that comics can and has engaged with as well — and scope not only has implications for understanding — and imagining — the potential of the art form but also for appealing to broad audiences with diverse artistic tastes. I wrote a lengthy response to Matthias about the importance of engagement between comics and literature/literary theory, and Noah asked me to move it from a comment to a post. So here it is (with only minor edits from the comment version).

Matthias, I remember that you’ve made this same basic argument before with regards to literature itself — in the same way that art isn’t theory, comics aren’t literature, and so on and so forth. It’s a sort of medium-specificity that insists on boundaries — and while I GET it, I think those boundaries may be more limiting than they are valuable, for any purposes other than pedagogical.

For my own purposes, as you say, there’s certainly an aesthetic preference at work here — but there’s also an aesthetic agenda for those boundaries to become more permeable. Not permeable so that there’s no possibility of ever deploying the distinction to good effect, but permeable so that there’s more possibility of deploying the mixture to good effect.

It’s partly, as I think we’ve discussed, the fact that theory isn’t a “way of experiencing and talking about art” it’s a way of experiencing and talking about the world — one to which visual art has yet to make its fully evolved contribution. I believe that’s a contribution that needs to be made, considering the impact and reach of theoretical vantage points not only for “talking about art” but also for talking about all kinds of other things, including politics, and identity, and the politics of identity. If the vantage point of art is insufficiently represented there, that is an exclusion — even if it is one that’s largely self-inflicted. Participating in that conversation should in no way prevent all the other ways from experiencing and thinking about art from continuing on apace, as not everybody will be inspired by theory in the same way that not everybody is inspired by aesthetics. Surely there’s room for all of the above?

But it’s also that such an engagement with language/linguistics/literature in particular is more important for comics and important in a different way than it is for visual art. It becomes, to me, a question of broadening the field of comics sub-genres — in English-language comics, at least, currently there are a) a couple of unique genres, the fully visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical ones; b) the comics versions of genre fiction, SF, romance and heroic stories; c) plenty of autobiography and memoir; d) biography; e) journalism; f) children’s stories. Then, there are those few cases that qualify as literary short stories (although those trend toward the visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical genres, for various reasons many of which, I think, are subcultural). There are also a handful of experimental comics (which, as you know, I’m extremely fond of, but that is a very new and nascent genre.)

But there’s very little in comics that’s comparable to — let’s call it “Booker fiction,” the kind of fiction that gets nominated for and wins the Booker prize. (Although Booker books are not really homogeneous and my bias against current American letters is showing; “Pulitzer fiction” just suggests a somewhat different scope and approach to me.) Booker fiction is very engaged with theory — not just contemporary theory but traditional poetics. It also tends to care deeply about literary aesthetics and a range of pleasures that come from prose.

You’ll probably come back with the argument — as you have before — that Booker fiction is a literary genre and that comics doesn’t need to model itself on something so outside. But the question “why shouldn’t it take that genre as a model?” is equally valid. There’s no consistent argument that Booker fiction shouldn’t serve as a model for comics — unless comics is also going to reject all the other literary genres right along with it: popular genre fiction, the literary short story, biography, memoir…

I find the possibility of comics engagement with fiction at the Booker level especially compelling considering that Booker fiction’s engagement with theory and form — both questions and the mechanisms for getting at those questions — is at a point where it needs fertile new terrain, and “the illustrated book” is extraordinarily fertile. Books like Fate of the Artist point in that direction for me, and I think it’s tremendously inspiring. It’s a different direction from the one folks like Warren Craghead and Jason Overby are exploring, and — as marginal as experimental comics is — truly ambitious, truly literary comics are vastly more rare.

At this point, though, I generally have the sense that there are several pressures working against comics producing a work that’s really truly comparable in scope and ambition to a Booker novel. The biggest obstacle is auteurism and the DIY insistence on self-expression, which lead people who don’t have a lot of literary background to resist collaborations drawing on varied expertise (the kind of fecund collaboration, for example, that Anke F. has with Katrin de Vries). Hipster ennui — that classic mix of self-importance with complete and utter lack of seriousness — saturates art comics culture and generates a contempt for complexity and intensity that works against any meaningful engagement with literature. (The hipster problem also severely damages American prose letters and is to some extent at fault in the problem Elif Batuman identified in the LRoB essay we talked about here.) Hipster-fic generally ends up being either irony or what Mike called “me-comics”.

But I also don’t think we should discount the role of disciplinary distinctions here. Art education plays into this as I’ve mentioned before: because English is more valued at the middle and high school level than art, literary people often have much less drawing training than art people have in writing. But this can also lead to a lack of understanding among art people about the differences in the way a trained literary reader will approach, say “The Fortress of Solitude” from the way that same reader will approach “Midnight’s Children”, or the fiction of, say, Umberto Eco. It’s a failure of American education that we don’t equip our students to read those books the way they’re meant to be read before the time when students have to specialize, so that those reading protocols are such specialized protocols. But it nonetheless remains true that those books do demand reading protocols that only highly trained readers have — most people writing comics and writing about comics, even the best writers in comics, aren’t highly trained readers. There are precious few people in art comics who are palpably sophisticated readers by the standards of fiction readers — because a lot of those protocols just aren’t mastered, if they’re even taught, until graduate-level study in literature.

Similarly, the academic art world sometimes seems hermetically sealed: unlike literature departments which (at the graduate level) embraced their “cultural studies” sister departments to the point that traditional literature almost vanished entirely, the “department of art” is very separate — methodologically and institutionally — from departments of visual culture (which tend to be, really, part of that greater diaspora of literature).

But this separation of the disciplines becomes a problem for comics which draws on the media and discourses specific to both. One response has been to claim comics exceptionalism — the only discipline you need to know anything about is comics themselves. But that’s obviously bullshit: comics scholars tend to know art or they tend to know literature, and each enriches their insights in different ways. This is why I brought up Noah’s oft-expressed annoyance at the banal content of many comics: it’s just exasperating to hear people make “literary” claims for a book like Asterios Polyp. It’s a perfectly good pedagogical tool and an interesting experiment in visual device, but by even the middlin’ standards applied to literature, it’s pretty run-of-the-mill as fiction. It’s equally exasperating to read comics criticism that examines a really pedestrian, obvious narrative, something that’s probably intended for diversion and fun, in lofty formalist, new critical terms — the type of review that explicates literary devices which are completely on the surface of the work. It’s like someone writing a piece of student criticism about a student essay. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in professional and semi-professional reviews of prose books. The expectation is that people who read Bookforum understand literature and there’s no need to spell out, or often even point out, the formal devices at work in a book. (And of course, here I’m talking about the semi-professional comics critics, not random people writing about books they love or hate on their personal blogs.)

A great deal of the writing in (and about) comics is — at its absolute best — BFA-level writing. And I’m not talking about prose-craft — I’m talking about the sophistication of the engagement with ideas.

So when claims are made about comics-as-literature, the impression is often that comics people don’t know very much about literature, let alone theory. But the bias against theory seems to be part and parcel of this dual belief that literature and literary structure basically work the same way that art does but just in a different medium, and that what you learned in college is all there is to know about literature. That’s a misperception due almost entirely to these overly-strict boundaries. I do think it’s extremely important for comics that those walls come down.