Comments on: “Everything Is the Nuts”

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:16:27 +0000

Forgive my typo. At one point, instead of writing “haute-bourgeois,” I wrote “haunte-bourgeois,” which I guess would be a bourgeois tormented by the spirits of his victims. An interesting image, that… It reminds me of Londo on Babylon 5, who later and to no one’s benefit (including his own) becomes Centauri emperor, being told by a mage whose blessing he sought that he could hear millions calling out his name. “My followers?” “Your victims.” That was a great show…

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:25:08 +0000

I hesitated before deciding to leave a comment, and have as a result probably arrived at the party after everyone else has left. But I find myself quite bewildered by this conversation thread. I’m not sure how Stevens’ very simple (and valid) point that the pursuit of artistic novelty had become a species of fashion (I love his phrase “professional modernism”), became the occasion for this series of disquisitions about class and whatnot (mostly “whatnot”). Why must people so often engage in free-association instead of reading?
And as shouldn’t need to be pointed out, Stevens was not a bourgeois, haute or otherwise. In Marx’s definition, the bourgeoisie are those who own the means of production, and a haute-bourgeois would be what used to be called a rentier, someone who lives off the income of his properties and investments. Stevens had a job and a salary and an office he went to every day, though it’s questionable how much actual work he did there, what with having his secretaries type up his poems. But even if he were an haunte-bourgeois, I’m not sure what that has to do with his opinions of modern art or of MOMA; not even Marx believed that class position determined one’s aesthetic positions, and to believe in such a direct relationship would be reductionist in every sense. And I’m still not clear about what point Ange Mlinko intended to make in the first place

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:57:44 +0000

I should explain that Jane was responding in part above to a comment I asked to be unpublished; it contained whingeing about why the “radical negation of the category of individual creation” is so important in some quarters, and quoted Harold Rosenberg as explaining that the avant-garde must always be “subsuming individuals under movements…” I thought I’d gone over the deep end, quoting Rosenberg for gosh sake! I didn’t mean for it to look like J. was responding to something invisible.

By: jane

jane — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:36:36 +0000

Always happy to find agreement with Don, whose previous (”P.S”) post seems just right (for a useful complement to Epstein, I suggest Lytle Shaw’s Poetics of Coterie).
And while we’re skewering caricatures, perhaps we could finally do away with the Red Scare version of modernist avant-gardes, groups, schools, and classes as borg-like entities with top-down programs bent on”subsuming” and “negating” otherwise autonomous artists: a canard which lacks accuracy or explanatory power (but does dovetail pleasantly with the rhetoric of deregulation).
But I’m sure neither Don nor anyone else would want to lose all distinctions. We might certainly notice a difference, for example, between art that imagines social problematics and social change (and I’m not saying all art does this, or should) as happening within structures (for example, changed political or economic systems) or happening within the consciousness of individuals (a model of this is something like the end of Mean Girls, a fine film, when Lindsay Lohan simply decides to be a kinder, gentler prom queen, and the school’s social conflict is resolved; you’ll recognize this from any number of artworks, not just Hollywood pleasures). Anyway, that’s a distinction I would want to maintain; it helps me think.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:31:31 +0000

P.S. I suppose I have in mind a more nuanced understanding of “individual” than would be clear from the comment above. I’m sure not valorizing some monolithic bourgeois self. Here’s Epstein’s caricature: “The word ‘individualism’ tends to conjure the image of a rugged American self, who sheds societal encumbrances and lights out for the Territory like Huck Finn to achieve a liberated, autonomous selfhood.” This bit of mythology about the individual has been programmatically linked “with such negative qualities as acquisitive materialism or crypto-capitalist greed, and indifference to others, reactionary conservatism or quietism, elitism, and an anti-democratic selfishness.” But surely by now we can all assume “individual” identity to mean something more complex and slippery; and nobody would deny that there’s a social character of the individual.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:04:48 +0000

Jane, my question doesn’t imply at all that the individual comes first. I’m not of the School of Eliot, but I do agree with him, and with you, that the “individual” and “social formations” (what he calls “tradition,” though the term is usually abused in his name) are in a dialectical – or, I’d argue, more accurately a constellational – relationship. My point is actually that the critiques alluded to here presume for polemical reasons that there’s a kneejerk insistence on the “individual” at work today when this is a Romantic idea demolished by Eliot and others almost a century ago. I don’t believe in either super-autonomy or schools, and can’t see why one needs to do so. Therefore, the “claims” to which you allude mystify me, which is probably what they’re for.
Two illuminating books on this matter: Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, which explores why poets manufacture “schools,” even with uneasy results; and T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding, which attempts to eliminate the nonsense accumulated around the word “tradition” and around TSE’s use of it back in 1919.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:19:09 +0000

After long and arduous study of the life and works of Wallace Stevens, I have come to the conclusion that – generally speaking – Wallace Stevens really enjoyed visiting museums.
I hope this clears up any remaining confusion or controversy swirling about this topic.

By: jane

jane — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:11:31 +0000

Sign me still puzled. Danielle, you’re completely right that the specifics of quotidian life ought not get lost in any discussion. The show, btw, included a major gathering of De Chirico, Modigliani, and some great Morandis among other things. Moreover, nothing stopped him from visiting the rest of the collection. Perhaps there is no larger significance to Stevens’ act of judgment that day; we could certainly say that there was nothing to read into this, that there’s no accounting for taste, and so on.
But we didn’t. And you’ll note that — in the process of Ange’s gracious hosting — it was she who launched the quite interesting polemic which endeavors to read quite a bit into Stevens’ judgment (again raising my original question of whether the analogy drawn between the artworld of New York 1949 and this present moment is a plausible one). You’ll note as well that it was Ange who introduced both the general category of class as explanation for specific tastes, and introduced matters of social theory (invoking Tim Clark). You’ll also note that it was others of our semi-hosts who picked up the thread of class-as-explanation (Steve). I have no problem with these choices — am really interested in them in fact — but I’ll thank you to be accurate about the vector of the polemic here, and who is invoking the class politics which weary you; and who is invoking the theory that you worry is obfuscating the real issues.
Don: Rosenberg’s question is an interesting one. People really seem to like it. The most common and silliest answer is that movements or schools are forms of branding and marketing; I think it’s very hard to have lived in the US for long and not notice that the figure of the super-autonomous individual artist expressing untrammeled individual spirit all by [his, generally] lonesome is at least an equivalent (if not far more powerful) myth/marketing image. But also we should note that movements and social class are not concepts more than obliquely related; their only conceptual connection is that both are ways of looking from the perspective of a group or community rather than individual. Your question seems to assume that it’s somehow obvious that the category of the individual comes first, and is later “negated” or “subsumed” or etc. That belief of course has no inherent truth; bodies may come before bridge clubs, but individuals (with operating consciousness and etc) don’t in any way precede social formations. Me, I tend to think that the individual and the group (whether it be class, or family, or “movement”) come into being dialectically — in describing either human lives or artistic making, I don’t see how I could protect one from the claims of the other.

By: Danielle Chapman

Danielle Chapman — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:15:52 +0000

Ange, you’re a gracious hostess, and I’m sorry if I sounded like an obnoxious guest. But, to answer Jane, while I certainly don’t think that Stevens was never wrong (his ideas about race were much more offensive than anything he ever said about the MOMA), I do find it distressing how quickly–especially in the blogosphere–a fact can get lost, or forgotten, or distorted in a haze of references. I was not reacting merely to the “optic” of class politics (though I do admit to feeling wearied by it), but the tendency to steer so quickly away from actuality (this “little bit from Stevens”) into theory and even personality analysis. While, in this case, the actuality (Stevens’ reaction to the Italian paintings) may be relatively insignificant, the practice of automatically fitting a writer’s words or actions into one’s own world view is not. Even if Stevens was a reactionary, there is no way to draw that conclusion from the quote that Ange posted.

By: jane

jane — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:05:39 +0000

Well, we all have our confusions. I myself am puzzled about two things: one, why the suggestion that Stevens mighta been, you know, wrong (and that the MoMA ‘49, wallpaper and all, probably stands as an untenable analogy for contemporary poetry or art) arouses such spirited reaction; and two, why the terms of class and social theory (check the thread; it weren’t me who introduced’em) seem suddenly so relevant, when the suggestion that class politics is a useful optic for the poetics of humans is in general so scrupulously avoided and even abjured around here,
I mean it: sincerely curious about this.