Why Is n+1 So Annoying?

BY DOLORES PALLAS

 

This is a difficult question to answer, because a rational approach leads clearly to the conclusion that n+1 is not, or at the very least should not, be very annoying at all.  And yet the emotional thrust behind that which leads to this question, the inexorable charge, electric and fierce, to find certain and damning proof of n+1’s hackneyed conceptions and formulations of the ideal art – because ultimately the journal seems to strive to answer nothing short of this: of how to make true, avant-garde, “high” art relevant, or even existent, again –, make this question difficult to ignore; I am thrilled upon the release of each new issue of the journal: “Maybe this time,” I think, “they will have screwed up enough to validate my annoyance with them.  Maybe this time they’ll drop their guard.”  And so I’ve prepared several answers to this question; all of them are inadequate and many of them are necessarily exclusive of at least one of the others, but they still seem somehow inextricable from each other: they together forge an irrational logic that is erratic in its applicability but feels right in its ramshackle coherence; some points digress into territory that seems to judge n+1 incorrectly or unfairly, at which point it becomes time to pick up another digressive strand from perhaps a competing or contradictory “answer.”  And herein lies the fundamental problem: n+1 feels annoying; its approach and methods feel inadequate to fulfill its oft-stated goals; it feels irrelevant to the avant-garde that it so desperately seeks to pinpoint and articulate.  But these feelings are inchoate and imperfect in reasoning.  And n+1 is, ultimately, more than good enough to sneak past these accusations unsinged.  To get to the more important point, then, the superficial will be done away with as soon as possible: in no particular order, this is why n+1 feels annoying: it is not as good as it thinks it is, and certainly not as good as its name thinks it is; it is not as profound as others claim it to be and as it shamelessly advertises itself as being; it is indicative of a worryingly conservative trend in contemporary literary criticism; it captures the woeful state of the particularly Western contemporary popular literary scene; it is utterly removed from a wider literary realm; it is offensively élitist; it is hopelessly self-conscious, but its consciousness of itself is hopelessly inaccurate; it maintains a struggle against precisely everything that it unwittingly stands for and promulgates; it doesn’t come out often enough: many other periodicals manage to produce journals of the same quality far more frequently; it comes out far too often: if it takes so long to publish such an unpredictable smattering of articles ranging from the thrillingly good to the bewilderingly bad, it might as well wait however long it must in order to create a journal solely of  the former; “The Intellectual Situation,” which begins every issue, provides an embarrassing and nearly intolerable biannual space for the editors’ approximations of wit; everyone that seems to like it is generally very intelligent and articulate, while those who don’t are primarily unthoughtful battering rams of intellectual imprecision whose qualms with the magazine seem to amount to little more than the fact that it is trendy and made by young and attractive people.

Most of these “annoyances” are straw men that can be easily dismantled with just a simple perusal of any given issue; others are simply ones of taste or temperament, often having little to do with the journal itself but rather with the “culture” of the journal: either of the “personality cult” that surrounds it or the social and cultural privilege that it represents and from which the vast majority of its editors and contributors have profited.  And besides, goes wise reasoning: if you don’t like the magazine, just don’t read it; it’s not harming anyone.  Before I continue, I should offer a telling disclosure: I applied for an internship at n+1 this past Fall and was turned down, rightfully so: the discomfort my interviewer clearly had in dealing with someone as unprepared and ill-equipped for any such position causes me shudders still.  But what I keep returning to, and what keeps annoying me about the journal, is that it bears so nakedly a particular artistic fear – a fear that many of this current twenty- and thirty-something generation indulge in and that its founders and editors articulate, perhaps unwittingly, nearly better than anyone else – and it does so with seemingly little awareness of how deeply distressed they are by it.  It is the fear that we are missing out on something, that we are missing out on something big for which our generation – if it is remembered at all – will forever be renown.  More terrifying, then, is the fear that our generation may not even have this something to miss out on; an almost frantic exigency typifies much of the journal’s criticism, often lending it an air that can be interpreted either as proscriptive and conservative or simply just scared and unhappy with our generation’s artistic contributions thus far.

This “something,” more specifically, is the next big avant-garde, the next major artistic step forward.  Mark Greif, Keith Gessen, Dushko Petrovich, and Eliza Newman-Saul speak about this in the n+1 publication P.S.1 Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde, transcribed from an event presumably of the same name in 2006.  The pamphlet, as they refer to it, has moments of tremendous insight, often articulated with great clarity, pith, and occasionally beauty.  But an undercurrent seems to course through their discussion that goes all but unmentioned, and it is precisely of this fear of “missing out” on the next avant-garde, if it even goes by such a name or is recognizable as such.  But the journal wants it both ways: it wants to elucidate this new avant-garde – or what the new avant-garde must be – while still adhering to the traditional strictures of the literary/artistic/contemporary affairs journal to whose guidance it appeals.

This deserves something of a digression, although I should be careful with these: I worry that I may simply be allowing myself to wallow shallowly in lowly mudslinging, much of which is the result more of envy than actual distaste.  Nonetheless: n+1 fits squarely in the mold of a great number of publications.  The editors cite Partisan Review and Lingua Franca as influences, but these two exemplary periodicals distilled their content into a product of their thought, and were not, as n+1 primarily is, soapboxes for the expression of their thought.  While n+1 quite frequently discusses the avant-garde it is ultimately, as Sam Frank states in the pamphlet, “a higher-quality middlebrow magazine.”  Greif, upon hearing this, retorted: “I feel it is the job and the mission of n+1 to be a low-quality highbrow publication.”  He is joking, somewhere in there, and there is some truth in his labeling, but Frank’s distillation is more accurate.   While n+1 wants to engage, and engage with, the avant-garde, it also wants to be counted among those in the same discussion as the New York Review of Books.  This is why it parades itself with the many glowing reviews it has received from such sources, among which is Jonathan Franzen’s remark that “Just when you think you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands,” a beguiling comment in which it is unclear if he is praising the journal or himself.  Basically, n+1 wants to be accepted by the mainstream literary high culture; no occasion to blame, certainly.  Greif states at one point in the pamphlet that “for n+1 the will is not to constitute an avant-garde,” adding: “That’s not our job.  The task is to restore the level of progress: the values and impetus that keep avant-garde practice from going about rootless and unanchored.”  The problem is that, while they see themselves as encouraging a robust avant-garde, they are really more closely attuned to the particular kind of conservative, proscriptive literary criticism that afflicts so many of our otherwise liberal thinkers, such as James Wood or Adam Kirsch, the former of whom n+1 has formally disparaged and the latter of whom they likely don’t particularly care for either.  And so they are stuck at an odd but understandable impasse: they want to encourage the avant-garde, but they don’t want one of the “weightless” kind, as they term experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake in the pamphlet; and, at least judging from Kunkel and Gessen’s perfectly likeable forays into fiction writing, they have no particular interest in contributing to anything other than the “perennial” – as Kunkel labels it, referring to the literary status quo – layer of literature.  They salivate for the new, exciting, and dangerous, but they participate only in the safe.  They want the respect, the literary street cred, of the avant-garde, but they need the security of being renown as the greatest literary journal of their generation.

And herein lies another digression: what the editors of n+1 consider valuable as literature.  I will spend as little time on this as possible so to avoid this low “mud-slinging” territory.  They hold literature up quite highly, challenging that only certain kinds and qualities of the art are worthwhile; they sanctify it, making any less-than-worthwhile effort near-blasphemy.  Certainly there is nothing surprising in this, and nothing immediately offensive either: at worst, they just sound like the beer aficionado who disdains any beer below the standards he has set for himself.  I find myself quite often indulging in the same kind of élitist view of literature.  But n+1 takes the dangerous step toward proscription, whereby they deign to acknowledge that any kind of literature other than that which they most admire might have some valuable contribution to make to the lives of its readers, might even have a hermeneutic effect of some sort.

n+1 defines itself against McSweeney’s, almost using Dave Eggers’ journal as the source against which it derives its particular self-consciousness; the problem is that McSweeney’s, whatever objections one may have with it and its weltanschauung, is both the more adaptive and clearly defined – ideologically, that is – of the two.  McSweeney’s is more effusive, more excitable, and in many ways more exciting; it is an institution, having also created a book-publishing wing, the literary journal The Believer, and many literacy centers across the country.  It adores and savors reading and writing, and adores and savors the adoration of reading and writing, with generally little regard for the style, content, or quality of that which is enjoyed, so long as enjoyment is taken.  The quality of the work McSweeney’s publishes is very good, often excellent, but they do not expand this to a qualitative assessment of all published literature.  Enjoyment and fulfillment – spiritually, intellectually, emotionally – are prized by McSweeney’s above any particular literary methodology or ideology.  Eggers provides implicit articulation of this in his foreword for the 10th-Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest.  To the editors of n+1, McSweeney’s represents a certain literary naïveté that only mimics progress but doesn’t produce it.  Kunkel terms McSweeney’s a “regressive avant-garde” – apparently disregarding the fact that so many a great deal of other avant-gardes, among them Brutalism, Dadaism, and Minimalism, similarly focus upon regression, variously defined–, in that they eschew the transcendent truths that ostensibly only the truly avant-garde offers in order to make way for a kind of childlike sentimentality.

There is an offensive assumption in this: only one kind of literature is good, namely, the kind that they approve of.  This leaves a wide gap of “useless” literature, sub-perennial, that, it can only be assumed, they believe should not exist.  Like the beer aficionado, they have no tolerance for anything they deem sub-par.  And like those who do happen to like what the beer aficionado deems sub-par – who, bewildered, wonder, “What the hell is that guy’s problem?  I just want to get drunk.”  –, any reader who indulges in the less-than-perennial is seen as participating in a part of culture that is below what should be the lowest common denominator, that what they take delight in should be forbidden for quality’s sake.  This position takes no account of “other” literatures that may provide its readers with just the kind of spiritual, intellectual, or emotional stimulation that McSweeney’s encourages; because it doesn’t suit those who have been privileged with an education and a lifestyle that provide the opportunities to take advantage of “higher” literatures, it is not deemed worthwhile.  McSweeney’s encourages illumination of any kind, not distinguishing between low or high; n+1 encourages illumination of one kind: specifically, of the sort that defines a good Western education.  They fail to acknowledge the potential benefits of other, “lesser” literatures, to appreciate the fact that, like many non-discriminatory beer drinkers, there are many readers who just like to get drunk, so to speak.

Here returns the fear. In seeking to be intellectually abreast of the avant-garde and in denying credit to lesser-than literatures, n+1 is driven by a simultaneous fear of inclusion – of these other literatures – and of exclusion – of the avant-garde –, but it cannot reconcile them as such.  Its fears are, as are those of so many well-educated youngsters, a product of its desire to participate in our generation’s potential avant-garde, whatever, wherever, however, and whenever it may appear.  In its way, n+1 is representative of that most emblematic fear of the bourgeois bohemian artistic class: not being in the center of a true, and truly important, artistic avant-garde.  It seems driven by the kind of self-consciousness particular to our era, in which it has become a brand marketable as a kind of new intellectualism: a “meta-intellectualism,” both founded in all the other brands of twentieth-century thought and confounded by what – after all these daunting “post-” prefixes – could possibly come next, and incessantly plagued by this question; “postmodernism” and “post-structuralism” dim our contemporary circuit with what seems a necessary call for the new: but the new what?  n+1 seems to take Pound’s declaration to “make it new” to heart, and as it was intended: to make the old new again, but not to fashion some new literary fabric altogether and out of nothing: this would be too opaque and difficult to discern, too “weightless.”  n+1 is a journalistic distillation of what so many in its social milieu – including myself – feel, and fear.  It’s not conservative, per se, it’s just scared.  It’s not just n+1 that’s annoying, it’s all of us.

Realistic Cynicism, Part II

BY PER GIOTTO

 

 

In the January 18^th issue of the New York Times Magazine, photographer Nadav Kander provides two photographic contributions: one is a photo essay of Obama’s incoming cabinet while the other, documenting Washington landmarks, supplements an article by Matt Bai on the predictable and rapid diminishment of a president’s approval ratings soon after his inauguration.  The former is a bit odd: Kander works with a variety of styles, many of which mimic somewhat standardized ones, and here he strives for an Avedon-like documentation of celebrity.  Many of his other photographs have the eerie composure and tones of Hollywood horror and sci-fi films, and these, too, have a somewhat nauseous cyan sheen.  While there are several excellent results – the utterly creepy portrait of Larry Summers and the wholly endearing one of David Axelrod are perhaps foremost among them –, they for the most part feel as though Nadav was capable only of approximating Avedone in style; any substance is absent.  The figures look beyond the frame almost chronically – artificially, as if pretending to be caught unawares –, and a great many of them look like they were photographed in Madame Tussaud’s for convenience’s sake.

But the Washington landmark photos are phenomenal.  They are far fewer in number than those within the cabinet portfolio but infinitely more intelligent and incisive.  More than that, they are adorable.  Nadav manages to capture the particular and peculiar willingness with which so many of us are, with some difficulty, allowing ourselves to feel hopeful about Obama’s presidency. 

And thus these old haunts of Washington – having become largely imbued with a sinister tinge, an aftertaste of the Bush Administration – appear sheepishly behind branches and trees, as if staring out at us for approval, hoping to impress us anew. They are marvelous, seeming to ask us, as we too may now be asking them, to be accepting.

It is difficult to not be tritely cynical about Obama’s presidency and the possibility of his accomplishing all that he has claimed; the seemingly naive trust so many have placed in him and his administration makes it all the more difficult to resist the temptations of disillusionment.  But beneath these familiar twinges of cynicism, I am immensely hopeful.  These photographs invest the city – and thus the Obama Administration and the entirety of the American government – with this hopefulness.  It is too early to definitively praise or condemn the administration – the charming hangdog expressions of the Capital; the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials, the last of which is unfortunately not available online; and the White House reflect the tendency to make such prognostications –, but it does feel nice to be hopeful.

The Articulation of Mental Illness, Part I

BY FREEMAN BRANDYWINE

 

Several years ago, in an interview with the New York Times or the New Yorker or some other journalistic institution based out of New York, Tony Kushner said something to the effect of “The body betrays; the mind does not.”  He was reflecting upon his mother’s cancer specifically but related it to his own work and its commitment to exploring the degradations that physical illness inflict upon the body.  Surely this is a misquote, but the general thrust seems similar to the intent of his remark: that while one can rely upon the health of one’s mind, one is always subject to the often cruel vacillations of the body within which it is caged.

His plays never directly address mental illness; the characters within them often suffer horrific mental corruptions as a result of their physical ailments, but neurological disorders or diseases seem largely absent from his realm of artistic inquiry.  And what the earlier misquote most clearly betrays is Kushner’s myopia regarding the reality of the betrayal of the mind.  Indeed, even while his characters undergo the most ferocious and terrifying symptoms of their corporal diseases, they largely remain intact enough to describe their states – even their incapacity to describe their states – with great articulacy.  The intention here is not to condemn Kushner for overlooking the true terror of mental disease – although his characters’ persistent ability to articulate whatever immensely confusing states they are in with witty, sound-byte ready calculations is somewhat annoying, and feels disruptive and disloyal to the emotional morass in which they proclaim to find themselves –, but to question the capacity of any artistic medium in appropriately conveying this terror.  Kushner’s articulations provide his audience with a means by which to digest the incomprehensible; he formulates dialogue that is often very intelligent, acutely observed, and understandable.  The audience leaves the theatre not in the thick of the emotional fog through which those whom his plays portray describe themselves as suffering, but with a seemingly lucid comprehension of their suffering.  And herein lies Kushner’s greatest achievement and most unfortunate failure: he makes the unfathomable seem comprehensible, and in pithy, charming, oft-quoted phrases no less.

Certainly there is no harm in this.  On the contrary, there is much good to be found in it: we often turn to the articulacy of art – whatever be its tongue – to express what we feel ourselves incapable of more accurately communicating.  These articulations are a solvent of sorts: it seems quite likely, for example, that William Styron, in seeking to express the inconceivable and incredible depths of his depression, found great solace upon coming across Milton’s description of the “darkness visible” in his Pandemonium.  If clarity is to be gained in such references, if what is otherwise untouchable by language – as the entire human experience is, as the particular assumption goes – can at the very least be pointed to, if the signifier is weak but signifies well enough, then what, ultimately, is the problem?  Dialogue, and the ability to express one’s condition, is necessary for empathic relations, even for maintaining sanity.  Why denigrate attempts at doing such, no matter how impoverished these attempts may be?

I do not hold that denigration is at all appropriate or necessary.  But it is upsetting to imagine what is lost in translation, what can never be understood.  If Kushner provides his audiences with the belief that they have begun to comprehend a condition, when in fact they have merely been pointed more precisely in its proper direction, isn’t this gap problematic, or at the very least upsetting?  Should what is unfathomable be left unfathomed?  The answer clearly seems to be that they should not.  But the alternatives are so often filled with trite assumptions and consolations, with tame approximations and pat articulations, that it is reasonable to yearn for the less expository: for the inchoate or untranslatable, for the amputated sources of the howls in Francis Bacon’s work, or the cavernous transliterations of dreams and death-bound ruminations of Finnegans Wake.  And even these – made static, at some near-infinite horizon line, by the very fact of their earthly, physical existences – may seem too much, too expository.  The breadth of the mind, and of its diseases and disorders, is inherently averse to any form of complete representation, as Joyce may have attempted to produce, or pithy evocation, as Beckett may have; any artistically isomorphic recreation would seem impossible and, more importantly, pointless: it would be too boring, too tedious.

Perhaps we need a certain amount of pith in addressing the pithless spread of life and thought.  At the very least – as in Kushner’s work – it provides words where little present themselves; in Joyce’s grand attempts to encapsulate aspects of human experience – his works build, in Finnegans Wake, to perhaps the greatest attempt thus far at such an artistically isomorphic recreation of life – it is often specific moments, phrases, or words that strike most resonantly.

As any obsequious and self-respecting Post-Structuralist or Deconstructionist would have it, nothing more is possible.  Literature and life are largely irreconcilable as existing forms; perhaps we should just celebrate whenever they do overlap, however grossly, coarsely, or fittingly they can.

Susan Sontag is Down Like a Clown, Charlie Brown: As Close to a Blog Manifesto as We Can Summon

With the somewhat seamy release of Susan Sontag’s journal and notebook entries, in the collection Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, comes what may be great relief among the many who cherish her work, and even among those who do not, over their respective – and likely quite similar – fears of inadequacy. She reveals herself therein as an individual of enormous self-consciousness, whose plans for the future seem more prescriptions for a model self than anything else.  The entries are filled with lists recounting the works she must read, with demands she puts upon herself so as to be a more formidable thinker.  She recounts the often tawdry and just as often tedious accounts of her days, with the abundant dramatization of someone of her age: she began composing her journals at fifteen, and this collection traces her entries for the following sixteen years.  It is, as these things often are, entirely invasive; it is voyeuristic in the salacious sense that few legal things ever are.

What may come as a relief to the many self-conscious bloggers of the current generation, however, is the extent to which Sontag’s intellectual and academic self-preening took precedence over the substance of her ostensible desires for knowledge and understanding.  Her appetite seems less intellectual than stylistic or affective; she wants to have read many of the works she has mentioned more than she actually wants to read them.  With the seemingly limitless access to knowledge that the internet affords its users, many of us feel pointedly and naggingly the little that we actually know as a mark of shame, especially beside all the other blogs, journals, magazines, novels, and various other textual forms that flaunt intellects far more knowledgeable than we feel we will ever be; as a remedy, we attempt to gorge on all the information we can find, often haphazardly and in defiance of any proper order.  Sontag seemed to approach knowledge this way, as well.  It is a familiar malady.

The collection makes her a far more likeable and respectable personage than many of her essays allowed her to be.  A great percentage of her work is written with an engagingly infuriating epistemological approach: it opts for generalizations and prosaic statements over open-ended questioning and the willing and willful acceptance of the skeptical and unanswerable that has defined the work of so many of our most probing public intellects.  Her prose is so simple and forceful that it seems to almost demand outraged dissent or dismissive disagreement, if only on the superficial grounds that she seems so unwilling to engage in a less limited discourse than the one her uncomplicated – but not necessarily not complex – sentences imply.  Her manner of discourse seemed to be one which would lead inevitably to the impasse of her hardened decision; she seemed less a thinker – someone, in the barest sense, who thinks, absurd as it sounds, for a living – than someone who thought, and then defended her position afterwards.  There rarely seems any evidence, any residue, of a process.  Her essays, hardened as they are in their statements, are distinctly uninviting; they engage the reader who agrees, but want nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t.

The impasse provided by so much of her work is similar to that provided by so many blogs: the majority are unabashedly – indeed, intentionally – guided by and interested only in the subjectivity of the lives therein addressed.  A blog is a presentation of subjective life as fact.  Someone’s photographed dinner is a fact.  Personal problems become a fact.  They become impossible to argue with because argumentation was never the point, or anywhere near the point.  Blogging allows people to present their lives as facts, their subjective appeals and complaints as objective, and they allow little room – given their often limited scope – for response.  Essentially, Sontag wrote blogs.

She addresses this issue of the personal-as-objective in “Regarding the Torture of Others,” an essay published in the New York Times Magazine shortly after the publication of Regarding the Pain of Others.  Both texts, like most of Sontag’s work, are alternately incisive and infuriatingly shortsighted.  Many of the claims she makes about those who tortured and took photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib are grand generalizations, but of which there is more often than not at least a kernel of truth.  Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch provide more acute and individual accounts in Standard Operating Procedure – which has been published in paperback with the curious title The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, and which is much better than the film version – but suffers from its own problems, as well: lack of focus, whether moral or “forensic,” being perhaps its most egregious.  But Sontag does offer an interesting twist to a familiar argument on what photography has done to “publicize” private life:

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them.

We have adapted, in a sense, to the publication of our lives, and depend upon it.  Furthermore, she seems to say, the action of taking a picture is almost a mere formality: we are already posing for the picture, so it might as well be taken.  This could lead into dangerously oversimplified, Baudrillardian territory, but there is something beckoning toward a kind of truth beneath those reductions.  She continues:

Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools — depicted in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, ”Dazed and Confused” — to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.

There does seem to be a greater delight taken in violence these days, at least visibly: in movies, video games, and all of the usual suspects.  But, as is usual with Sontag, her problem lies in blaming the zeitgeist as something inextricable from its time; this seems a contradiction in terms, but what Sontag does not question in her assessment is whether the delight has grown or simply the easiness.  She frames them together: it is an “easy delight.”  But they are separate issues: it is easier than ever to take delight in certain things – owing to the increasingly “global community” and so on – but this does not mean that the delight itself has grown; rather, it is the ease that has grown.  That is why it is more visible; that is why it seems to have grown.  Who can say, or how could it be said, whether or not it really has?

Delight is taken in violence when it is foreign.  And while films display violent acts, and ostensibly inure their audiences to cinematic violence, it is, of course, far from the real thing.  This is because violence engages the voyeuristic sense.  Violence is private; when made public, it attracts the kind of giddy excitement that occurs when the private is publicized.  Violence, then, is somewhat distinct, when shown in movies or video games, from real violence that truly affects, and hurts, real people.  Violence, for many people, is just another private thing that is exciting to see publicly.  And filmmaking – and any expository branch of an art form – engages in the kind of artificial voyeurism that can make violence seem exciting and sexy to so many.  The audience knows that the violence it is watching on screen is composed, that the “events” are “designed to be photographed.”  It is similar to taking private photographs and passing them along to friends, although it is of course significantly heightened.  Violence in film is just another kind of sex, or cursing, or just watching another person go about his or her day.  It provides an affect of realism, but without the same ethical problems that would accompany watching these acts outside of the cinema.  The problem with a movie like Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s supposed attack on screen violence, is that it thinks it’s doing one thing, to expose the audience, when in fact it is doing another, which only further excites the audience: when the actors begin playing with the fourth wall, staring out at the audience, or stopping and rewinding the film, they are not – as Haneke desires – subjecting the audience to something they do not want; on the contrary, they are providing the audience with exactly what it wants: participation, further inclusion in this escapist, faux-voyeuristic world.  As Haneke has remarked about the film, he is making explicit – namely, the audience’s involvement in film violence – what had previously only been implicit; what he doesn’t realize, however, is that the audience wants to be involved.  The audience understands the artificiality of this kind of voyeurism and enjoys when it is pushed.  This is why the vast majority of people who like Funny Games also probably like movies by Quentin Tarantino.  Haneke isn’t forcing the audience to see what they have done; he is allowing them to do what they want to be doing.  He is making this artificial voyeurism, in effect, only more approachable, in heightening the artificiality.  Furthermore, the blame he places on the audience for the proliferation of violence is a bit skewed: he forgets entirely about the providers, like himself, who abet the consumers in their consumption.

And so: blogging is merely another trend of artificial voyeurism; it wends in various directions – toward the more intellectual, critical, personal, crafts-oriented – but is essentially bound to a fundamentally exhibitionistic desire.  It would have been interesting to read what Sontag would have thought about blogging, although one can likely easily imagine: it seems she would find it just another potential arena, like photography, for posing.  It also seems likely that she would have very much liked the whole concept, through the practice of which acts of “posing” can be seen or read.  That’s why it’s fun; that’s why it’s infuriating; that’s why it’s gross or boring.  “To live is to be photographed” is a dubiously grand statement, and perhaps it applies more to Sontag, to the self-consciousness so evident in Reborn, than contemporary human nature; but if living is posing, then blogs are just another posture.

Realistic Cynicism, Part I

BY DOLORES PALLAS

 

There seems to exist a trend among older, successful writers – particularly writers who have been successful since their youths, and successful in a variety of genres and media – to place an unqualified faith in the value of whatever thought happens to cross their minds, and, moreover, to find any of these such thoughts – that is, every single one that their brains conjure forth – worthy of publication and entry into public discourse.  I think the logic goes something like this: I’ve written things that have received public acclaim, and I’ve written something just now, therefore, what I’ve just now written will receive public acclaim.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this; a fundamental part of blogging ideology lies in the belief that any thought is worthy of such an “entry.”  And it is entirely understandable: if someone believes him- or herself to hold a valuable judgment, and the publication of its exposition is possible – as it always and unquestioningly is by these long-successful writers–, why not seek a greater readership?  And, furthermore, there is a seeming infinitude of space online for these writers’ opinions to be shared; why not just let them speak and have their peace?  My practical answer for all of these is to allow these older, successful writers have their say and let it be over with.  But they still annoy me.

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the foremost figure among these older, successful writers to be victim to the delusions of his sort; and for good reason: the founder and figurehead of a discipline whose momentum is only increasing, and a justifiably celebrated thinker on matters beyond modern linguistics –a general consensus, perhaps more trendy than unbiased, grants Foucault the crown in their televised debate, but these people do so at the risk of simplifying Chomsky’s often dazzling suggestions, which he intentionally filters through deceptively jejune terminology, as if he were daring others to oversimplify his remarks; plus: this may be the only video on YouTube in which no one in the comments section calls anyone else a fag, which should merit some kind of commendation – Chomsky is no one to scoff at.  He is among the most vitally intelligent American “thinkers” alive.  But what he has succumbed to, what so many writers of his talent and success seem to succumb to, is an ossification of the alertness and intellectual flexibility that made him a notable mind in the first place.  He has stuck so stringently to the principles on which he founded modern linguistics that he risks limiting the discipline: it is so dependent upon his sole judgment – a problem in any field, but that seems to exist in this one more than any other – that any linguistic concept lacking his approval or bearing his disapproval is subject to, at the very least, being branded “controversial.”  And he pumps out new work after new work, seemingly creating new strands of his discipline with each successive text and any number of younger academics willing to examine the particulars and the holes of his latest prized suggestions.  He is immediately dismissive of any work that challenges his own, and this is severely to the detriment of both him and his field.  A remarkable article in the New Yorker offers a kind of digressive testament to this.

But what makes him most emblematic of this trend of older, successful writers is not his work within the discipline with which he is most closely associated but with those beyond it.  These writers are particularly keen to state what seems the obvious but has, somehow – perhaps for fear of seeming hopelessly redundant –, gone unsaid by others.  Usually this comes in the form of a sort of tame, thoughtless cynicism that masquerades as ostensibly tough, countercultural straight-talk.  Most recently, Chomsky warned Americans to not vote for Obama “without illusions.”  His reasoning, already fully digested by most thinking Americans, is that Obama may not be capable of fulfilling all that he has promised, or that, worse, he might turn his backs on us and start becoming all politician-like. Žižek, of all people – and someone who very clearly flirts with becoming afflicted with this delusion endemic to the successful –, offers a thoughtful rebuke to Chomsky’s remark.  He classifies him as the “realistic cynic” who, like Kissinger and so many other Realpolitikers before him, and like so many of us who feared Obama’s loss even amidst his soaring pre-election poll numbers, is often quite wrong.

This is precisely what is lacking in the thought processes of these older, successful writers – most of whom are also realistic cynics, as cynicism is to so many nearly, and lazily, synonymous with wisdom – and what separates them from their younger, considerably more thoughtful younger selves: the possibility that they may be wrong.  This very real, very frightening possibility is what shapes the most profound thinkers into who they become; without it, they lose their verve, their intellectual comprehensiveness, and their salience.