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Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Assault on Hedonism, Part 2: Nietzsche, Pater, Marcus
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
At the end of my last post on hedonism, I wrote: “At least, since we have to start somewhere, to start by tackling the relationship between consumption and pleasure, and the silent withdrawal of the festival from daily life.” Consumerism is not a process of enjoyment, to be resisted through sacrifice and Grecian discipline. It is a betrayal of enjoyment, a form of usurpation. The imposition of new political guilt, justified through the fantasy of a non-existent Leninist vanguard, piling sacrifice upon sacrifice, drives me to the same sorts of questions expressed so eloquently at Larval Subjects:
When I hear calls to give up enjoyment such as they are issuing from Jodi Dean or Zizek, I hear the thesis that somehow social change should consist in rendering our living conditions even more intolerable than they currently are. Why is this a form of social transformation that anyone should desire? To put it in crude and less than trendy-jargonistic terms, if social transformation does not lead to better work and living conditions, better, more equitable, more just, more satisfying, and more meaningful ways of relating to one another, more freedom to pursue our desires and cultivate ourselves, why should these forms of social transformation be desired at all?
So, for me, the return to the Greeks will be a search for pleasure. Rather than asking why people aren’t more disciplined, I am interested in why they should be so miserable. It is not enough just to accuse consumers of being insatiable; one has to trace the losses of solidarity and vision that accompany the crippling of pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche still holds title to the most influential study of pleasure in Greece ever written, The Birth of Tragedy. In that book he famously divided Greek culture into two halves, named after Apollo and Dionysus. He then described the decline of both cultures after the advent of philosophy, and blamed Socrates and Plato for an optimistic account of truth that banished the fundamental pessimism of both Apollonian and Dionysian art.
Here are Nietzsche’s rather inescapable descriptions of the Dionysian mood (from the Modern Library’s Basic Writings):
Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness....Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. (36-37)
In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance—the annihilation of the veil of maya, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself. The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement. Then the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony. (40)
For Nietzsche, all of these experiences are built upon a “hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge” (46). This is why Nietzsche ultimately identifies Dionysian culture with tragedy, and with philosophical pessimism.
American popular culture has always had an immense fund of pessimism in the form of its musical traditions, most archetypally via country music and the blues. This compensated for the exclusion of pessimism elsewhere, by the optimism of enterprise and the Protestant work ethic. (The only American holiday faintly resembling a “bacchanal” is New Year’s Eve, and even that carries with it the tradition of making resolutions.) For example, Greil Marcus, discussing Robert Johnson in Mystery Train, duplicates almost every one of Nietzsche’s terms:
In “Stones in My Passway” terror is too ubiquitous to have a face: it is formless, elusive, overpowering....The idea simply takes shape as the song draws in all the echoes of hellhounds, devils, the weirdness of blues walking like a man, draws in those images and goes past them. If those images were a means to expression, they are no longer necessary—they are no longer good enough. Because not even his body is how own, Johnson cannot satisfy his woman. Because that matters more than anything else in his life, that fact, as a symbol, expands to create more facts, more symbols. Finally, with stones in every passway and no way clear, there is a way in which the singer’s life is resolved: he has seen all around his life, for as long as he can hold onto the image....It communicates so directly any distance between the singer and the listener is smashed. (36)
Here is the recurrence of “terror” as a primary impulsion towards ecstasy. Here is the moment when the image fails, to be replaced by mythic symbols, which themselves prove to be fleeting manifestations of a primal formlessness that affirms and resolves life. The bounds of subjectivity are broken. Johnson is no longer himself, and the “union between man and man” is reaffirmed when the distance between him and us goes smash.
So, what happens to these musical traditions in a stubbornly optimistic country? The “primal unity” of its ritual gets torn apart into two separate and vulnerable practices: pessimism and dancing ("the whole pantomime of dancing").
Dancing, on its own, reverts to optimism. Going out to clubs or bars, for example, has nothing to do with some German philosopher’s vision of “these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, [in whom] we rediscover the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks” (36). It is an opportunity to socialize and flirt, thoroughly hedged in by work schedules for everyone except some college students. The wilder the party, the more likely somebody is about to get married. And yet, despite the fact that these outings are sources of terrible anxiety for many people, and manifestations of loneliness, boredom, and need, they still get the shakedown. Philosophy blogger Grundlegung writes,
In the spirit of Zizekian austerity....I am somewhat attracted to this inversion of Emma Goldman’s notorious demand: “If I can dance, it’s not my revolution."
He’s not being entirely serious, but the irony only goes as far as a “somewhat.” Above all, dancing is something young people do. Chris Rock put it well: “Every man has to settle down, eventually. You know why you gotta settle down eventually? Because you don’t want to be the old man in the club. You know what I’m talking about. Every club you go into, there’s always some old guy. He ain’t really old, just a little too old to be in the club.” The perfection of the sketch is twofold: You know what I’m talking about, because of the universal prohibition, and He ain’t really old, because real age isn’t the point. The point is settling down: catharsis and courtship, not hedonism. The one kind of dance culture really devoted to self-forgetfulness, rave culture, regresses all the way back to costumes that signify infancy and childhood, and the fantasia of childhood as we dream it.
The other element of Dionysian culture, pessimism, becomes mired in puerility just as much. We call it angst, and put it squarely on the shoulders of adolescents, who have to go through both generalized existential angst and the angst of unrequited love. In the place of Robert Johnson’s actual pessimism, or the actual revelation of futility, we get a contemptible epiphenomenon. In fact, even Nietzsche himself falls in. There are two Nietzsches who now live side-by-side: the “serious” Nietzsche, author of the genealogical critiques of morals and metaphysics, and the adolescent Nietzsche, author of most of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books. As waxbanks put it, in an eloquent comment elsewhere: “Only asshole teenagers read Nietzsche, right?!” Or look at Feministe, where criticism of the eminently criticizable Avril Lavigne went like this:
You’re a married grown-up now; the middle school mall-punk “Ugh, this suuuucks” schtick is a little tired. We all have our teenage angst, but at some point, you move on.
Of course it’s tired. It has to dress up like high school every time.
***
So what becomes of Apollonian culture? What enters into its spirit when its opposite is transformed into a discourse for children? After all, Nietzsche makes the persuasive claim that Apollonian culture is a form of alchemy that overcomes the horror of being born into death:
The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing one to a continuation of life, was also the cause of the Olympian world which the Hellenic “ will made use of as a transfiguring mirror....Where we encounter the “naïve” in art, we should recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture—which always must first overthrow an empire of Titans and slay monsters, and which must have triumphed over an abysmal and terrifying view of the world and the keenest susceptibility to suffering through recourse to the most forceful and pleasurable illusions. (43)
In the absence of a legitimate Dionysian culture, Apollonian culture becomes likewise regressive, veering towards adolescent romantic plots and nostalgic genre references. At other points, I’ve written about regressive art, of which the best example continues to be Harry Potter. But here I want to emphasize, not the aesthetic limitations of regression, but the paralyzing effect it has on creativity. The real risk one takes writing a poem, or a novel, or even a series of reflections, is that of becoming a child—a real risk, not something to be shrugged off heroically, because childlike perceptions and plots have been blended with the authentic impulse. The only remainder, subtracted from the childlike experience, is ethics, the discourse of iron. Ethics intrudes everywhere, with its relentless speechifying: every episode of The West Wing ends with a speech, and so does Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, just as Dumbledore’s speeches echo through Harry’s adventures. Zizek’s review of 300, with which this whole investigation began, hones in on the film’s “programmatic statement” about freedom and reason. Where the impulse towards puerility has been successfully avoided, one rarely escapes an equal loss of Hellenic lambency: the remainder is Cormac McCarthy.
So, for the consumer, the irony is that the conjunction of adolescent pessimism, nostalgic escapism, and inviolable ethics puts the work of art continually out of reach, while making it simultaneously necessary as a form of relief. In fact, the work of art escapes even when it is right there, in front of us, thanks to the “criticism of purpose“ described so well by Caroline Levine, or else remains uncomprehended. The phenomenon of consumption is not, ironically enough, the result of too much engagement with things. It is actually the symptom of a lack of engagement with things: an inability to carry on a lasting study of a piece of culture, an inability to wrench material objects away from the advertisements or stigmas that constitute them. In the Apollonian dream, things have to be what they are, and be subject to the perceptual discipline that realizes beauty in things without the missing term of the purchase.
In his study of Giorgione, Walter Pater wrote:
In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school, music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening—listening to music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are suprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. (from The Renaissance)
So, having established the principle of play, in a way that recalls childhood without becoming bound to it, Pater himself begins to engage more deeply with Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre in the mode of play. As he does so, first water, and then air, become the symbols of desires awakened and satisfied, questions asked and answered:
But when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off; and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water—the well, or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fête Champêtre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music of the pipes—is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. And the landscape feels, and is glad of it also—a landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels.
The whole thing is instinct with joy. It ventures inside of the original work, but also surpasses it through the playful exposition of a reverie, one whose limpid depths are clear all the way to the bottom, where are thirsts and tears. In the hope that media like blogs will prove to be some means of access to the happier powers in things, I will end with a landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air. From the art blog Big Window:
Comments
Joseph, I think that this 2-part post sounds quite interesting, but I can’t quite follow it. I understand “The imposition of new political guilt, justified through the fantasy of a non-existent Leninist vanguard, piling sacrifice upon sacrifice, drives me to the same sorts of questions expressed so eloquently at Larval Subjects: [...] “I hear the thesis that somehow social change should consist in rendering our living conditions even more intolerable than they currently are. Why is this a form of social transformation that anyone should desire?” That much, I’ve already commented on / agreed with at the first part of the post.
The rest seems to depend on an argument that the U.S. has a national culture of optimism and perhaps workaholism (I don’t know if I’d call the Protestant work ethic optimistic precisely, but it’s certainly opposed to Dionysian culture), which rejects an adult Dionysianism, and then Apollonian culture is itself reduced to childishness for lack of a Dionysianian one. But this seems oddly ahistorical—it would have to apply since U.S. national culture was formed, would it not? But then you’ve lost “the fantasy of a non-existent Leninist vanguard”, which was not a fantasy for significant parts of the 20th century. It seems like you’re trying to take something viewed as a recent reaction and explain it though last-lasting cultural universals.
I als oquestion this: “The real risk one takes writing a poem, or a novel, or even a series of reflections, is that of becoming a child—a real risk, not something to be shrugged off heroically, because childlike perceptions and plots have been blended with the authentic impulse.” The authentic impulse? If we’re talking about pleasure, or enjoyment, is the authentic impulse really an adult one? Remember: there is no adult reason to write a poem, a novel, or a series of reflections. The work is badly paid; almost anyone who could do it could be more highly paid doing something else, and that is what is of importance in the adult world, is it not? The only possible additional recompense is a sort of desire for recognition, in itself childish. Certainly perceptions and plots should not be childish, wherever the impulse comes from, the writer should not lose their life-experience. But your example is a series of books that is intended, after all, for children.
And finally I don’t understand your close, about Pater. I know that you mean to be saying something about aesthetic discipline, but discipline for who, the creator? Or the consumer? Life conceived of as having the time to listen seems to me to be dangerously regressive. “An inability to carry on a lasting study of a piece of culture” may be in part a problem of so much more aesthetically worthy culture being available to the masses—not a problem that seems amenable to easy solution, unless through a “discipline” designed to reject large parts of it.
Rich,
What a helpful comment—it points to moments in the post that, indeed, probably could be further explained.
First, this:
But this seems oddly ahistorical—it would have to apply since U.S. national culture was formed, would it not? But then you’ve lost “the fantasy of a non-existent Leninist vanguard”, which was not a fantasy for significant parts of the 20th century. It seems like you’re trying to take something viewed as a recent reaction and explain it though long-lasting cultural universals.
That’s absolutely right; I see these calls for discipline more or less as new manifestations of the old work ethic, with the ironic twist that they claim to fall outside of “work,” outside of religion, and even outside of capitalism. But the only thing really new here is an attack within the Left on forms of “permissiveness” it has historically championed.
Remember: there is no adult reason to write a poem, a novel, or a series of reflections. The work is badly paid; almost anyone who could do it could be more highly paid doing something else, and that is what is of importance in the adult world, is it not?
You’re being sarcastic here, which I appreciate, but which also makes this a little harder to untangle. In other words, you’re both critiquing the situation, since your reference to losing out on money is clearly sarcastic, and endorsing it, since you end by concluding that the impulse is in fact childish. We might tend to think of it that way, thanks to Freud, but things like “the desire for recognition” would not have seemed childish in the least to writers from a different age, or to moralists like Aristotle or Plutarch.
I know that you mean to be saying something about aesthetic discipline, but discipline for who, the creator?
Yes, exactly; the discipline of craft, which discovers limits, rather than the discipline of asceticism, which imposes them. A reader can read anything; a writer, even a critic like Pater, is going to find influences and antipodes (or both together, as Bloom has it).
Life conceived of as having the time to listen seems to me to be dangerously regressive. “An inability to carry on a lasting study of a piece of culture” may be in part a problem of so much more aesthetically worthy culture being available to the masses—not a problem that seems amenable to easy solution, unless through a “discipline” designed to reject large parts of it.
It seems clear enough from Pater that listening is part of acting. It is something like a principle of harmony: he is “listening” to the painting when he analyzes it, just as the woman in the painting is listening to the water as she pours it out. Again, what might seem dangerously regressive or passive to us did not seem that way to Emerson or Thoreau, who described an ideal relationship to Nature in very similar terms. Can you imagine endorsing the opposite, not having time to listen to things?
The idea that contemporary aesthetic discipline involves rejecting large swaths of culture makes perfect sense to me. Otherwise, we either drown in it outright, or suffer from an arbitrary selection of things whose merit remains abstract, only palely related to any project or sensibility of ours. One heralded novel after another (cf. Indecision); one Pazz ‘n Jop list after another.
Thanks, Joseph. I’ll have to think about that some more. But as an immediate reply, yes, I was probably switching back and forth between sarcasm and seriousness too quickly in that middle paragraph. There is a serious core to the sarcasm, though; I remember reading something by Empson (it must have been in Seven Types of Ambiguity) about how changing economic conditions have changed poetry—it used to be possible to make a living as a poet, and now it is not. Therefore, poets used to have an economic motive to polish their poetry as much as possible, while now they have only psychological motives, and therefore poems must now be, in some sense, either more psychological or less polished. I do think that there’s a danger in classifying authentic impulses as adult in these circumstances; the desire for recognition may not have seemed childish to people from a different age, but we’re talking about our age, in which the avatar for the desire for recognition is the reality TV contestant.
“The idea that contemporary aesthetic discipline involves rejecting large swaths of culture makes perfect sense to me.”
I think that this is the central problem of critcism, perhaps of readership in general, of our time. Almost all the various stances are different ways of rejecting swaths of culture (too old, too new, too in-group, too out-group, too low, wrong medium, wrong genre, etc.) Harold Bloom is agonized by this; I think it’s why he makes the ridiculous claim to have read every major work, and I suspect it’s why his theory of influence has a mode of decline but no mode of improvement.
I don’t know what a good answer would be, but I distrust all the ones I’ve seen, and none of them seem to me to be able to hold under the continuing expansion of the universe of culture. I suspect that it’s going to be a willing embrace of the arbitrary—a willingness to spend the time “listening” to each reasonable worthwhile art / text that you encounter, even though this inevitably means that you spend time with less aesthetically worthy art, and therefore miss more worthy art. But, in effect, this is like a return to childishness, when you are fascinated by ordinary things. Again, this shouldn’t be done with childish perception, but there’s a possible disjunction between quality of perception and modes of perception.
"the discipline of craft, which discovers limits, rather than the discipline of asceticism, which imposes them.”
Having had a little more time to think about this, I wonder about this part. You analysis in this half starts with consumers and then goes to people in general. Do people in general get to exercise craft within the area of art? Generally not. It’s possible that they could, or, there are localities in which it appears that they do. (A good deal of my poetry implicitly references the area in which I live, in which a very high proportion of people appear to have some kind of artistic hobby.) But if so, it appears inescapable that most people are going to produce ordinary art, by any reasonable definition of “ordinary”, and that this art would itself be rejected by the discipline of readers “rejecting large swaths of culture”. The wish not to drown in art becomes an implicit force for discouraging people from exercising craft.
My preliminary solution is a forthright statement that everyone should spend a large part of their time reading the works of their friends. It’s a value that is certainly attacked as parochial, but I think that it’s necessary for appreciation of art to be local if production is to be made universal, and it doesn’t disallow some time spent reading what are considered to be the globally most aesthetic or most influential works. It’s the solution of blogging, really. No one should ever read a blog if what they want to do is discipline themselves to read the best works.
And in that spirit:
“One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education....“
Speaking of hedonism, I enjoyed this a lot. It’s an essay—a start, a stab—and so it’s meant to provoke thought rather than rest a case. It attained success as soon as it incited Luther Blissett’s Declaration of Twee. (See also the Poof Manifesto.) Literally incidentally, I also appreciated your averting the antipathic turn in the first part’s comments thread.
The thought first provoked for me is a worry about how we try to deal with consumerist culture. Of course this is an ongoing problem for anyone who wants to take artifacts seriously, but our shared impulse to say that fast-and-disposble consumption isn’t really pleasure—it has a hint of “false consciousness”, a condescending air. (Not to mention how easily such arguments can be turned against us—or against me, at any rate.) I look at Cory Doctorow and I see someone who does seem to take genuine delight in his “toys”. I wouldn’t want to be him; he wouldn’t want to be me. But that formula seems like a solid basis for friendship rather than something to fix.
As teachers and critics, we’re impelled to push people outside the conceptual boundaries where they more or less comfortably rest, and so we do need to justify the differences between what we see and what they see. In this case I’m not sure whether I want push to come to shove—some other approach might allow a more equitable distribution of contempt....
(No conclusions yet, as you see.)
Ray, thank you very much!
I would say that this comment, from Rich,
I suspect that it’s going to be a willing embrace of the arbitrary—a willingness to spend the time “listening” to each reasonable worthwhile art / text that you encounter, even though this inevitably means that you spend time with less aesthetically worthy art, and therefore miss more worthy art. But, in effect, this is like a return to childishness, when you are fascinated by ordinary things.
...is echoed to some extent here, by Ray:
I look at Cory Doctorow and I see someone who does seem to take genuine delight in his “toys”. I wouldn’t want to be him; he wouldn’t want to be me. But that formula seems like a solid basis for friendship rather than something to fix.
The difference being that Rich puts it in terms of a valuable (though not mandatory) moral precept, while Ray makes it external to himself by referencing Doctorow.
Perhaps it’s heresy to say it, but most blogs are good because they spark conversations, not because they are on par with the best that has been thought and said. It’s also a pleasure to read up-to-the-minute documents that analyze contemporary culture, politics, and products; many blogs are like editorial columns. Right now Spurious is the only non-comment blog I’m willing to read, and I think many blogs owe their popularity to the fact that you can read them at work, whereas a book is a little too obvious.
There have always been people who delighted in toys; it would be great if, thanks to them, we had more Creative Commons novels about Disneyland and more sites like Boing Boing. I have to be honest, though, about the fact that libraries and museums appeal to me more than the obsessive clutter of private collections and private Wonderlands. I don’t just mean spaces for books and paintings; I mean common spaces of all kinds. While I enjoy the nostalgic collector’s joy driving artworks like American Splendor and Ghost World, both of which began as comic books, I don’t think the phenomenon of male analog culture has much to contribute to the overall debate, in part because I see it as an ultimately doomed reaction against digitalization. There’s always a limit to what someone can actually use, and within those limits, I have nothing bad to say about other people’s pleasures; on the other hand, a private collection is not limited, and can’t automatically be brooked.
Of course, another relevant refrain is that you can’t get anywhere just asking people whether this or that gave them pleasure. Most people would rather say they enjoyed something, than not. So, right after Pirates of the Caribbean 2 came out, it had plenty of defenders, even though, by now, it has already been pushed aside by other genre films. Lots of people read The Life of Pi; I’m not personally aware of anyone who read it and re-read it with the kind of devotion that Salinger, Plath, or Fitzgerald tend to inspire.
As for the artwork of friends—like blogging, I understand this through the model of conversation and exchange, rather than as a painful series of mutual obligations. And a lot of it can be extraordinary; the profusion of new independent music has actually raised standards. On the other hand, a huge marketing effort goes into suspending questions about the value of new, mediocre cultural artifacts. I’ll emphasize how complex these issues actually are by pointing out that one of the reasons I like Ghost World is that the characters feel a tremendous imperative towards culture. No matter how eccentric or superficially ordinary the thing might be, they don’t experience it that way, and they certainly don’t think of it as mere “entertainment.”
Finally, I should point out that Pater was more critic than artist. If blogs are any indication, most people do want to have a soapbox for their critical views on culture, politics, and society, all of which require rhetorical skill, research, erudition, and craft. I wouldn’t want to set any limits, in advance, on what their capacity for insight or beauty might be.