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And so now the Left is riven by a pointless debate between a supposed “class-only” Left and an “identity” Left. There are valid criticisms to make of “identity politics,” the most obvious of which is that it tends to toggle between being a theory of everything and being a set of simple commonsense observations. But no sensible person should seek to altogether do away with identity politics in a society as riddled with invented divisions as this one; it would be like asking every country to disarm except the biggest one. And while it’s true that the accusation of “class-only” leftism befalls anyone who talks about class, that is no reason to lean into the stereotype. Many on the left point out that identity politics is often used by “capital” to keep the working class apart; when critics of capitalism become hostile to the mere discussion of racism, though, they are playing out the other side of capital’s little plan.
Most people who are not simply saying indefensible things to build their brand will agree that racism originated in class exploitation but that it now operates somewhat independently. The question is how much, and as this is not a question that can be answered in the abstract—it can only usefully be assessed about particular situations—the general “class vs. identity” question should be given a wide berth. Suffice to say that if you are truly worried about workers, you will always try to notice who they are and which of them is worst off. You will, if you do this, find yourself fighting racism, and also sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism—every systematized cruelty.
I watch bad movies, a pastime and a passion I have long shared with my father. When I was a child, we would sit on one of a series of couches scavenged from yard sales or curbsides, eating microwave popcorn while watching, say, Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) or Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1962). My father would set the VCR to tape these movies in the middle of the night from the sorts of TV channels that programmed them, with palpable desperation, between reruns of The Incredible Hulk and camcorder-filmed ads for local mattress store chains. Amusement, like couches, had to be taken where found.
cute
I do not believe that we manifest our own reality. The older I get, the less control I feel anyone has over anything, including the quality of one’s work. Outright fatalism tempts me, though I don’t succumb. In the realm of the arts, the realization that we can have deeply memorable experiences with bad works—and dull experiences with well-made ones—can lead us to a free-floating aesthetic relativism, analogous in some ways to apolitical liberalism of the West Wing variety. Everyone has preferences, but the important thing to remember is that we’re all just people. De gustibus non est disputandum. The more sophisticated version of this argument is the common belief that “good taste” reduces to the desire to accrue cultural capital—a claim that removes taste from the black box that relativism puts it in but does so by reducing it to a wispy epiphenomenon at best.
But given the ubiquity of aesthetic experiences—sublime, ridiculous, weird, disgusting—and the fact that they are shared often enough to stand, in some sense, external to the self, this relativistic stance becomes hard to sustain. Nobody sticks to relativism, in aesthetics as in politics, for very long. We reach for the normative languages of “good” and “bad” art, of “genius” and “talent,” as we reach for the language of “good” and “evil,” because the experiences we label with such language are ubiquitous and often shared. (No sooner had some theorists declared the term genius off-limits than a generation realized that we needed a word for whatever Kate Bush is.) And we distrust these same normative languages because we (rightly) fear participating in an unjust hegemony, or because we (wrongly) conflate subjective with private, indeterminate with unreal.
ugh i love his writing!
The blending of “high” and “low,” and the temptation of aesthetic relativism that comes with it, has been with us at least since the beginning of the twentieth century—when Henri Rousseau was acclaimed a genius for his ostentatiously naive paintings and the Surrealists found unexpected inspiration in the careless, breathless style of the Fantômas novels. Cave art and African masks, made by people then presumed to be “primitive” in some inescapable sense, made Pablo Picasso and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who they were. It never went away in literary studies, where first, the author’s intention, and then, just the author, were declared off-limits to criticism. The films and paintings of Andy Warhol, the music of Sun Ra and John Cage and Brian Eno and then of the more committedly amateur post-punk artists, and the creative plagiarism of hip-hop DJs and writers like Kathy Acker all raised the question: Is it still art if you don’t know or control what you’re doing? Knowledge of tradition didn’t necessarily matter; training didn’t necessarily matter; meaning didn’t necessarily matter; vision didn’t necessarily matter. This process of aesthetic reassessment resembled the way Christian theology every so often rediscovers the frankly antinomian possibilities of a salvation initiated and completed by God. If our hard work doesn’t matter, why bother?
Born in the 1970s, I caught the very end of the culture Teachout mourns. My father spent years paying off a set of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World on the installment plan. He read from it when he could, and eventually so did I. The set left me with the unfortunate impression that Homer wrote prose, that there was a single thing known as “the Western World,” that human thought culminated in Sigmund Freud (volume 54, right at the end), and that all geniuses were male. With effort and luck, I was able to overcome these prejudices. But the presence of these books in my home also gave me an early awareness that the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were things a person might read after coming home from a shift at Walmart. I have since learned that this is a hard thing for many putatively well-educated people to imagine, and so I look back on those volumes with warmth as well as skepticism.
American intellectuals’ persistent attraction to the idea of a synthetic common culture, pulled together from the best bits of everything everywhere, seems to me like a displaced form of artistic ambition. It is Richard Wagner’s dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk that unites every art into an unanswerable, unignorable synthesis, or the modernist dream of an all-powerful new symbolic language formed from the synthesis of new and old, the reblooding of the past. The intellectual wants to compile and curate this language while the artist wants to invent it. Each wishes for something that cannot be. Precisely because we can use them to talk to each other, common languages can leave us feeling more fragmented; they let us state our differences more clearly. Language consolidates and it splits. We live among fragments and see through various glasses darkly.
[...] pop culture teaches best when it isn’t so conscious of its teacherly role, when it doesn’t underline every point five or six times. (It has this in common with, well, any sort of culture.) The low-budget shock filmmaker George Romero taught the audiences of his own period far more powerfully, and with much less fuss, simply by featuring Black characters in heroic roles and by listening when the actress Gaylen Ross said, during the shooting of the 1979 zombie epic, Dawn of the Dead, that she didn’t think her character would scream. We might say that Romero rode his mind at a gallop in pursuit of making a frightening movie, whereas our popular artists live betwixt and between, now trying to emulate the artworks that they love, now trying to impart a Very Important Lesson.
Why have we settled for this strange cultural compromise—lowbrow genres, done with middlebrow earnestness, in pretend revolt against a thoroughly defunded highbrow regime? The answer is simple and depressing. We have accepted the idea of the democratization of culture—we have accepted, rightly, that, say, opera is not inherently worthier than jazz, that superhero comics are not inherently dumb, that ancient epic poetry is not automatically loftier than rap (with which it shares some features), that all of these things can be done well or badly and that they serve different ends—without accomplishing democracy. I mean this in a dully straightforward way. We are not all equally in control of our lives, and we are afraid of what becoming so would entail, of the costs of democracy, of the mess of it. We are divided by class, race, and gender and united only in being the objects of a ceaseless corporate effort to accomplish our commodification. Having lost the economic battle to economic and political elites, we celebrate, again and again, our victory over the mostly imaginary cultural elite that would scorn us for watching 90 Day Fiancé. What you can’t do practically, you do symbolically, until it becomes a neurosis.
damn
The best thing we can do for Homer, for opera, for the French New Wave, for the Four Classical Novels, for Jay-Z and The Simpsons and Star Wars is to take the promises held out to the culture by the older sort of educational middlebrow, look carefully at them, and keep them. We would keep them by guaranteeing every person a decent school, free time, and a good nearby library, one they could walk through without immediately attracting the hostile attentions of staff. We could decide that there are such things as beauty, goodness, excellence, and self-cultivation and that we’re willing to pay for them; we could stop indulging the adolescent boy’s fantasy that the world of culture is a scrim drawn over an unremittingly Darwinian landscape. We could, having done all this, settle down to the task of talking with each other about the art we love in a way that attends to the specificity of that art. We could do that now.
hell yeah
The fact that I eventually left my denomination also illustrates that religious people experience coming to our beliefs no differently than other people do. Some religions teach that we learn to share their tenets through divine action, but I’m talking about how it feels getting there. You arrived at your deep belief in human rights, in class struggle, in science—the lawn-sign sense of the term—more or less the same way I arrived at my left-of-center Christianity: sloppily. We all muddle through life with pieces of a thousand incompatible discourses wedged in our skulls. They come from upbringing, education, friends, popular culture; they are forced on us, malignantly or benignly, by corporate or state or family power; we are drawn to them by disposition or by experience or by the fascination of what’s difficult. Gradually, from a combination of happenstance and persuasion, we discover our deepest commitments.
The post of his quoted earlier, about maintaining fidelity to the post-punk event, illustrates why you have to have some patience with Fisher, and also why you’ll be glad you did. First, there’s the lucid analysis: “Punk and post-punk, however, were profoundly suspicious of the Dionysian triumvirate of leisure, pleasure and intoxication, so that the required attitude was one of vigilant hyperrationalism.” (Where hippies smoked weed and related, punks took speed and argued.) Then there’s the surprising but suggestive connection: “The stance such a perception demanded—and this was a culture that was deliberately and unashamedly demanding—was one of ‘proletarian discipline’ rather than slack indulgence, its Puritanism recalling the egalitarian social ambitions of the original Puritans.” Then there’s the understated compassion, the trait that most clearly distinguishes him from Land and yet can’t be neatly separated from Fisher’s silly hobbyhorses: “Go into a roomful of teenagers and look at their self-scarred arms, the antidepressants that sedate them, the quiet desperation in their eyes. They literally do not know what it is they are missing. What they don’t have is what post-punk provided . . . A way out . . . and a reason to get out. . .”