Building Nothing Out of Something

Goldsmith in his infinite fur-coated wisdom writes, “Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard?”

The simplest answer is to say why not atomize, shatter, and splat language, but if you want a more philosophically sophisticated answer, it lies in everything ever written by the Dadaists and the Futurists. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Goldsmith—I like to stuff words into towers too, and there are masterpieces made in doing that—however I must bring up an argument made in our class by the subtly aphoristic Dave “The Mean” Levine who said that art movements love to base themselves on the negation of all art before themselves. Goldsmith doesn’t really throw out everything before him—he says Flarff is “[f]using the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present,”—but he is still saying that the old stuff isn’t as good as the new stuff. Stealing is better than breaking, mink is better than fox.

The question of aesthetics, the question of what is appealing, comes to mind. Earlier in the semester Erin brought up the topic of liking a piece of art for its aesthetic, non-philosophical appeal alone, and isn’t that enough. My answer is that it is enough if it is good. John Cayley’s “Translation” for instance was ugly as hell, the music atonal and awkward, and the text illegible. It’s appeal is in its philosophy, and what it stands for, or really, what it stands against, that makes it a good piece of art. It stands against harmonies and readability that we usually associate with good art. Understanding brings appreciation. “Translation” is meant not to be understood, and is therefore unlikeable. However, the fact that it is meant to be “ugly” in all ways, creates understanding, and therefore makes it beautiful. Q.E.D.

But even so, Dave is still right. “Translation” is made to negate all art before it, and in doing so it promotes itself as worthwhile. Is it really worthwhile? How worthwhile is it compared to a van Dyke painting. Most people would not want to compare the two because of the philosophical space that separates them, but what if you take out the philosophy? What is left?

Liberalism and Free Internet

At the small press festival on Saturday Oren, our dear friend Oren, got confrontational with Lori’s husband, Ben, over (it seemed) the differences between what the Internet professes to be and what it actually is. Is it a space where the copyright laws are nullified by open source code? Or is it still commodified by software companies and internet providers? (Wait for the day when Google buys Comcast. Mark my words…)

This little flare up at the small press fest has sparked a little debate among our MFA circles, based mostly around trying to figure out what liberalism is. The simple definition, it seems, is the belief in liberty and equal rights, which is a broad definition that almost doesn’t get us anywhere at all. What constitutes freedom on the Internet? Is it access to digital art or is participation a requirement? If it lies somewhere in the middle of those two, how does one discern the gradient between access and full participation? A Flash piece for instance, like YH Chang, is access with no participation, while Brian Kim Stefans’ Letter Builder is all participation, with the access being pointless without movement from the reader.

As the person in the back said, we must remember that most of the world doesn’t have access to a computer or the Internet and the software to make digital art is even more prohibiting. But I hate that statement. A lot of people in the world have never heard of James Joyce, but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about him until everyone has read Finnigan’s Wake. We work in a very privileged field, but it is still a field that raises a lot of questions and needs a lot of answers. It is not pointless, in other words, and the question of whether the Internet is actually free or not lies at the core of that Marxist-like class argument of who has the means? I don’t see the Internet as exclusionary, even though lots of people are excluded from it. But it does not exist because people are excluded from it, unlike democracy (although that seems like a stretch too). It is theoretically possible for everyone to have access to the internet, even though it probably won’t happen. But there is all the difference in the world between “probably won’t happen” and “impossible.”

A Defense of Cynicism

Apropos of out conversation from last class, I want to talk about cynicism and Brian Kim Stefans’ The Dream Life of Letters. The argument was that this piece is cynical because it took a Duplessis feminist essay and disintegrated it, destroyed it, blew it up, and picked through the remains to make something that does not address the essay or the theories and implications, involved in the work. And according to his intro, Stefans couldn’t figure out the essay and therefore his response was something that cannot be understood (at least in a grammatical sense). Dream Life was likened to hipsters who only criticize and destroy without creating anything positive in return.

By saying Dream Life is cynical is saying that it is not a positive creation. And since it is indeed a creation, that much I am sure, if it isn’t positive, it is a negative creation. I find this to be a unjustified heirachization, the bane of literary theorists (MAs, PhDs mount your steeds! To battle! To battle!). To assume that Dream Life is a negative creation is to assume that Duplessis essay was a positive creation. I am not arguing that it wasn’t, but I am arguing that because Dream Life is in dialogue with it, we assume the first to be correct. I have defended this piece in two classes now, and both times it is just assumed that the feminist approach was inherently better than what Stefans produced. Yes, inherently. No one has read the fucking essay! How can we say that Dream Life is cynical if we don’t know what it is destroying? For a hyperbolic argument, what if Dream Life took the words from a Mussolini speech and made them beautiful. Essentially the piece would be the same, with the same movement and colors and whatnot, but the creation would be positive (assuming a Mussolini speech is a negative creation). That is the problem with calling a piece of artwork cynical. It creates a positive out of nothing, and vice versa. Doesn’t a creation of artwork boil down to just being a creation, even if it is in dialogue with another piece?

I feel that this is the Conan O’Brien argument for cynicism, the argument that nothing good will ever come from cynicism and therefore there it is only destructive and only harmful. I consider cynicism to be our political pain, a feeling that tells us something is wrong. It is impossible to notice something is wrong and have a replacement, or answer, instantaneously. Duplessis wasn’t wrong, of course, and Dream Life was not an extemporaneous response. But to deem a destructive response as automatically a negative one, I find jumping too far ahead.