Full disclosure: I, like Erika, am working from the “red-panties” edition, and so I fully understand that my reading experience of Against Love was immeasurably more pleasurable than most of you. Take it under advisement, dear reader.
On the style question: if you haven’t already found it, I recommend the dialogue Kipnis had with Daphne Merkin in Slate.com about The Female Thing, her most recent book. (The dialogue starts here: http://www.slate.com/id/2154848/entry/2154988/; note that “id” appears in the URL, which would no doubt make Kipnis happy) Merkin’s opening post begins with her attack on Kipnis’ style, which echoes some of the things others have been saying:
“I…devoutly wish that you would lose some of your more strenuously (not to mention irritatingly) breezy locutions in your next book. But I, unlike Jacobs, am willing to overlook your populist twang—which I attribute variously to you and your publisher’s hopes for landing you an Oprah slot and to your being an academic specializing in media studies (which can’t possibly be as flimsy a specialty as I conjecture it to be) rather than, say, gender studies (which would bring on a whole other unbearable vocabulary of ‘queering’ and ‘privileging’ and spotting ‘tropes’ right and left)—to the unpopulist mind that lurks beneath.”
It’s interesting that Merkin herself enacts the “academy vs. the middle-brow” binary right off the bat in an attempt to make sense of Kipnis’ style, as if there’s something about Kipnis’ prose which evokes some form of tension between these two cultural imaginaries. (Not only that, she creates a “media studies” vs. “gender studies” distinction that I find more than a little odd.) Anyway, here’s Kipnis’ response, by way of an opening “confession”:
“The confession concerns my employment situation in the dreaded world of academia, which you contrast to the populist twang of the writing. Although I do indeed receive a paycheck from a university, I’m actually a former filmmaker who went to art school and mostly teach on the production side of the curriculum. What I write about actually has little to do with what I teach, so I’m not really what you’d call a traditional academic. It’s a little complicated to explain all this in a bio line, though I would have tried if I’d known that it would turn out to be a filter through which to read the book (not only here, but in the Times).”
As a response to Merkin’s assumptions, I find this last line really fascinating, as Kipnis hints at the ways in which the spectre of the academy is used to pillory Kipnis’ text, as if it is some kind of unacceptable Frankenstinian monstrosity. It seems to me at least some people are dismayed by the hybridity of the text, that it inappropriately mashes together two different discourses, when it’s this hybridity which I personally find so fascinating, even if I didn’t find it altogether successful (Trisha can tell you that I’m in love with failure). Kipnis, however, goes on to pretty much affirm that dichotomy herself:
“How does this relate to the question of prose style? Having an art education, and having been steeped in an experimental tradition at an impressionable age, I find myself interested, as a writer, in playing around with style and address, and in the larger question of how to creatively revamp social theory writing—the critical-diagnostic tradition of books like Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, in which the writing itself is often unbearably dry and authoritarian. How would you write social criticism in which the writing itself performs the critique, as opposed to relying on argumentation or didacticism; books in which the writing engages the reader at the aesthetic level, not a cognitive one alone?
“In Against Love, given the subject (adultery), I tried riffing on the mode of the love letter: The writing was over-the-top and flirtatious, there were a lot of run-on sentences and excessive metaphors, a lot of playing around—you know, like adultery. I was trying to write to the cultural id, and I think people mostly understood that. In The Female Thing, I really thought it would be clear that I was parodying the style of women’s magazines and girl culture—not because the publishers were hoping to land me on Oprah (though I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded), but as an experiment in appropriation: refunctioning (in the Brecht sense) girly language and turning it on its head, into critique. OK, maybe it was a failed experiment, if that didn’t come across. But it wasn’t unserious….”
I’m not sure I’m entirely with Kipnis on this one, but it is interesting to me to hear what she thinks she’s doing, and I’d be curious to see what others thought. Is it possible to make the case, as she does, that the subject matter necessitates a certain style, and that the excesses of the prose that others are finding so odious is itself a rhetorical strategy? Is it possible that one would more easily discern the parodic quality of her style if it didn’t evoke this juxtaposition of academic source material and “breezy” style, that such a juxtaposition immediately makes her prose a litmus test for the “academic vs. mainstream” debate, obscuring other nuances in her writing? Merkin’s highly problematic response to Kipnis on a subsequent post is that you can make relevant cultural points or you can be parodic, but you can’t do both simultaneously; I cringed when I first read this, but perhaps she has something like a point; one can’t be parodic while simultaneously referencing Marcuse, de Certeau, and Jameson, because this invokes an entirely different culture war (academia vs. the hoi-polloi, rather than hetero-normatives vs. adulterers and weirdos). (PS: the whole dialogue is a laugh riot, as the two women start out cordial and proclaiming their “mutual bond,” only to degenerate into outright hostility and name-calling.)
In this context, I found myself intrigued by the “inciters” listed in “A Note on Sources” in the bibliography; Kipnis highlights the various major theoretical texts with which she sees herself in dialogue, and I found her selections fairly interesting, as well as the different ways she used these various writers. Chapter 1, for example, seems like a straight re-packaging of Marcuse, whereas Chapter 2 seems like an attempt to further Foucault, since, as she notes, Foucault himself never got around to marriages. Chapter 3 & 4 seemed to me to be more interesting and fruitful applications of de Certeau and Jameson, respectively.
In other words, I think a careful reading of Against Love might suggest that she’s doing more than just name-dropping theorists, and that furthermore, she’s using them in different ways and to different ends. What others have found repetitive and redundant seems to me to be bringing these different writers’ projects into dialogue with one another, and that if the individual chapters are paired more rigorously to their respective theorists, there’s a far more nuanced and evolving relationship to the overall subject matter.
I’d be interested to see what people made of this theoretical lineage; do others think that Kipnis’ use of these writers is acceptable? (I’m guessing not.) Does the transformation of the rigorous and scholarly into a mass-market polemic seem justified, or does it betoken a dumbing-down and/or misappropriation of their arguments? Is she making notoriously obtuse writers like Jameson (big ol’ scare quotes a-comin’) “palatable to the masses”?
All this being said, what I could not figure out for the life of me was how to locate Peter Burger in all of this. He’s listed alongside de Certeau as the inciter for Chapter 3, but aside from a chatty bit of gossip about the loves of Max Ernst, I’m hard pressed to find a connection between her writing and Theory of the Avant-Garde. Do others see connections I don’t?
In trying to make sense of this, I’ve been going back through Burger’s text, looking for parallels. The main thrust of Burger’s narrative, so far as I’ve always read it, is the gradual marginalization of art in the wake of the historical avant-garde, which attempted to effect social change via shock, and was greeted with apathy instead, so that the bourgeois re-trenched itself and foreclosed the possibility of anything like art’s capacity to enact change in the populace at large. I should say I’ve always hated this book, which constructs a really problematic narrative around post-avant-garde production (which, for Burger, is an a priori failed enterprise that is perpetually doomed to meaninglessness).
If Kipnis’ goal is to “shock the bourgeoisie,” then Burger would be the first to say that she’s too late. So is the relationship between her and Burger far more contentious than her other “intellectual dads”? Is it even possible, let alone responsible, to read Kipnis into a history of the avant-garde? Or, could one say that Kipnis is agreeing with Burger, that the avant-garde is no longer in a position to shock the bourgeoisie, and so necessarily such a shock must come from a different venue, e.g., the mass-market, Oprah-hopeful polemic, rather than anything to be found at the Venice Biennial?
Colin
