A Thin Line between Caress and Strangulation.

“By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head,

The strange low sobs that shook their common bed

Were called into her with a sharp surprise,

And strangely mute, like little gasping snakes,

Dreadfully venomous to him.” (I, George Meredith, “Modern Love”)

“Devilish malignant witch! and oh, young beam

Of heaven’s circle-glory! Here thy shape

To squeeze like an intoxicating grape — ” (IX, ibid)

“I bleed, but her who wounds I will not blame.

Have I not felt her heart as ’twere my own

Beat thro’ me? could I hurt her? heaven and hell!

But I could hurt her cruelly!” (XIX, ibid)

Jonathan has referred to the “linguistic violence” of “Modern Love,” deftly dissecting the cycle’s use of alliteration and (I love it!) “‘transegmental drift’”; and Jay has “snarkily” but also deftly maintained (among many points) that the cycle’s “unabashed approach to sexual desire doesn’t ‘fit’ with the novelistic conventions,” thereby confining itself to “the periphery of Victorian studies until that paradigm undergoes some critical tectonic shifts.” Yes, yes, yes to all these points, extraordinary gentlemen; so let me provide a little icing by bringing the violence and the sex into the same sleeping bag, or body bag, or what-have-you. While it may seem the most obvious theme of “Modern Love” to address, that of eroticized violence, I’ll do so anyway, not only because I found those moments of the sequence the most lyrically and narratively engaging, but because I’d like to (begin to) consider how and to what significance eroticized violence pairs with the concept of love-capital-L. Particularly when violence is often situated as paradoxical/antithetical to Love.

(Note: I use “violence” sometimes interchangeably with “pain,” not having the brain- or theoretical-power to tease out a complicated distinction right now. And, of course, I’m circling issues with consent, but setting them aside for this post.)

The excerpts I opened with are some of the best examples from the sonnet cycle elucidating the erotic violence. (Again for the sake of time and space, I’m going to avoid close readings right here, and instead encourage us as a class to take a look at some of these sonnets.) But we can’t really consider the erotic violence of the poem’s narrative without consider the characters. Who is enacting the violence? Who receives the violence? Who is turned on by it (here we can think of both characters and readers)? These questions might offer more complicated answers than I will consider here because, instead, I will focus on the obvious violence acts and violent character: the speaker of the poem, ostensibly the betrayed husband. Because he is the cycle’s speaker (in my mind he clearly authors the third person masculine moments), his violence works lyrically upon the readers (and the wife/Lady, if we take his several marked addresses to her); again, I refer you to Jonathan’s post for an excellent analysis of the lyrical and linguistic violence (and, somewhat less, eroticism) of the cycle.

The clear psychological characterization at work in the sonnet cycle makes the erotic violence in “Modern Love” a bit different from other poetic depictions of erotic pain and violence. (Algernon Charles Swinburne is an excellent example of a 19th century poet who makes much lyrical use of the trope of eroticized pain [I wouldn't say violence], without there being much narrative propulsion to his poems, even the nauseatingly long ones. [Perhaps this is the difference between violence and pain, that violence needs a clear narrative to be considered "violence" . . . hmmmmm . . .]) What I’m trying to say is that there is suspense here, and a bit of terror, most of it attached to the uncertain psychological state of the speaker, and the question: will he do it? Like the Duke did it in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”? Here’s one of the amazing Hyde-sonnets (not included in the NAEL):

He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles

So masterfully rude, that he would grieve

To see the helpless delicate thing receive

His guardianship through certain dark defiles.

Had he not teeth to rend, and hunger too?

But still he spared her. Once: “Have you no fear?”

He said: ’twas dusk; she in his grasp; none near.

She laughed: “No, surely; am I not with you?”

And uttering that soft starry “you,” she leaned

Her gentle body near him, looking up;

And from her eyes, as from a poison-cup,

He drank until the flittering eyelids screened.

Devilish malignant witch! and oh, young beam

Of heaven’s circle-glory! Here thy shape

To squeeze like an intoxicating grape —

I might, and yet thou goest safe, supreme. (IX)

This characterization and this plot go beyond the lyrical and thematic erotic violence and, I wonder, engender a kind of erotic response in the reader? We can (and have, probably) said much about how reading and writing as practices are sadomasochistic. I’m sure most of you felt pain, plain and simple, (not even the sexualized and pathologized sadomasochism) at having to read FIFTY sonnets of Victorian poetry (trust, nothing to Swinburne’s Hellenic stanzas and metre!). But what kept you going? What turned you on? For me, along with the moments of lyrical erotic violence, the narrative suspense kept me going. Will he do it? How will he do it? And how will he render it lyrically?

To make connections (and an awkward transition): I am reminded of the suspense of Sylar stalking his victims (catchin’ up on the middle Heroes episodes), and the thrill of certain violence that surrounds him, ticked out for us by his ever-present clock-soundtrack. Why is it that I always find myself turning down the volume and cringing every time Sylar comes on to the screen? We take pleasure in the suspense generated by the always impending and certain violence of Sylar. But Sylar is a bit different — there is suspense over how he will do it, and how long he can maintain the beautiful and dreadful lie to Mohinder, but we know he will commit his violence. We are uncertain, for example, about Jessica; but because she’s almost always more interesting and sexy than Nikki, the suspense is different, and we almost look forward to the sight of impossibly torn bodies. But Sylar is only ever Sylar (even in “6 Months Ago”) . . . I think about the speaker of “Modern Love” we are more uncertain . . . but there is already so much erotic violence circulating at the lyrical level, perhaps that builds the narrative suspense, as well.

So we are deep into questions of what makes suspense . . . what renders it an erotic affect that extends out of the thematics and content of texts? And must it be so often aligned with violence? Why are monsters sometimes the most interesting and fascinating characters? And don’t they love, too? Love so deeply and powerfully and destructively that their loves lose the familiar tropes of Love? What is the significance of such love cloaked as obsessive, perverted, and violent? How do such depictions of love help us to complicate the question: What do we mean when we say “love”?

OMFG, it’s about sex.

I asked him if it were not hard that one deviation from chastity should so absolutely ruin a young woman.
JOHNSON: ‘Why, no, Sir; it is the great principle which she is taught. When she has given up that principle, she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue, which are all included in chastity.’

In one of my more recent castings-about for a “workable” dissertation topic I entertained—for at least a couple days—contemporary Victorian studies’ literary constructedness and the notion that it is radically out of sync with British nineteenth century’s reality (whatever that means—it was a “jumping off point”). One of the first and most enthusiastic emails I got back from a professor in response to my e-casting suggested that I begin with “un-Victorians,” those figures who—despite fairly clear historical evidence to the contrary—don’t “fit” with contemporary models of Victorian literature and/or theory and, thus, are more-or-less cast into the pedagogical dustbin because of outright neglect or some kind of backhanded inclusion to make up for an abundance of Austen/Brontë/Dickens/Thackeray/Eliot/Trollope/James/etc…

One of the few authors recommended as emblematic of this tendency was George Meredith. So naturally I sidled up to the ol’ Norton to get the skinny on this neglected fellow (please note glaring irony), or at least discern how the containment strategy was operating through our canon-archive of choice (…now more self-aware). The first anachronistic words of the introductory material?: “Like Hardy…” Hm. It seems GM wrote novels—like Hardy—to pay the bills and quickly became more famous for his prose output than his poems. But then the NAEL is subject to that primary exigency of which we all are aware, namely the absence of novels (unless you include the supplementary one-volume “Norton Anthology Editions” [e.g.] designed to cozy up with your two-volume mommy and daddy Nortons, until eventually the muted pastel Norton family subsumes the colorful range of diversity that was once your bookshelf). Moreover, we trust those many decorated editors to align their scanty selections with an Arnoldian metanarrative that will make sense, so the popular certainly doesn’t equal the best [picture of scribbly anger cloud over Jay’s head]! Presumably, then, the verse selection will be in some way emblematic of GM’s importance to Victorian/English literature. Here we (read: the class) seem to be on track, since “Modern Love” is the only work that appears. And it is significantly excerpted—all the way down to thirteen stanzas (though thankfully not for us—cheers, Mary Ann)! If you’re curious they are 1, 2, 3, 15, 16, 17, 23, 35, 42, 43, 48, 49 and 50.

The question to which I’m getting, snarkily, is what it means for ML to be “emblematic.” To ask this I have to put aside my most annoying goblin, who takes the form, here, of Leah Price: “The anthology’s ambition to represent a whole through its parts is always undermined by readers’ awareness that the parts have been chosen for their difference from those left out.” (So the ideal anthology’s some Borgesian map that’s never done—right, got it) But already I’m contradicting the whole “un-Victorian” theory, so I guess it’s a good thing I jettisoned that idea a few months ago (or did I?). Rather than flirt around in the big paradox party in my brain, I’ll say that I think this work is in some way unique for its meditation on sexual transgression (gasp! It is??). While this stance illuminates exactly zilch for you, gentle reader, I think it speaks much more to the conventions of Victorian novel writing and our subsequent inheritance of a Victorian studies that is—albeit creatively and compellingly—still primarily concerned with novels and the literary and cultural forms they variously encode between their covers. Writing about those novels, William Cohen helps to show (via Foucault) why this might be: “Like other restrictions upon expression, the conventions of sexual unspeakability serve writers as a productive constraint, contributing to a certain historical formation of the literary. Literature in turn supplies a culturally privileged repository for the production, and recognition, of sexuality as unspeakable.” Cultural restrictions provide productive material for the novelists (“secrets” not unlike those of the Wilkie Collins variety), who then help articulate a ‘literary’ in many ways defined by its circumscriptive tendencies. Thus the process of decoding the “sexiness” of the Victorian novel—or really any way that that redirected libidinal energy is circulating—is a substantial engagement and one that warrants the extensive attention it has received (and continues to receive).

Against this backdrop, ML is all too unheimliche or something. The opening scene in which the “common bed” shakes with the wife’s sobbing (an image that’s quite potent on its own) shifts quickly to the male figure’s perspective on “the bitter taste her beauty had.” It’s those beautiful, deceptive female surfaces that reactivate his struggle with sexual desire throughout the poem, a struggle that gets channeled into unstable rhetorical binaries like dream/reality (stanza 10), heaven/earth (11), intelligence/instinct (30), “old”/“new” love (40). Add to this those couple of early (inconclusive?) passages about adultery—the man whom “her eyes swim/Across” (3: 7-8), the letters of stanza 15, the French novel—and ML starts to seem sufficiently un-Victorian afterall. While we’re all busy unpacking three-decker scandals through Freud, Foucault and narrative theory, our male figure in ML stubbornly rips the veil off: “My dear, these things are life” (25: 15). This stuff is so familiar it’s unrecognizable!

So maybe I’m starting to see how, with ML, GM is emblematic in his un-Victorian way—the way that I presume was recommended to me in that email. What has to be apparent in order to use “emblematic” in this context is that we’re dealing with two kinds of representativeness:

1. the poem is “emblematic” of a discursive practice—most apparent in novel criticism—that unfits certain works for inclusion in traditional Victorian studies, and

2. it is so exceptionally “emblematic”/idiosyncratic (now we are really in Leah Price’s territory w/r/t the anthology) that the NAEL has to keep it around.

Thinking about #1, when approached with respect to the wealth of Victorian novel crit ML is less legible, and therefore less visible. Discerning why may require us to critique the frame before we can see the picture, though. The work certainly warrants the kind of close focus Johnathan has offered—I recall reading once that there still isn’t a book-length study of the narrative poem (although J’s references may indicate that someone’s finally gotten around to it). But as a student primarily concerned with the conventions that attach themselves to historical awareness of “the Victorian,” I think it’s also necessary to see this work in the context of more familiar novels and their legacy. Because ML and its unabashed approach to sexual desire doesn’t “fit” with the novelistic conventions—narrative strategies that propel plot by elaborately diverting or masking sexual (or patrilinear, at best) secrets—it seems destined to hover on the periphery of Victorian studies until that paradigm undergoes some critical tectonic shifts.

But there is still #2, stubbornly insisting across seven pages that ML is out in the open and available in all its exhibitionist glory. While nothing I can say would efface those seven pages (though no doubt the D.G. Rossetti editor would snap them up!), I think the extensive exclusion of sonnet chunks along with a more-than-typically tendentious introduction (sidebar: they even f’ed up a footnote) go a good distance toward explaining the way this kind of “inclusion” furtively works against real visibility. If nothing else, for a work whose formal significance lies in its hybridity the narrative component is, at least, impaired. And while bickering about editorial choices is easily possible in almost any Norton entry, this kind of disciplinary containment strikes me as beyond the usual—less an edifying inclusion than a vestige that’s lost its body. (Ideally this is where my close reading tools would show you all those fundamental things that are conveniently missing from the anthologized version.)

Even though I’m sure I’ve been less-than-convincing about this representativeness problem, I can’t help foreshadowing Kipnis with a final note that ML’s unfittedness for critical reception in the Victorian canon might ironically “fit” with Kipnis’s even-more-modern “love.” The analogy isn’t perfect, but certainly there are more and less-popular ways of cognitively integrating texts just as there are definitions that do and don’t fit with our “wedding-industrial complex.” In this way Meredith’s “Modern Love” might still be spoiling a party not altogether different from the one Kipnis resolutely seeks to upend, herself.

Jay

Reading Modern Love

“And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words”-Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“In Memoriam”, 95)

The question with which I always begin when I am compelled to say something about poetry is, What is a statement, however brief or long it may be, about a poem supposed to do?  Is it supposed to “unlock” the poem, i.e. to bring about or facilitate some kind of “understanding” of the poem?  Or is it supposed to do something else entirely?  “As if there’s anything to be “understood” in poetry!” I’d like to say.  Perhaps, when dealing exclusively and individually with lyric poetry, “unlocking” some sort of “meaning” is not so important.  To paraphrase Wilde, lyric poems are at once surface and symbol, and, to my mind anyway, reading the surface is every bit as compelling an activity as plumbing the symbol.

Matters become complicated when narrative is at stake.  In all narratives, regardless of the form they take, there is a readerly desire to understand, to see how events relate, how characters relate, how the story unfolds.  Narratives can be told in poems, though the poem that most looks like a narrative (“Prufrock,” maybe, or “Peter Quince at the Clavier”) can be a lyric in disguise.

Modern Love would seem to present the most curious of problems, then, for it consists of lyrics (and lyrics of a quite static and contained form: the sonnet) which are intended to be read sequentially to evoke a story.  As Dorothy Mermin points out in “Poetry as Fiction: Meredith’s Modern Love”, “Modern Love is a curiosity of Victorian literature, an oddity among Victorian poems and even among Meredith’s own.  For despite the rich, dense imagery, the self-sufficiency of many of the individual stanzas (which stand well by themselves in anthologies), and the paucity and obliquity of narration (the latter a characteristic of Meredith’s fiction too), it is in a very real sense novelistic” (100).  The temptation to read Modern Love for the story might prove maddening, if for no other reason than Meredith’s oblique narration is, I should think, designed to frustrate such a reading at every turn.  Likewise, the temptation to read the poems individually as a series of more or less self-sustained lyrics is bound to fail as well because the understandability of certain poems depends, often, on an understanding of what has occurred in previous poems.  There might be much to say about the psychological experience of reading novels and poems, both regarding how these experiences differ (one would think they would differ in more than just the obvious ways) and how forgetting is inevitably, but in different ways, a part of the reading experience of both genres.  It might also be worth pondering whether Meredith chose this odd form that might be destined to fail as an ideal vehicle to treat this failing marriage, whose problems concern infidelity, secrecy, suspicion, silence, and feelings that are, to say the least, mixed.

Yet, at the same time, I wouldn’t say the project of Modern Love fails, not by any means.  (Notice, though, that sonnet 29 opens with narrator’s asking this very question: “Am I failing?”)  What is in my view the work’s constitutive difficulty-that is, as Mermin says, “the point of intersection between Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel”-might indeed be its weakness, but it also might be its greatest strength.  On one hand, the reader may feel paralyzed by the need to choose between reading the poetry and reading for the plot.  (A way out of this paralysis may be to read Modern Love several times, and each time to consciously change one’s biases.)  Perhaps if one reads for the plot, as Mermin does, one loses a sense of the poetry-which she also does.  Reading the poetry has, however, in my experience anyway, the potential to be rather disorienting.  In my own experience, after two readings, it was still not clear to me that the “Lady” the husband refers to is a woman with whom he is attempting to have an affair.  (I preferred to think of the “Lady” and the wife as the same person.)  Because I like to think of myself as something other than utterly stupid, I’ll blame that elision on my reading the poetry rather than the plot.

On the other hand, this intersection of forms could allow for a reading experience that is necessarily playful and open (maybe “writerly” in Barthes’s sense).  Of course, the paradigmatic case study for a work that begs for that kind of reading might be Finnegan’s Wake.  Let me not appear to suggest that Modern Love and Finnegan’s Wake can be said to elicit identical, or even similar reading experiences.  Indeed, Modern Love is a great deal more pleasurable than Finnegan’s Wake because, even if one chooses to read the poetry, or read for play, there is, lurking in the shadows, a more or less graspable plot which pulls the action along.  In my brief and frustrated experiences with Finnegan’s Wake, I’ve barely been able to discern anything that might be called a narrative or plot.

Since most of my knowledge of Finnegan’s Wake is based on rumor, hearsay, and reputation, I shouldn’t say too much about it.  I know Ulysses, though, and, as I said, I know what people say about Finnegan’s Wake.  These works are renowned for their play with language, their ability to mix high and low discourses, and, particularly in the case of the latter, a deep and complex structure of puns that exists at and operates on every word.  One could perhaps even argue that language is the subject of both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.  Maybe Humanity is the subject, but it is Humanity via language, because Humanity is language…etc…etc…

A similar case can be made for Modern Love.  While not employing anything near the linguistic acrobatics of either of Joyce’s masterpieces, Modern Love is a work that is very much invested in playing with language, though this is not its most obvious investment.  The reader is placed between a pair of desires: the one for the fantasy and play of a novel, and the other for the work and gratification of a poem.  (Poems are certainly playful, as we’ll see later, but I think few readers would lose him/herself in the fantastical world of a poem, no matter how well-written it may be.)  As I’ve already said, one response to this might be paralysis.  Another might be a kind of academic sternness of the “let’s interpret like lives are at stake” variety.  Generally, this consists of the process I mentioned in my opening: finding out what the poem means.  This meaning will certainly depend on the individual reader’s biases and commitments, and so will vary from reader to reader, but it will, usually, take the form of an overarching narrative, or through-line, or summary, or thesis.  To me, neither of these possibilities-paralysis or injecting a coherence into the work which isn’t already there-sound desirable, but both place the reader in the unenviable position of the poem’s speaker(s): that of one who desperately desires intimacy, but who has been wounded, both by intimacy and by the desire for intimacy, and whose wariness from these wounds creates suspicion, paranoia, and a doggedness for “truth” that can only end catastrophically.

But if one is willing to occupy a reading place between the poetic and the narrative (though one that, admittedly, shades a bit more toward the poetic), a reading place that is invested in the moment of the text, rather than exclusively in the meaning, whether narrative or poetic, of the text, then one might discover, primarily, a rarer kind of pleasure to be taken in Modern Love, (and maybe other pieces of artistic writing) and secondarily, proof that the linguistic flamboyance of modernism (which I value) is not all that unprecedented.

Let’s begin with the first poem in the sequence.  The second line of sonnet 1 reads, “That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head…”  Notice “hand’s light quiver.”  On reading that, you will no doubt see and hear, in translation, “the light quiver of his hand.”  You’ll also hear, though, “hand’s slight quiver.”  This is because that s between hand and light has no real beginning or end and so therefore bleeds into both the phonemes that surround it, and in the process creates a new word, a new concept.  This is a basic example of what Garrett Stewart calls “transegmental drift.”  Another example can be seen in the epigram to this response by Tennyson.  “Silent-speaking words” says just what is written, yes, but it also says, by the transegmental drift between the t of silent and the s of speaking, “Silence-speaking words.”  (This is Stewart’s paradigmatic example.)  Between “hand’s light quiver,” and “hand’s slight quiver” there might not be much difference.  Both, unlike “silent-speaking words” and “silence-speaking words” say essentially, though not exactly the same thing.  And so, on one hand, this is just a bit of clean poetic fun.  On the other, though, it is a small instance of a conceit that plays out throughout the work, both thematically and stylistically, which is metamorphosis.  In the moment of reading, “hand’s light quiver” becomes “hand’s slight quiver.”  “Becomes” might not be the right word, because, really, those graphemes are always both “hand’s light” and “hand’s slight,” but, I would say, only potentially.  The potential is realized in the moment of reading.

At the end of this first sonnet there is another metamorphosis, or rather a bundle of metamorphoses.  The husband and wife metaphorically become statues:

Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

There are at least three metamorphoses taking place here.  The first, and most obvious, is, as I said, the couple’s becoming (or becoming like) statues.  This is metaphor.  The second and third are more complicated.  In the second, the word “sword” becomes the word “word.”  Clearly, “word” is contained in “sword.”  The addition of that little phoneme s at the beginning changes the morpheme word into something radically different.  This has already happened, arguably, before the writing of the poem: when word becomes sword, word is no more.  But I want to suggest the opposite process happens in the moment of reading the poem.  We readers are presented with sword, but we are made to see, and hear, and think, word.  On one level, we already see word in sword, but, as I said, this doesn’t communicate anything.  We need a reason to extract word from sword.  In other words, we need a reason to either elide that initial s or to slide it to the end of the morpheme.  The reason to do this, to play rather freely with the s, is that the s is played rather freely with elsewhere in the stanza.  Not including the s-sounds in the two swords, I count 34 s­­-sounds in this sonnet-and that count does not include s’s kissing cousin sh.  Among this abundances of s-sounds are several instances of playfulness and meaningfulness.  I’ve already discussed “hand’s light quiver” and how the s takes on a life of its own there.  There is also the alliteration in line 7-”Stone-still.”  And many of the most meaningful words in this stanza are s-words.  “Strange,” “sobs,” “surprise,”, “strangled,” “snakes,” “silence,” “sleep,” “scrawled,” “sculptured,” “seen,” “severs.”  In seeing this play with s, and in our being overwhelmed with s-words, we are induced to think of just that-s-words.  So, when we get to “sword” in the final two lines, we will see and hear “sword,” certainly, but, I think, we will also see, and hear, “s-word.”  The morpheme s has become disconnected from the morpheme word.  “Sword” becomes “word.”  “Swords” are “words,” and so the violence that will “sever all” is not the literal piercing of the flesh, but rather the linguistic violence which we see occur at the end of the poem.  “Then each applied to each that fatal knife, / deep questioning, which probes to endless dole.”  What had been suggested stylistically in the opening poem is restated and clarified thematically in the last.  This is the second metamorphosis: “swords are words and words sever.”  The third metamorphosis is as follows.  “Sword” becomes “s-word” by the process detailed above, and it is a certain “s-word” that “severs all.”  What might that s-word be?  Well, SEX, naturally.  In sonnet 43, when, ostensibly, the husband and wife attempt sex, they also, “dig love’s grave.”

Look at sonnet 11 for another instance of thematic, if not stylistic metamorphosis (I haven’t parsed this sonnet out quite yet):

Look, woman, in the West.  There wilt thou see
An amber cradle near the sun’s decline:
Within it, featured even in death divine,
Is lying a dead infant, slain by thee.

The sunset is transmogrified into a dead infant, which the woman has killed.  This is grotesque, to be sure.  It is also rather magical.  The image of the dead infant might suggest the wife’s failed motherhood (Mermin, 112).  One can take that or leave it.  I think it renders banal a rather complex image.  For, whether or not the wife’s failed motherhood is suggested here, the sunset becomes a dead infant, which is made to represent the couple’s tortured relationship to time.  The sun’s setting in the west suggests the future, that place to which men, culture, civilization aspire.  By turning the future into a slain infant, the speaker suggests not only that the wife has destroyed the future (a recurring motif in Modern Love) but also that she has slain the past and the present.  An infant is certainly something new, but it is also something old, a prior state.  We are infants before we are adults.  This image then, collapses and alters the natural and the human, the future with the past, and the utter ruin of life and love.  This latter is achieved through the “decline/divine” rhyme.

In sonnet 30, we see another instance of stylistic and thematic (perhaps there is a cause/effect relationship here?) metamorphosis.
What are we first?  First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.

“Whom,” in the rhyme with “tomb,” becomes, aurally, “womb.”  Yet, though we hear the change, we also, in a way, see it too.  The h in “whom” becomes a b and is moved to the end of the word.  Notice the rhyme which frames these lines: text/next, which amounts to an invitation to write on this poem.  (Maybe writing is a sort of erotic act.  Think of how it plays out in this poem, with the wife’s love letter to the other man in sonnet 15.  Or maybe think of the Marquis de Sade.)  This extra meaning is already contained by the writer’s bringing together of these two words, “whom” and “tomb.”  But it requires our reading, or our writing through reading, to bring this meaning to life.  As for the significance of rhyming “womb” and “tomb,” of bringing the sites of pre-life and death together within the very real context of writing (both through the next/text rhyme and through the fact that we write “womb” into the line)–well, I’m sure Jacques Lacan would have something to say about that.

Jonathan

REPOST: Raeanna on Hebdige

The posts have been so interesting this week—I really wish I hadn’t been out sick on Tuesday! Anyways, a few (sleepy) thoughts:

I share Colin’s concerns around academia and radicalism, but like Alexis and Virginia, I do believe we can produce politically relevant academic work and I also argue against notions of purity and authenticity. I have a serious problem with the idea that scholars are necessarily invasive outsiders who exploit subcultural groups or are utterly compromised by careerist self-interest and the institution. Framing the scholar in this way and in opposition to a subcultural subject that “has no real need” for scholarly theory actually seems to prop up academia as the site of thought and analysis while limiting subcultural resistance to a site of raw, authentic being. Such a move actually seems to replicate a whole mess of politically scary divisions around who thinks and who just is.

A quick personal detour to give an example:
I’ve been involved in the Los Angeles anarchist (take that, Arnold!) and activist communities for about ten years. (since there are many misconceptions about anarchism–for anyone unfamiliar, there is a thriving anarchist movement in LA that is primarily based in working class, immigrant and other communities of color especially in east and south LA. This movement incorporates grass-roots organizing and projects as diverse as high school students and ex-gangsters self-organizing, immigrant housing cooperatives, queer theater groups, domestic violence prevention, cop watch organizations, etc.)

Before returning to school this year I had been a full time (unpaid) organizer and scraped by piecing together odd part time teaching jobs. Duh, going to grad school puts me on a track to actually make money and compromise myself in the institution, but my motivation for returning to school was the fact that many of our radical movements could use some theoretical revitalization. I’m not sure if radical political movements (such as anarchist, immigrant, youth, etc) are technically considered subcultures, but I think they can/should be.

Colin questions if the interaction between academics and subcultural members is actually a “dialogue” and says “the subcultures have no real need of us theorists to explain them to themselves, let alone help them.” I totally agree that no one needs us to “help” them, but many of us need to help ourselves. Many of us are as equally invested in communities outside academia as in. Our commitments to theory can be multiple, and members of subcultural groups are also engaged in making meaning of their conditions. In my experience writing about radical political subcultures, I certainly do believe dialogue is possible, necessary, and welcome. To assume that people outside of academia are simply annoyed or disinterested in the way academics discuss them and their interests assumes rigid divisions in membership and, as I said earlier, makes assumptions about how people engage analysis. Outside of academia I have been in study groups with teenagers, nurses, construction workers, former black panthers, etc; lots of people engage theory and lots of people theorize about their lives. For the most part, the activist communities and LA neighborhoods I participate in are interested in asking me about my academic work, offering input, and reminding me of the value of academic theory when I am feeling overwhelmed by the pointlessness of doing such work within the institution. It is not about condescendingly helping others but rather enriching a collective set of tools and arenas for discussion that may be accessed in varied ways.

Finally, I wanted to connect this with our discussion of Heroes (the show) last week. For me, Hebdige, Hall, and Gramsci’s thoughts on consent and ideology point to why popular culture can open space for dissent or refusal. Certainly I will not argue that Heroes is wholly radical, but I didn’t and still don’t understand an investment in thinking about cultural production as either purely radical or purely complicit with hegemonic ideology. Again I think this way of thinking establishes divisions between a thoughtful academic who can analyze and critically decode and other duped viewers who can’t. That is just plain scary. I was also thinking about how shows like Heroes and other popular cultural productions must negotiate with contesting ideologies. I haven’t fully thought through this example, but I was thinking about how Hiro is an undocumented traveler who shamelessly outs himself as a hero and “alien” (“I come in peace”) at every chance he gets. He pops in and out of temporal and spatial boundaries at will, even providing similarly undocumented passage to his buddy. I found this interesting given last year’s massive immigration protests. Sure a border crossing Japanese guy may be less threatening in the public imaginary than someone crossing the US/Mexico border, sure many holes can be poked here generally….but I do think that pushing issues of immigration into public discussion and questioning what constitutes “alien-ness” is valuable. This example also points to how subordinate groups (including subcultures) may at times desire mainstream attention. Immigrant activists (from liberal groups invoking rights discourse to cultural nationalists to radical internationalists who agitate against the very existence of borders) have self-consciously attempted to gain widespread public attention. There are many strategic reasons marginalized or subcultural groups may at times desire such attention (such as offering glimpses, however mediated, of alternative ways of social interaction and organization, challenging historical amnesia that erases legacies of radicalism, providing ways for people marginalized from popular movements to gain knowledge of and join them, etc), and I think such desires destabilize rigid divisions between pure and co-opted resistance.

And now I need to run and shower so I don’t stink up our class, Raeanna

The Virtues of Pink and Green

Ok, I just finished reading Subculture and the Meaning of Style and skimmed the blog posts and my mind is just about exploding with different ideas.

First, I did not realize that many of you graduate students teach undergraduate classes, meaning that you essentially teach me. Kind of weird, right? I haven’t thought of you as teachers throughout this course, though, but as students. It’s a kind of strange and cool reversal, at least for me. Teachers discuss and struggle with dense theoretical texts, too, yeah!

So now that I’ve got that off my chest, I guess I will try and contribute something to the discussion of Hebdige’s text, though I will apologize in advance for my own limited undergraduate understanding of it that will not include impressive critical sources.

While I found myself totally engrossed by Hebdige’s discussion of the formation of the punk subculture, I couldn’t help but think of the book “The Official Preppy Handbook” as I read. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with this bizarre yet wonderful documentation of prep culture that focuses, like Hebdige, primarily on the visual signs that distinguish this subculture. I had a really hard time thinking of prepsters as a subcultural group, though. Aren’t the members of this group, the WASPs, the upper-middle class white population, the dominant class that imposes ‘common sense’ and “transparent” hegemony on subordinate, subcultural groups like the punks and teddy boys? Maybe I’m confused about who and what represents the dominant/ruling class that Hebdige refers throughout his work, but I find it interesting that one can apply many of the concepts he presents in the context of working class culture to a discussion of an upper-middle class cultural movement.

Probably the most relevant portion of “The Preppy Handbook” ‘to look at in relation to Hebdige’s text is the portion devoted to defining the prep look. The author, Lisa Brinbach, presents there ten style ‘commandments’ for all preps to follow, and many of them resonated with Hebdige’s discussion of the totally opposite subcultural dress styles he describes in his text. The third rule reads “Attention to Detail,” claiming “some Preppies go as far to change their watch bands everyday.” While this may just sound anal, it reminded me of the passage where Hebdige distinguishes subcultures for their “intentional” style which strives to convey a very specific message that differs from the so-called ‘mainstream,’ and while I cannot say for sure what values their clothes proclaimed (good breading? financial status? I get the LL Bean catalogue in the mail?) the prep wardrobe was certainly as self-conscious as the mods and teddy boys. The seventh commandment, “Anglophilia,” also struck me as a kind of parallel (and I know its going to sound like a real long shot) to the racial relationships and tension that Hebdige details in his history of the formation of the punk movement. America and Britain have a similar love/hate colony/colonizer relationship, though not as historically/culturally divided as the West Indian immigrant and white working class that Hebdige discusses. The last rule that caught my eye was “Androgyny.” This stylistic ideal of sexual ambiguity recalled the glam rock/David Bowie section of Hebdige’s text, though the preps seem to want to dumb down sexuality while Bowie and other glam rockers wanted to throw it in everyone’s face. This seems to feed into what Hebdige later discusses in terms of ‘homology,’ the “symbolic fit between the values and lifestyles of a group.” The preps dress in an asexual way that reflects their puritanical, polite values. I know I’m just skimming the surface here in terms of my analysis, but I hope the connections are becoming clear. The book also includes a while prep dictionary (think Hebdige’s whole discussion on the cultural sanctity of language and the working class vocabulary used in the punk zines) and an analysis on the different “prep” accents (the Boston Brahmin vs the New England Nasal Nip)

Now for the kicker. “The Official Preppy Handbook” actually has a short section called “The Punk-Prep Connection,” which basically describes a subculture of young preps who desire to infiltrate the freer punk subculture. Now this totally reminded me of the passage in Hebdige where he describes the Beats’, and anglo groups like the Mods’, romantacization of the “Black Man” who “was a past master in the gentle arts of escape and subversion.” It’s like a giant chain of subcultures feeding off of one another, but its often the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy who end up at the top of the subcultural food chain in term of authenticity. So where does that leave the prepsters? Can they be considered a subculture despite their social dominance? I’ll bring the book and its English counterpart “The Official Slone Ranger Handbook” into class tomorrow if anyone would like to flip through these marvelous social/ cultural documents. SC even appears as one of the top ten drinking schools in the prep handbook! (And I just realized that I owned up to owing two books on prep culture….please don’t judge me too harshly, I swear they’re funny)

Oh, wait, one more thing. I was interested in what Alexis wrote about Hebdige confining his definition of subcultures to youth movements. In terms of the prepsters, the subculture is equally visible in the youth and adults. The prep subculture also appears not to be one that you grow out of, though Hebdige seems to imply this notion in excluding adults from his discussion. But what about middle aged punks? What is their place in a subculture? Does style change with the age of its wearer?

Kappy

Academic AND Subcultural? Hegemonic AND Subversive?

Hebdige is clear that his academic account of subcultures comes from a discursive position located firmly outside the groups he is discussing, and that those groups would likely have little interest in his work:

[W]e, the sociologists and interested straights, threaten to kill with kindness the forms which we seek to elucidate … we should hardly be surprised to find that our ‘sympathetic’ readings of subordinate culture are regarded by the members of a subculture with just as much indifference and contempt as the hostile labels imposed by the courts and the press. In this respect to get the point is, in a way, to miss the point. (Hebdige, Subculture, 139)

Colin asks:

[I]s the best thing to do simply to stay the hell away, and keep our well-meaning theoretical mitts off of what doesn’t need and doesn’t want our help? How can anything like a responsible (let alone progressive) contribution to subcultures be made through academic writing?

I believe that it is possible to work responsibly and progressively on subcultural topics in academia, and I think that one way to do so is to treat the subject position of “interested straight” with some suspicion: not to assume that one’s insights will be treated with “indifference and contempt,” but rather to think seriously about what might render them contemptible. I even think that working across subcultural and academic modes of knowledge production might be a way of offering some small challenge to the hegemonic institutional knowledge-producing practices to which Colin has been drawing attention. In these hubristic aspirations, I am influenced by Judith Halberstam’s writings on subculture:

[N]ew queer cultural studies feeds off of and back into subcultural production. The academic might be the archivist, a coarchivist, a full-fledged participant in the subcultural scene that the scholar writes about. But only rarely does the queer theorist stand wholly apart from the subculture, examining it with an expert’s gaze. (Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 163)

As I’ve already mentioned, the subcultures I am interested in working with and in at the moment are the online communities of media fandom. Whether these are true “subcultures” in Hebdige’s or Halberstam’s sense is open to interpretation; but I would suggest that the ideal of a style culture of pure dissent and untheorizable authenticity, which must by necessity evaporate when it is approached by the penetrating gaze of the academic or the inevitable commodifying force of dominant ideology, may always have been a fantasy anyway. Virginia pointed out that involvement and complicity in capitalist exchange may complicate but do not negate the content of subordinate culture or style; the idea of a subcultural ethic that remains purely outside the dominant culture and can never be commodified is probably only found in the mythology around, say, Kurt Cobain’s suicide (or, to substitute a moment from my own teenage subcultural involvement, Richey James from the Manic Street Preachers carving ‘4 Real’ into his arm with a razor blade).

Fan cultures don’t take the countercultural high ground; what could be more hegemonic than investing huge quantities of one’s time and energy in utterly commodified objects and texts? Than caring passionately about Heroes, about Star Trek, about Harry Potter? And yet, in certain largely female fan communities which can trace their fiction-writing and video-making genealogies back more than thirty years, these texts get rewritten, critiqued, and shifted around to express desires that don’t go along with dominant understandings of sexuality, gender or commodity exchange. Communal and frequently erotic textual production in a gift economy, anyone?

I could say a lot more about fan cultures, of course, but I don’t want to get too irrelevant in this blog entry. I wanted mainly to call attention to the way in which intellectual discussion permeates this ‘subculture,’ among both academics and other participants. Participants do read academic accounts, and recognise themselves; academic and journalistic representations are discussed intensely, and rarely provoke indifference. Many such accounts are written by self-identified fans, though that does not exempt them from critique; the power relations between those who represent and those who are represented get taken seriously, and the subcultural cores of fandom have been debating its current meteoric rise to public attention for a good while. Theory and criticism, often in the academic mode, functions outside of a purely institutional context, here: this is one of the factors that makes me insist to Colin that the content of what we say as intellectuals matters, because there are other discourse communities, other subcultural contexts (this is certainly far from the only one) where ideas can be exchanged, analyses can have effects.

I haven’t yet figured out whether it’s appropriate for me to use the language of subculture to talk about these formations, though it comes easily to my lips, especially through Halberstam’s revised terms. Subculture seems often to be a synonym for ‘youth culture’ (an equivalence Halberstam challenges) but fan culture isn’t necessarily youthful: for many, fandom is a lifelong source of pleasure and support. It isn’t explicitly political, though political organizing and debate takes place through its networks, but nor are several of the subcultures Hebdige discusses. It all happens online, so it isn’t a matter of physical personal style; though it certainly has its own stylistic modes as expressed in images, jargon and text. “Subversion” is one of slash fan fiction’s most cliched descriptors, though whether you think it is subversive probably depends on how you feel about fictional characters having gay sex. I think that fan cultures can subvert certain models of gendered socialization and of audience relation to mass media, so that fannish subculture occupies an interesting position between the hegemonic and the subversive. As such, it might be able to show us some ways to think about subcultural practices and knowledges without the need to constantly fetishize an unattainable authenticity.

***

Some discussions on the issues around fan culture and fan studies, for your general edification: Turning the Tables on the Object of Study, by Karen Hellekson; Amateurs ‘r’ Us by Kristina Busse; discussions of Busse and Hellekson’s edited collection of academic work on fan culture by Princess of G, a fan not invested in academic networks; metafandom and metabib, two collections of fan theoretical discussions on LiveJournal.

Alexis

I miss Dick (a rant and a polemic)

 

 

 

“In the most recent upheaval [May ’68], the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves.  But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network.  Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power—the idea of their responsibility for ‘consciousness’ and discourse forms part of the system.  The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘discourse.’”

Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power” (1972)

 

To respond to Gillian’s final question, about the possibility of contemporary subcultures, I’ll say that for me the most dated element of this book seems to be the premise that style itself offers some kind of subversion; as Dick puts it in the opening pages, the book is invested with  “the idea of style as a form of Refusal” (2), and that seems to me to be hopelessly antiquated.  In the days when Urban Outfitters is selling high-quality cotton t-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara’s portrait for $30, certainly it’s clear that style is (and has always been) the most vulnerable element of counter-cultural subversion, and the quickest to co-opt by square society looking to make a fast buck.  The style of the only counter-cultural moment I was ever a part of (the Dickie boots and waist-tied flannel shirt uniform of Seattle grunge) was appropriated faster than bits of Kurt Cobain’s skull, brains and scalp could fly across his back lawn—so quickly that I doubt it’ll ever even see the cynically exploitive retro resurrection that disco and new-wave experienced.  Style was always at best a tenuous signifier (see 94, 96, 102-103, and 115); now it’s become utterly empty.

 

So one thing one could ask is how might a subcultural group define itself, if the uniform of style is only ever going to be a handicap?  How have the dynamics of group unity changed in the wake of Urban Outfitters?  When I was in high school in the early 90’s, the punks and the hippies and the goths and the skaters all ended up hanging out together as a sort of “Superfriends” subcultural group, and the notion of a collective uniform or style didn’t seem to make much sense at all.

 

Maybe I’m misreading Virginia’s quote from Tom Crow, but if I understand him at all, I would strongly disagree: subcultural style, as defined by Dick, has nothing to do with “consumption as its own justification,” and to define the subcultural figures he discusses as “groups most committed to leisure” is to miss the political context of punk, reggae, Bowie-ites and so on that make up his study.  The main effect of co-opting subcultural style is its depoliticization, and it is this which is so problematic.  This is more than just a Sneeches-style “star-on, star-off” game; the process by which Che Guevara or punk’s safety pin is appropriated by the white upper-middle-class bohos is one in which class struggle, race and gender politics all become reduced to fashion accessories.  (To return to my high school days: being a Jesuit high school, there was a big push to recognize the rights of farm laborers while I was in school, and as a result buttons that read “NO GRAPES”—urging us not to buy table grapes until some labor dispute had been resolved—were all the rage.  But it wasn’t long before people started blotting out letters with markers to spell “NO RAPE”, “NO APES” and “NO RAP”, which is another way of saying that any of these statements had the exact same political meaning: zilch.)  The problem with market capital, as I see it, is not that capitalism is bad in its own sake, but that the effect of commodifying political critiques is that they become emptied out and useless, and the underlying systems supposedly being critiqued remain untouched.

 

Another thing one could bring up, in reference to Alexis’ comment that not all of us “oppositional politicos” are interested in the same oppositions, is this tension between Bowie-ites and punks that Dick maps out: “Certainly Bowie’s position was devoid of any obvious political or counter-cultural significance, and those messages which were allowed to penetrate the distractive screens were, on the whole, positively objectionable….[A]nd yet Bowie was responsible for opening up questions of sexual identity which had previously been repressed, ignored or merely hinted at in rock and youth culture” (62).  In the terms of subversive resistance, is colluding with one power structure (e.g., consumer capitalism) acceptable in the service of critiquing another power structure (e.g., sexual politics)?

 

But while these questions are sort of interesting, and I produce them as a kind of knee-jerk graduate student response to a text, I should say at the outset that I’m really uninterested in these kinds of questions, since they seem to me to miss the point entirely.

 

Since affect is all the rage these days, I’ll interject my own personal feelings: it’s hard to read this without thinking of the author himself, whom I knew (though that may be stressing the word) while he was Dean of the

School of
Critical Studies at CalArts where I did my MFA.  The image of this beautiful British man—a taller, gaunter version of Clive Owens, who looked perpetually harrowed, haunted and deeply uncomfortable with his position as an authority figure at an academic institution—dogged me as I read this.  Those who knew him during that time better than I would all agree no doubt that Subculture probably caused him more harm than good, as it catapulted him to a level of academic stardom that he didn’t seem to want or be able to cope with (see, for example, Chris Krauss’ I Love Dick, which by all accounts was deeply disturbing to him).  A friend of mine relates a story of going up to Joshua Tree for some kind of High Desert Test Sites-esque art happening, and stopping into some local dive bar for a drink, only to find Dick (who had a house in Twentynine Palms), trying to drink himself into a stupor and deeply horrified by his students’ sudden materialization, as if finally recognizing that the hordes of CalArtian sycophants would follow him no matter how far he ran.

 

I bring all this up because, as you might be able to tell by now, I’m deeply interested in questions of the academic institution’s relationship to radicalism and subversion (not to mention the question of the polemic), and I see this conflict imprinted on the body and the biography of Dick as much as in the content of his writing—to me he invokes the question of academic celebrity, a concept which somehow allows those writers who have spent their lives critiquing hierarchy to eagerly benefit from it (Spivak taking $50,000 for a four-week graduate seminar with four students, for example, when the same institution pays a post-doc $3,000 to teach a freshman composition class of 50).  Dick, far more so than many other academic celebrities I can think of, seemed deeply distraught by this idea (and the fact that he was regularly brought out by CalArts as a figurehead to attract revenue), and from what little perspective I had it seemed to me that the very notion of celebrity caused him a great deal of personal damage.

 

Reflecting on Dick as a tragic hero, and a sort of liminal figure himself, straddling the academy and the subcultures that he made legible to the academy, the question that I’d really like to ask of this book is this: what work is it doing?  Is it really, as the no-doubt well-meaning Routledge copy editor who penned the back cover copy, a means of understanding what it feels like “to live ‘inside’ a style as the member of a spectacular youth culture?”   If so, is this some sort of academic tourism?  In rendering the cultural attacks of marginalized youth culture into a theoretically coherent system, doesn’t the book contribute to the deadening of those cultural attacks?  If not, why not; in other words, how can a work like this hope to maintain, let alone promote, the vitality of spontaneous and self-sustained subversion?  Or does this book—and really, any book produced in an academic context—at most produce only a highly problematic notion of academic celebrity, divorced from reality but fully exploited by the academic institution to further prop up that institution?

 

At times the book seems designed to create a dialogue between the subcultural groups and academic theory—on the one hand, we can give the subterraneans some tools (like Gramsci, Althusser, even Arnold) that they can use to better to do what they’re already doing, while on the other hand, we can understand these subterraneans in a way that gives us a better sense of the world around us.  But it becomes clear very early on that this is not a dialogue, since the subcultures have no real need of us theorists to explain them to themselves, let alone to help them: “It is highly unlikely,” Dick concludes, “that the members of any subcultures described in this book would recognize themselves reflected here.  They are still less likely to welcome any efforts on our part to understand them” (139).  The conversation only goes one way; the subjects are trapped behind glass, and we stand in our white lab coats and monitor them, trying to figure out what makes them tick, not for their edification but for ours. 

 

To the extent that the academy, as Karen pointed out, is from its inception a minority position already enshrined in an institution, is the best thing to do simply to stay the hell away, and keep our well-meaning theoretical mitts off of what doesn’t need and doesn’t want our help?  How can anything like a responsible (let alone progressive) contribution to subcultures be made through academic writing?

 

To be clear, I’m speaking here exclusively of the type of literary and theoretical production that happens within the sphere of the academy, which is why I think it’s helpful to distinguish this kind of compromised production from Virginia’s idea of “art that sells” (though the art market is itself a highly dubious and incredibly problematic power system that has completely divorced itself from meaning in favor of capital, but that’s another post altogether…).  When I speak of academic production, I’m speaking chiefly of the kind of work where one’s creative production is tied exclusively to one’s personal, bourgeois economic self-interest (the job market, tenure, and merit pay, all of which are based on publication and which reciprocally ensure that all publication is at least tainted, if not outright spurred by, one’s desire for a better salary) and thus deprived of any remote possibility for radical social impact.  The institutions of academy, through long-established channels such as peer-reviewed journals, graduate qualifying exams, and so on, have long ensured that the writing that gets produced will only ever reify the institutions which have allowed it to come into being, and have long-since lost any direct connection to the world around us.

 

It would seem, from my limited vantage point, that those who are interested in the kind of social subversion described in Subculture would do better to stop interfering with that subversion by trying to explain it to their fellow bourgeois academics, and start instead dismantling the system that long-ago prevented them from having any direct relationship to those subcultures in their writing and pedagogy.  Dismantling the academic publishing structures, divorcing one’s creative production from one’s economic self-interest, radicalizing pedagogy, ending the exploitation of part-time faculty by tenured faculty and graduate students, rethinking the concept of “mastery” which defines the educational system, and above all critiquing the unchallenged notion of “genius” (or “excellence” or “culture” or the “heroic”) which shores up the hypocrisy of the system from which all of us benefit—these seem far more interesting projects to me than quixotically trying to tell punks what they already know.

 

Subversion and critique, as they say, starts at home.

 

Colin

Personal Beefs

I just wanted to share a brief beef Alexis and I were discussing after class. Well, I was ranting, Alexis was listening. Call that what you will.

The conversation started with an appreciation of Karen’s comment that ended classes, namely to ask us to think about our investment in oppositionality and outsidership. I also think a lot about authenticity and, to get to the beef, commodification. I always ask why commodification robs something of its oppositional or critical potential. In my work, I question people who dismiss artists who sell, who create objects that are sellable. Why does participating in exchange preclude any ability to offer an insight into oppressive systems or structures of marginalization?

One of the things I think about a lot in relation to this is a point raised by both Sarah Thornton and Angela McRobbie, namely the modes of capital and heirarchy that are always part of the subcultures people so often look to as exemplars of oppositionality. As per above, I don’t think that this robs these subcultures of their ability to be critical, to offer a space of refusal. I just raise the point to air a beef concerning what strikes me as patriarchal fantasy.

There’s a passage by Tom Crow, from Modern Art in the Common Culture, that people often look to when considering these questions that I’d like to throw out there. Judith cites it in her art chapter in Queer Time and Space, but here it is for those that don’t have either: (warning, kinda long)

“The context of subcultural life is the shift within a capitalist economy toward consumption as its own justification. The success of this shift – which is inseparably bound up with the developing management of political consent – depends on expanded desires and sensibilities, that is, the skills required for an ever more intense marketing of sensual gratification. In our image-saturated present, the culture industry has demonstrated the ability to package and sell nearly every variety of desire imaginable, but because its ultimate logic is the strictly rational and utilitarian one of profit maximization, it is not able to invent the desires and sensibilities it exploits. In fact, the emphasis on continual novelty basic to that industry runs counter to the need of every large enterprise for product standardization and economies of scale. This difficulty is solved by the defensive and resistant subcultures that come into being as negotiated breathing spaces on the margins of controlled social life. These are the groups most committed to leisure, its pioneers, who for that reason come up with the most surprising, inventive and effective ways of using it. Their improvised forms are usually first made salable by the artisan-level entrepreneurs who spring up in and around any active subculture. Through their efforts, a wider circle of consumers gains access to an alluring subcultural pose, but in a more detached and shallow form, as the elements of the original style are removed from the context of subtle ritual that had first informed them. At this point it appears to the large fashion and entertainment concerns as a promising trend. Components of an already diluted stylistic complex are selected out, adapted to the demands of mass manufacture and pushed to the last job lot and bargain counter.

The translation of style from margin to center depletes the form of its original vividness and subtlety, but a significant residue of those qualities remains such that audience sensibilities expand roughly at the rate the various sectors of the culture industry require and can accommodate. What is more, the success of this translation guarantees its cyclical repetition. While it is true that the apparatus of spectacular consumption makes genuine human striving – even the resistance it meets – into saleable goods, this is no simple procedure. Exploitation by the culture industry serves at the same time to stimulate and complicate those strivings in such a way that they continually outrun and surpass its programming. The expansion of the cultural economy continually creates new fringe areas. And young and more extreme members of assimilated subcultures will regroup with new recruits at still moer marginal positions. So the process begins again.” (34-35)

I have always thought that the insistence upon a negation of the market had a lot to do with the terms Hebdige uses to describe subculture, particularly in relation to “parent culture.” Later writers like Thornton have taken him to task for this formulation, and I also think it might be useful to think about markets and exchanges outside of a very specific system of exploitative capitalism. Resistance and refusal (through ritual or otherwise) does not have to be complete, or total, and particularly not eternal or effective, to be critical.

REPOST: V. Solomon’s Response

This is Virginia’s response, also embedded as a comment to Jen A’s post on “THIS Machinery.”

So many of us seem to be interested in the points that I was thinking about while reading Culture and Anarchy. I am struck by Arnold’s definition of culture, or really what culture does more than necessarily what culture is. Sweetness and light, the best that has been thought and said, the pursuit of perfection by embodying our best, rather than our ordinary, selves. But what does that mean? What IS that? I have been trying to place his idea of culture in relation to contemporary uses of the term. More precise uses of the word come to mind for me: culture as community of interest that is specifically contrary to nationalist interests, that provides a space and a stance to counter hegemonic and dominant ways of being; and culture as a more nationalistic program. In both of my cases, though, culture seems to be more of a tangible thing, marked by certain activities, behaviors, styles, etc. Arnold seems to discuss this kind of culture when he talks about the characteristics of each of the classes, when he goes through these characteristics to determine why each class is unfit for the kind of authority that will encourage the pursuit of perfection by their example. It seems to me like he is describing aristocratic culture, middle class culture, working class culture. Clearly this is through my interpretation and not his, and I don’t mean it as a critique, but rather as a mark of my working through understanding what his idea of culture is, and maybe to leave a thread to pick up later to bring some use value out of a text that is fraught with problematic elitism, humanism, etc.
I think it is interesting that Arnold opposes culture to anarchy. As others have noted, this gives rise to the collective nature of his culture, as culture is the pursuit of perfection within a group (for him a nation state) as opposed to everyone doing as they like. Given my own work, this interests me because of how it explicitly intertwines culture and electoral politics. While I am a bit confused about his enumeration of the State (“the nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as government, the free swing of this of that one of its members in the name of the higher reason of all of them” p88), and assume that there are contemporary philosophical discourses that I am not familiar with addressing this, I think that this could be useful in terms of thinking through the range of effective and worthwhile critical cultural practices. Arnold calls for an authority that sets an example of the pursuit of perfection, sweetness, and light and embodies the best self. He also calls for a kind of trickle down self-betterment. The problematics of the authoritarianism and cult of individuality aside, his thought does offer, indeed seems to call for, a counter hegemonic way of being as critical practice. English culture currently was all about Hebraism and machinery, as he describes it, and the counter to that is for individuals to occupy a different stance, a different way of being. It is also clear how this can lead to the fetishization and elitism of sub or counter cultural practice. But I am really interested in this idea of the efficacy of critical social practice, as opposed to direct electoral intervention.
Like others, I am interested in the specter of Marxist thought in Arnold’s writing, or the use of the same cultural phenomena that interest Marx et al but taken to different ends. Arnold’s idea of culture seems to describe hegemony, of course the vilification of the middle class for its materialism and ‘culture’ of accumulation sees its parallel, and his passages about the working classes echo Marx along multiple fronts. His description of how the working class revolution under the rubric of their ordinary selves leads them to adopt middle class values echoes the historic bloc and false consciousness, and by working within the realm of culture, and insisting upon the primacy of culture, his argument seems to contain the workings of hegemony and ideology. Also, he seems to describe a kind of class consciousness, although for him culture combines aspects of different classes rather than constituting something that will be achieved with the ascension of the proletariat. Maybe it would be useful to consider Arnold’s culture in relation to Marx more fully? Like Carlyle, Arnold locates culture within what could be viewed as criticism, and the one who seeks sweetness and light as the critic. Given the Marxist bent of cultural studies, it might be useful. I don’t know entirely what to make of it, but there it is.
Although I don’t entirely know where to take this, I am interested in his idea of excess. Excess for Arnold is the inhabitation of class culture to the point where it becomes a problem, for whatever reason. At the same time, excess could also seem to echo a Bulterian parodic inhabitation in a way which might be useful or helpful in relation to critical cultural practice. Excess is the site where a particular culture crosses the line from the pursuit of perfection, sweetness, light, the best self, etc. I want to think about excess, and also defect, as productive categories, or as models for refusal. I was particularly thinking about this when Arnold discussed resistance as an excess of the aristocracy. I don’t know entirely what to make of that, but find it interesting, given the fact that what someone defines as excess, as sweetness and light, as the best that has been thought and said, might not conform to the next guy’s standards. I am particularly interested in excess because of how it intersects with how people describe queerness, particularly in relation to Camp. And I’m thinking that there is a more specific way to connect this to Arnold, given Arnold and Wilde’s mutual connection to Carlyle, but I can’t seem to make it.
More to say, but this is getting long! See y’all in a bit,

VA

Disclaimer/apology – I am comfortable as neither a theorist nor a philosopher, so sorry for any unclarity! Didn’t exactly realize that I was getting myself into, volunteering to respond this week…

The Scholar Gypsy

I know we’re not reading Arnold’s poetry for this class (and I know this isn’t my week to post) so feel free to skip this, but I couldn’t help but find the parallels in his prose and poetry. For instance, Jen pulled out a great quote:

For Arnold, the brand of collectivity we seem to be after is deeply interested in a a homogeneous cultural nationalism and state authority: “If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible… when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive” (79)

Jen’s observation that Arnold’s brand of collectivity as ultimately a state of poetic homogenization is astute and is an argument that is reinforced in his poetry. Take this from The Scholar Gypsy:

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. 165
O Life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope. 170

Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven: and we,
Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never have been fulfill’d; 175
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too? 180

I felt these particular stanzas echoed his anguish that the distance between poetry and society is so vast (which is why I particularly love the cartoon Professor Tongson uploaded), which is an extension of his argument that people think only according to their social class. In Arnold’s opinion, this distance between poetry and society is precisely what holds back the potential for culture. Because this distance in which the masses dwell is the disappointments of society–which Arnold believes to be the red herrings of culture, such as industry and railways and the urban environment–and the masses allow these to suffocate them of life and of any hope of poetic union. Arnold only finds hope in the pastoral myth. The only way towards Arnold’s definition of salvation is in the countryside.

Furthermore, his assertion that culture “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light” (79) is just more of the same homogenized edicts. Much like Dover Beach:

THE SEA is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 5
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 10
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago 15
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 20

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 25
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-winds, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems 30
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain 35
Swept with confus’d alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

All this imagery of the “sea of faith” (line 21) and the opportunities it holds is more of the pastoral ideology that Arnold is trying to feed his audience. However, it’s also indicative, of that curious, double-edged homogeneity that Arnold at once fears (in the disappointments of the unpoetical working class) and yet, dare I say, heroically displays as a source of perfection. We are told that real culture can only consist of “single-minded love of perfection” and that “curiosity” is not enough (71). Arnold hints that curiosity is only good if it leads to the same conclusions to which the Scholar Gypsy, who is curiously dreaming on Dover Beach, would lead us to himself. It feels like Arnold is saying that dissension amongst the poetic ranks would only lead to anarchy, but as long as everyone is the same kind of curious, a curiosity that will lead us out of the evils of the urbane, then we can happily keep the status quo.

(Is anyone else sick of this romanticized notion of Nature with a capital N?)

–Jillian

Blind Faith in THIS Machinery

While reading Culture and Anarchy, I cringed remembering the exchange that Reanna and I had in class last week regarding what she saw as the problematic anti-democratic strain in Carlyle and what I saw as his more utopic emphasis on collectivity. Reading Arnold, I was reminded that “collectivity” can also be used in reference to more anti-democratic and authoritarian approaches to politics than I’m usually referring to when I bandy about celebrations of “collectivity.” The questions I am most interested in are: What is the status of the collective and democratic in Arnold? And how does his understanding of collectivity in politics intersect with his methodology as a literary and social critic?

For Arnold, the brand of collectivity we seem to be after is deeply interested in a a homogenous cultural nationalism and state authority: “If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so niether have I srunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible… when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive” (79). Interestingly, this homogeneous cultural nationalism is opposed to material and practical pursuits, which isn’t something you find in many (for instance) transcendentalists, who are all about morally harenessing the working-class in service to U.S. expansion. I was surpised! For Arnold, inherent in the emphasis on materiality and the celebration of industrialization is the threat of anarchy.

My interest in Arnold’s paranoia around anarchy is definitely influenced by recent conversations with a friend who has been active in contemporary anarchist communities as both an activist and academic (problematic qualification?), where debates about the use-value of technology and industrialization continue to be prevalent. I’ve always been intersted in the intersection between labour rights and anarchist movements of the early twentieth century, but as we see in Arnold’s concern about incendents such as the Hyde Park riots, the relationship between industrialization, labour reform, and arnarchist movements was relevant well before the turn-of-the century. For me, this is indicative of Arnold’s acknowledgement (and worry) regarding the radical potential that might result from the growing proletarianization of workers in the late 19th century.

I agree with Alexis that there’s a spectre of Marx at work in Arnold’s essays, but a spectre that ultimately gives ways to an ideal of collectivity as an anti-democratic form of authoritarianism. Again, I am reminded of the ways that “collectivity” can be used in service to homogeneity and normativity that bases itself on fairly arbitrary and elitist aesthetic judgements. However, there are fissures in Arnold’s argument.

Arnold is almost humurous to me in his complete blindness to the way that his attempts at defining culture, perfection, and the authority of the state open themselves up to making possible the sorts of arguments re: subculture that Hebdige will make in Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

What persists in Hebdige’s arguments as well as the persistent debates around the importance of technology in subcultural movements (i.e. anarchy) is the question of to what degree technology, industrialization, and capitalism contain radical political possibilities, and also as I’ve said, how the collectivity that we usually associate with radical politics can give way to authoritarianism.

It seems clear how our disciplinary investment in pursuing “the best that is known and thought in the world” correlates with nationalism, racism, and heteronormativity. However, I think Arnold offers us some hope in exposing the failures of a homogenous understanding of culture, and his acknowledgement (paranoia) regarding the radical political potential inherent in material production/ consumption. Otherwise, why would Arnold be soooo worried about the anarchical tendencies bread by our “blind faith in machinery”? Love it!

Jen

Arnoldiana (For Discussion Tomorrow, 6/5)

While I usually prefer to leave this blog yoyr forum, I thought it might be helpful to “tag” a few citations I’d like to discuss tomorrow from Arnold’s letters and his contemporaries’ reviews of works like C&A and “The Function of Criticism…”

But first, a picture:

The title of this piece is “Sweetness and Light” and it depicts Arnold taking “great leaps” between “Poetry,” “Criticism” and Philosophy.” Originally printed in the journal Once a Week 12 October 1872.

Make of the dilettantish image what you will.

Or consider it in light of these comments from W.R. Roscoe in the National Review (1858):
“Mr. Arnold thinks…he can dig up the dusky olive from the plains of Attica, and plant it in our English wheatfields; that he can take in its fullest development in the most purely indigenous and the most intensely narrow national literature the world ever saw, and bid it find new springs of life some two thousand years later in a nation which has already found its expression in a dramatic literature evolved by itself. Did such an attempt ever succeed?”

Or these remarks from Arnold’s nemesis, Fitzjames Stephens, in a piece titled “Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen” (Saturday Review, 3 December 1864)

“[Arnold's] self-imposed mission is to give good advice to the English people as to their manifold faults, especially as to their one great fault of being altogether inferior, in an intellectual and artistic point of view, to the French…He is so warm upon the subject that he has taught himself to write a dialect as like French as pure English can be.”

“Mr. Arnold’s present object is to make English criticism ashamed of itself and aware of conscious of its own contemptible character.”

Arnold’s remarks in a letter to his sister, Jane Martha Arnold Forster, 6 September 1858
“Perfection of a certain kind may there be attained, or at least approached, without knocking yourself to pieces: but to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort and a labour, but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces, which one does not readily conset to (although one is sometimes forced to it) unless one can devote one’s whole life to poetry.”

Oscar Wilde in “The Critic as Artist” (1891)
Ernest [paraphrasing Gilbert]: “The highest Criticism…is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.”
KT

Ghostly Marxism

[T]he mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, unmanageable masses of sunken people, to the existence of which we are … absolutely forbidden to reconcile ourselves. (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy 175)

In Arnold’s descriptions of East End poverty and working-class social movements, occasionally in his gestures toward egalitarianism before they are reincorporated into meritocratic intellectual elitism, and most of all in his depiction of bourgeois capitalism and its “liberal practitioners,” I kept finding a spectre haunting my reading of the text. The spectre of a politics Arnold would surely find inconceivable; the spectre of Marxist analysis.

I checked some dates: it appears that Marx and Arnold were, indeed, writing at the same time. Perhaps Arnold worked in the British Museum and came near that scribbling, bearded figure so beloved of neo-Victorian novelists (see Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem though I’m sure there are others).

From where I’m sitting, it looks as though Marx and Arnold perceived the same historical situation: a powerful bourgeoisie and a new industrial proletariat coming to develop its own political consciousness. Neither wishes to “reconcile themselves” to the status quo, and they both think they have answers to its problems. Marx’s was a heightening of the consciousness of class oppression, commodification and alienation to the point of revolution; Arnold’s a proliferation of elite culture which would replace class consciousness with a striving toward individuals’ “perfection” of the higher mind. Two utopian projects (if you will excuse my vague and soundbite-like descriptions).

And we all know from which one of them our discipline emerges.

Alexis

Matthew Arnold and Stanley Fish?

I remember the first time I read Culture and Anarchy and how I was initially sucked in by what appeared to be Arnold’s democratic desire to spread the idea of perfection to as many people as possible.  But of course, I quickly realized that what I initially perceived as democratic was really his strong aversion to individualism.  As I was re-reading for tomorrow I had the same experience – I find his writing very enjoyable to read and his ideas incredibly disturbing.  And I kept thinking of our discussion last week about the viewing public and how Arnold would almost certainly see them/us as the “uncultivated masses” he so wants to transform into a single ideal of thought, beauty, intellect, etc.  And this made me think of Stanley Fish and his ideal reader (a theory for which, I believe, he is roundly criticized).  I must admit that I am only peripherally aware of Fish’s theory, so I am operating from pure hearsay, but it seems that Fish would certainly have something to add to our debate about a passive vs. active audience.  And while his idea of the reader who creates meaning for the text  also seems (at first glance) rather democratic, the ideal reader for Fish is really someone like himself (sounds like Arnold to me).   And doesn’t any discussion of an ideal suggest a rather dangerous conformity?  I guess my point in all of this (especially since I’m not a scheduled responder this week) is that I’ve been a bit bothered by the suggestion that there is a certain group of viewers, readers,  etc. who are “enlightened” enough to find or create meaning in texts (or at least meanings that are worthwhile).   Or am I misreading Arnold and Fish completely?  Any thoughts (or corrections to my horribly misguided understanding of Arnold)?

-Jessica

REPOST: MDaddy on Culture and Anarchy

Please note: I try to repost longer blogs into their own threads, especially if they get buried in the “comments” section of other posts. In other words, Michael, I’m not picking on you–I just urge you to post blogs of this length into separate threads so they don’t get lost in the shuffle of older posts.
KT

“Sapere aude!” (Immanuel Kant)

“…the difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to till our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” (Jonathan Swift)
****

In reading Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’ we have reason to consider the frustrating and lamentable fact that the essay has yet to be adapted into comic book format. Indeed, imagine the moral fortitude to be gained in witnessing the evil visages of Mr. Bright, Mr. Harrison, Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Bentham, the English ‘Rough,’ and the feisty Irish Fenian colorfully caricatured in cartoon print! Let us not dwell on the unfortunate negligence of post-industrial literary gatekeepers and corporate machinery. Rather, let us boldly embrace ‘sweetness and light.’

Arnold seems to be engaged in a critical project that is continuous with the frequently misinterpreted Socratic ‘Know Thyself’ (a Delphic oracular dictum that had little to do with introspective self-knowledge, rather suggesting that one should know his place in society so as not to offend social order and the gods). It is consistent with another Socratic maxim: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Also, it seems to be continuous with Kant’s critical project, which in prolegomena is reiterated in “What is Enlightenment?” Therein, Kant makes three statements that might ring familiar: (i) “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life”; (ii) “I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me”; (iii) “Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity.” Both Kant and Arnold were invested in the moral and aesthetic commitments of the public good. And both equivocated on what ‘good’ denotes. We shall revisit these themes in Oscar Wilde (having already seen them in Carlyle). And we shall revisit these sentiments in current debates on the ‘ethics of belief’ (initiated by WK Clifford).

First, we should perhaps consider the form of the essay. In “The Essay as Form,” Adorno reminds us that “the essay shys away from the violence of dogma, from the notion that the result of abstraction…deserves ontological dignity.” The essay “comes to no final conclusions” and is the “critical form par excellence,” constructing “criticism of cultural artifacts” and it “confronts that which such artifacts are with their concept; it is the critique of ideology.” The essayist must “necessarily experiment,” creating “conditions under which an object is newly seen.” Thus, as readers we have reason to speculate on the essay’s potential in its critique of a ‘false’ positivist consciousness, allowing something akin to a Hegelian “openness to experience,” which recognizes the process of the world’s mediation—that is, it is an awareness of our critical presuppositions and criteria of truth. An ‘openness to experience’ simply means that we meditate on the vulnerability of error, and being able to revise our criterion of truth. A refusal to revise our criteria of truth when it no longer yields knowledge is tantamount to not thinking, and it is this that helps explain how individuals maintain a society that is antagonistic to their needs. To briefly summarize Adorno, if possible, the essay is intended to be an open-ended inquiry that is guided by the subject matter, embodying intellectual freedom.

Second, we should recognize what Arnold means by ‘culture.’ It is not a body of knowledge, a provision of the materially privileged, or a wedge of bourgeois domination in social and political affairs. (We have reason to challenge these points). It is the result of intellectual curiosity and scientific passion (might we dare say ‘reification’?). It is “seeing things as they are” and “for their own sake.” It requires a critical project that emphasizes the proper role of reason and studies the ‘disinterested’ pursuit of perfection; it is a process of ‘knowing and becoming,’ of fashioning a ‘best self’ or an ‘internal condition’ of character. In privileging the literary and philosophical over visual and musical forms, Arnold’s ‘culture’ is “the best that has been thought and said,” which is an ideal of human life, establishing standards of excellence (similar to ancient Greek notions on transcendental ideals) that aim to perfect cognitive capacities and the aesthetic and moral dispositions of human nature. It links aesthetic values to moral goods (not unlike recent ‘aesthetic’ apologia by critics such as Elaine Scarry in ‘On Beauty.’) “Culture” is a cosmopolitan salve in that it unifies external culture and heals divisions—it is an ideal of organic wholeness and harmony. It is the ultimate bran muffin. ‘Culture’ engenders that which is ‘sweet and light’ (characteristics I’ve rarely experienced in bran muffins). ‘Sweetness’ extends to the appreciation of beauty; ‘light’ has something to do with the stimulation of one’s intelligence and higher faculties—the noble exercise of reason.

Let us clarify ‘disinterestedness.’ Arnold’s sense is not equivalent to Kant’s.

Kant maintains that judgments of beauty share four characteristics: they are disinterested, universal, necessary, and purposive without a purpose. Since Kant draws a distinction between rational and aesthetic judgments, he argues that aesthetic judgments are not based on concepts, or things that can be known, but on intuitions or sensations. Therefore, a true judgment of beauty is disinterested; it is not based on any known concept, simply a sensation of unconstrained, completely detached pleasure. Along these same lines, a beautiful object is purposive, containing the property or quality of purposefulness, without actually having a concrete purpose. Kant thinks that we respond to an object’s rightness of design, which satisfies our imagination and intellect, even though we are not evaluating the object’s purpose.
Kant believed that though the sense of beauty was grounded in feelings of pleasure, this pleasure was universally valid and necessary. Other people ought to feel as we do. What did he mean by this imperative? Not that we could ever establish principles to compel admiration, but that we must think of our pleasure as validated by the beauty of the art object.

Kant also stressed the disinterestedness of that pleasure. Just as human beings should never be treated as merely means to an end, so aesthetic pleasure comes from the sheer joy of deploying our imagination. (Not for reasons of morality, or utility, or any other purpose). In a free play of our imagination we bring concepts to bear on experiences that would otherwise be otherwise free of concepts, thereby extending our pleasure in the world.

For Arnold, disinterestedness is keeping aloof from ‘the practical view of things’; it must follow “the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects.” It steadily refuses to lend itself to “ulterior, political, practical considerations.” It must keep in “the pure intellectual sphere,” “detached … from practice.” Criticism is a “subtle and indirect action,” embracing “detachment” and “abandoning the sphere of practical life,” and will inevitably be the work of “a very small circle.” The crucial aspect of this “disinterested endeavor” is “never to let oneself become abstract.”

T. S. Eliot once said that Arnold is a “Propagandist and not a creator of ideas.” Yet Eliot named Arnold as one of the greatest critics of the English language. Arnold’s ‘objective approach’ to criticism and his view that historical and biographical study is unnecessary was very influential on New Criticism. Such an approach paved the way for Eliot to say that poetry must be ‘disinterested’– not an expression of personality but an escape from personality, because it is not an expression of emotions but an escape from emotions.

Thus, the term ‘disinterested’ has been used in a variety of ways.

Although Arnold defines culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said,’ we can sufficiently estimate that ‘C&A’ hardly rises to that standard. There are several passages in the essay that have a particular ability to motivate one’s head about a spinning pivotal axis like the possessed, up-chucking child in ‘The Exorcist.’

Whatever we say about the ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’ distinction (definitions of each term are too broad, too general, too figurative, too affective, insufficient), and whatever we might think of the ‘barbarian’ and ‘philistine’ distinction (I suggest that we withhold judgment on this until we’ve all had a chance to serve with colleagues on community college faculty committees), we have reason to be concerned about certain prejudices and flagrant fouls of reason.

Let us open our hymnals: a few problems.

As we saw in Carlyle, Arnold assumes that we have a common human nature. This notion is philosophically problematic for reasons that I cannot enumerate. It is basically the idea that human beings are autonomous, created equal, and have free will in a natural world that is determined by physical laws. It is a view rooted in Cartesian metaphysics, and you are likely familiar with standard objections. For Kant, all human beings are rational agents such that a universal law of nature applies to them (a categorical imperative).

Page 62: “men [what about women?] are all members of one great whole.” This is an organic view of society that was particularly popular with Continental Romantics, stemming from writings in ancient Stoicism (for example, in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) and Republicanism (you’ll also see it in Cicero). We see this view in current debates on political cosmopolitanism. It is problematic in that it ignores what we call cultural ‘hybridity’ and isn’t informed by discussions on multiculturalism.

“Human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest.” This is simply false. Kant recognizes in his work on ethics a propensity to diverge from social norms, expectations, and seemingly common moral instincts or intuitions (such as ‘if we are capable of charitable action we should help others in need’: an occasion might allow that we do not save a drowning child in a shallow pond). This view ignores views on ethical or psychological egoism— arguments by folks such as Thrasymachus, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Ayn Rand, and Karl Rove). It presupposes a ‘good’ will inherent to actions that issue from an innately ‘good’ human nature. It is a problematic yet common warrant for toleration, respect, and the achievement of instrumental ends; it is similar to MLK, Jr’s: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” It is an assumption that justifies something akin to Kant’s Humanity Principle: although we treat people as means to ends all the time, it is problematic to treat the ‘humanity’ in individuals as means and not ends.

“Perfection is not possible while the individual remains isolated.” We have reason to doubt this, but Kant says something similar. We are bound by ‘civic duty’ to further the virtues of human community. But we can rationally ‘opt out’ of our membership in the city, state, club or any other social arrangement and its laws — for instance, by quitting the club. Those laws only apply to us given that we don’t rationally decide to opt out. Our respect for the laws guiding us is qualified, in the sense that the thought that the law gives us a duty is compelling only if there is no law we respect more that conflicts with it. Eventually, we come to laws that apply to us as rational agents, as beings who are capable of guiding their own behavior on the basis of directives, principles, and laws of rationality. We cannot choose to lay aside our ‘membership’ in the category of such beings, or at least it is unclear what the status of such a choice would be.

“The individual is required to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection.” By what maxim or principle? What makes this true? What are conditions of satisfaction? How does this ignore a project of bad faith? (Sartre)

Page 62& 63: A. defines ‘culture’ as: (a) the study of perfection; (b) harmonious perfection (expanding the ‘human family,’ as in we are members of a ‘Trojan family’); (c) General perfection (becoming something rather than in having something); (d) an ‘inward condition’ or character of mind and spirit. Here’s A’s argument (reconstructed as cited on the page):

1) If culture is the study of perfection, then it has an important function to fulfill in society.

[Note: ‘the study of perfection’ is already an active function, thus A. is saying that ‘culture’ has a function with an important function—circular reasoning—the content of the antecedent does not establish a sufficient condition for the consequent.]

2) If culture has an important function, then it must confront the material and mechanical character in society.
3) [From (1) and (2)]: If culture is the study of perfection, then it must confront the material and mechanical character in society.
4) If culture must confront the material and mechanical character in society, then its aim is to perfect the ‘inward condition.’
5) [From (2), (3), (4), and (5)]: If the important function of culture is the study of perfection, then it must confront the material and mechanical character in society & perfect the ‘inward condition.’
6) Either we expand human nature [(b) above] OR support strong individualism.
7) If we need a study of perfection, then we must expand human nature (b).
We have to deny strong individualism (yet fashion an ‘inward condition’).
9) We need to expand human nature. [from (6) and (8)]
10) Thus, we need a study of perfection. [from (7) and (9)??]
* To expand human nature [(b) above] does not entail the study of perfection, and the study of perfection does not entail the expansion of human nature. If we conclude (10) from (7) and (9), then we’d commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. (10) does not follow from the given reasons.

There are other problem areas that we can look at. Arnold criticizes: middle-class liberalism, faith in machinery and industrialization, conspicuous wealth and consumption, overpopulation, and the ills of Puritanism, the Dissenters, and Fanatics. We have every reason to wonder about what Shakespeare & Virgil have to do with the Puritans; we have reason to challenge A’s class-based ad hominem against ‘Philistines’ who are excluded from possessing culture. We have reason to challenge the logical connection between Swift ‘sweetness and light’ and Epictetus on the character of human perfection [not all ancient Greeks had the same or similar views on how to promote or achieve human perfection]; we have reason to challenge A’s ‘didactic’ theory of poetry; we have reason to question the curious suggestion that Oxford = ‘culture’; we have reason to challenge the seeming oxymoron of ‘apostles of equality.’

Lastly, before I submit this blog entry as a dissertation chapter, let me conclude with MA’s remarkable comments on the Irish Fenian and Fenianism (page 87), which demonstrate the brutality of colonial practices: the colonizer shall never understand the project of cultural retrieval on the part of those who have been colonized. John Bull has rarely come to terms with the oppressive violence of its ‘culture.’ The British government has been consistently ignorant of the shame and indignation for which it has been responsible over the ages, disavowing the effects of economic policies that have crippled a people that only wanted to secure its own sovereignty and freedom. On this point, the ‘culture’ of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant is vastly blind in recognizing the right to ‘culture’ of the ancient and modern Celtic peoples.

What is a Fenian? Who were they?

The Fenians were an Irish nationalist group that was based mainly in the United States (with cells in Canada and throughout the world). It preceded the Clan na Gael, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. It was founded by John O’Mahony, who was a Celtic scholar, naming the ‘Fenians’ after the Fianna, a group of Irish warriors led by Fionn mac Cumhaill. They were not strictly a Catholic organization, and most members were not active Catholics. Matter of fact, the Catholic Church denounced the Fenians as a secret society.

Arnold says, “It never was any part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary, a non-Englishman’s assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution is…for Englishmen. We extend them to others out of love and kindness; but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us to extend them. And the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is so immense…He [the Fenian] is evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame against us, with an alien religion established in his country by us at his expense, with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort! Show him our symbolical Truss and Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, and tell him that British industrialism can bring a man to that, and he remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy.”

The Fenians had no issue with Anglicanism. Rather, the Fenians took issue with the “love and kindness” of British philanthropy and institutions that were set on genocide in Ireland. The Fenians, it is true, took issue with “centuries of ill usage” of which much of British ‘culture,’ that is, the ‘best that was thought and said,’ supported it wholeheartedly. The Fenian is a sentimentalist, indeed! He cannot seem to forget the past, and he cannot refrain from learning the history of colonial oppression. He is fated to dream about a ‘Romantic’ or ‘Hidden’ Ireland that is free of British ‘cultural’ domination. Until recently, the Irish were denied access to learning and speaking their own language. Today, in Northern Ireland government laws prohibit instruction in the Irish language. On behalf of the Fenian, and in sentimental remembrance of those who fell in the cause of Irish independence, expressing a ‘feminine’ and ‘rough’ fanaticism concerning the millions of people who perished as a result of British laws, who emigrated aboard famine ships to America, I gratefully decline British ‘love and kindness’ and a ‘culture’ that strives to supplant and eradicate my own.

Save the cheerleader, save the… cheerleader.

Where does it come from, this desire to comply with forces larger than ourselves and write responses to texts we have read? Is it born within us, a natural progression of our free will that led us to graduate school in the first place? Or is it an aberration, a mark on humanity’s otherwise unblemished visage?

Just kidding. I won’t put everyone through that.

But seriously, was that finale t3h SUXXORS or what? I, like Alexis, was disappointed in the finale of Heroes. But I think it is interesting that one of the episodes we’ve talked about the most here is “Five Years Gone,” because that’s the one I was going to begin with as well. That episode was the 42-minute-long manifestation of the anxieties I’d been having with Hiro’s abilities since the beginning of the show. I’ll just put it out there.

Time travel as a narrative device is extremely disconcerting to me.

Well, not exactly disconcerting; maybe that’s too strong of a word. It just makes me think too hard. I don’t want to “go with the flow” when it happens. Sure, I’ll accept telekinesis or self-healing or alter egos in the mirror or walking through walls, but when time travel happens, there’s something inside of me that just wants to say “Is ANYTHING sacred?” My first instinct is to lump the abilities I “accept” together as spatial manipulations as opposed to Hiro’s temporal manipulation, but I think that’s an oversimplification of the process. After all, there are situations in which alternate spatial dimensions are explored (Mohinder’s and Peter’s transitions into the “dream” state aren’t just dreams, are they? And they’re certainly not just memories, since they a) in Mohinder’s case take place outside of his physical location at the time being depicted in dream-world, making him a fly on the wall, and b) give corporeal form to the “dreamer,” a form visible to some [the dying? the dead?] and a form in addition to the “dreamer’s” original form in the memory). The seemingly atemporal nature of the “dream” sequences makes them acceptable to a time-travel skeptic such as myself, since the sequences are presented as external to the narrative space-time of the series.

Hiro’s travels, on the other hand, are violations of this space-time, and they make me go more than a little insane. Now is when I try to articulate why. The most obvious place to start is with the episode “Five Years Gone.” Forgive me for asking, but if there are people five years in the future living on Earth at the same time as there are people living on Earth in the narrative present, then does it not follow that there are an infinite number of narratives, an infinite number of Earths, an infinite number of possibilities and outcomes? I think that Hiro traveling back and forth through time and changing events renders any conception of space and time irrelevant, unless we accept that there are restrictions imposed by the creators of the narrative itself. Thus, the coexistence of temporal freedom and a lack of utter chaos within the show’s narrative calls attention to Heroes‘ status as a created, manipulated, mediated object…

and this is where words fail me on this train of thought, but I want to try something different now to see if I can try to make a connection.

Alexis spoke briefly on the difference between X-Men and Heroes with regard to the relationship between “those of special ability” (not quoting Alexis, just attempting to have a catch-all term) and “those without special ability.” This observation combined with the ever-present gay subtext of Heroes – you show me a superhero and I’ll show you a closeted queer (see also Colin’s astute IMDB quote) – made me think of a very different show: (The American incarnation of) Queer as Folk. One common critique (or point of praise, depending who was doing the talking) of that show was its hermetically sealed environment which only allowed for queers GLBT persons, the occasional queerGLBT-friendlies and the extremely occasional queerGLBT-bashers to exist within the show. I think that makes a nice analogy to Heroes, in the sense that the “world” of Heroes is also delimited based on identity. I’d argue that the “world” we’ve been discussing in this blog is indeed not what we think of as the “real life” world, but I’d also argue that it has as much to do with “New York” or “Texas” as Vancouver has to do with Pittsburgh (QAF was supposed to have been set in Pittsburgh, but was filmed entirely in Vancouver). Maybe a bigger leap is to say that the world is delimited based on potential for viewer identification, and if that prospective viewer is the GL and GL-friendly subject in the case of QAF, then maybe a good question to finish up with would be, who is that viewer in the case of Heroes? I’m not sure, but I think it might have to do with Neoliberalism.

That was a flippant and irresponsible ending, and I’m going to leave it at that, because like Hiro’s pre-training swordplay skillz, my Neoliberalism skillz are a bit rusty. Hopefully we have something to chew on.

Also, I don’t think the temporality issues are entirely separable from the issues in the second half of the post. But I’M NOT SURE WHY.

Also, why did the mind-reader encounter linear, usable thoughts rather than messier things such as this blog post?

Charlie

“I fear he collects monsters”: Bachelor Collectors and Their Menageries

The Bachelor as Collector has been haunting me since The Woman in White. There it was. Staring me in the face ever since Middlemarch as an undergrad. Why did it take so long for me to see it? Finally! Chapter XI in The Picture of Dorian Gray makes sense! In the words of my SoCalism roots (I was born in San Diego ya’ll): Like, duh!

It’s too obvious to speak of Sylar as the ultimate collector for this week, so I’ll keep it brief. The dude collects clocks, snow globes (for his mom), watches and powers (like, duh, right?), but he also collects sympathy, and this sympathy always erupts in violence. First, it was Dr. Chandra Suresh’s sympathy, who Sylar subsequently murdered. When he invades the Bennett home under the pretense of returning Mr. Muggles (am I reading too much into this as a Harry Potter reference?), Mrs. Bennett calls him her “hero” and he seems genuinely touched, but he ultimately creeps her out to the point where she suspects something is, well, creepy, and he physically harms her. Finally, he plays upon the Mohinder’s sympathies, but when Mohinder finds out the truth about his traveling companion (and Zane Taylor and everyone else he has basically fed to Sylar), that relationship also ends in violence. …I am just now noticing that Sylar essentially meets and exploits everyone under a false or stolen identity (be that in name or in powers, heck, his pseudonym, Sylar, is lifted from a watch brand). Except the interaction with his mother, although, that, too, ends with her death.

Anyway, I didn’t really want to talk about Heroes. I wanted to talk about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In particular, Mina Murray, and her role as a collector as well. Her collecting of the men who will make up the League resembles Sylar’s collecting habits in that they both are collecting people with power. But the extraordinary gentlemen share more in common with Sylar: they are all exiles and they are all “bachelors.” I wonder if Carlyle would add bachelorhood to his list of requisites of a sincere hero, the way poverty will enhance the sincerity of a Man of Letters. I imagine Carlyle saying something to the effect that bachelor(ette)hood (my ette, not his) ennobles individuals because they can focus on their cause and not be distracted by petty familial connections.

And now for something completely different…

League is premised on a similar theme explored in Dracula: the archaic versus modernity. In much the same way Bram Stoker was obsessed with science, technology and society in Dracula (with the inclusion of typewriters, phonographs, psychology, blood transfusions, and social questions such as Imperialism and the idea of the “New Woman”), Moore is equally obsessed with a universe slightly more advanced at the turn of the century than it actually was. Whereas in Dracula these technical developments literally shape the narrative for different characters (in Dracula Mina keeps a journal on a typewriter, marrying her with technology further solidifies her connection to the spirit of New Woman), in League, Mina writes a letter, but it’s handwritten in curvy script. Visually it has the effect of a diary entry when in narrative function it is a business letter to Campion Bond updating him about the situation with Jekyll/Hyde. Why not allow her to write this letter on a typewriter, which could possibly be more in keeping with the spirit of the original character?

I fear the answer is a misogynistic one (and this totally sucks because I don’t want it to be!). Mina assumes the role of leader for the group (perhaps due to the fact that she was the first one recruited), but even after the group is formed, she continues to give orders. The story is peppered with the other gents’ anxiety about Mina’s “manliness” resulting in petty insults (“harpy”) and usurpation of her authority (Nemo taking matters into his own hands by sending Griffin after Bond). And so I take the handwritten nature of the letter as a piece of power that writer Alan Moore is withholding from Mina.

In a sense Alan Moore is the ultimate Bachelor Collector (well, until recently he was a bachelor, he literally got married two weeks ago). He selected all the characters based on his favorite Victorian texts (both popular and obscure)–even the random characters he includes as side characters have a foothold in a Victorian text (Miss Flaybum and Miss Coote, as ironic as their names were in the context of League, they were real characters in Sherlock Holmes and The Pearl). In essence, both stories (Dracula and League) are stories of Imperialism, stories of modern/civilized society overcoming what are perceived as primitive/Other cultures. The question I’m most concerned with, though, is: at what point am I reading too much into things? Is a comic book ever just a comic book? I am all too aware that ideology asserts itself into all facets of life, taking aggressive or passive forms. I understand Stuart Hall and inferential racism. But at what point is a writer aware of the things he is writing and at what point is a writer relying on ye olde ideologies to create an action/adventure homage to his favorite novels? Does that excuse the use of ideologies? Does that make the use a rebellion of sorts? How can we trace the rebellion?

 

–Jillian

Heroes, Geeks and Fans

Having volunteered enthusiastically to blog about Heroes, I find myself with a lot of ideas and no single overarching theme. Should I detail my critiques of the race and gender politics of the series, its promises and disappointments? Offer an aesthetically oriented analysis of the show’s intertextuality and narrative complexity in the hope of convincing those of our number less enamored of the popular that it’s genuinely worthy of study? Explain why the finale was such a failure in my eyes, and why “Five Years Gone” was such an intensely pleasurable piece of television? Analyze the show’s presentation of geekishness and fandom as heroism?As I’m finding it so difficult to narrow these possibilities down to a single entry, I think that it might be best to step back from my anxiety about achieving a properly ‘academic’ tone and instead offer a list of possible discussion points on which we can elaborate further in class. I’ll assume that the rest of this entry is fair game for spoilers, as anyone who hasn’t seen the finale yet is probably watching TV now instead of reading the course blog.

***

Carlyle’s imperialist, occasionally protofascist concept of the hero is disturbingly similar to the way the term is used in Heroes. The ‘Great Man’ who makes history, who changes/saves the world: Linderman, Nathan, Hiro and even Peter all believe that this role is theirs. And though “Five Years Gone” (the dystopian future episode) and Linderman’s machinations are there to show that self-conscious heroism can slip over easily into fascism, it is not so much the idea of the Great Man that is critiqued as the failures of those who misguidedly claim it. Peter and Hiro want to save New York instead of sacrificing it, are unlikely individuals without the social and economic power Linderman and Nathan command, and so they can be fated as the true ‘Great Men’ of the show. Even Nathan returns to greatness when he abandons Linderman’s plan; his political corruption is apparently obliviated by his (literal) ascent to the right kind of heroism. I found the lack of moral ambiguity disappointing, especially after the complexities exhibited in the stories of Mr Bennet and the invisible man.

If Carlyle had watched Heroes, he might have wanted to add a new lecture: The Hero As Geek. In class on Tuesday, we talked about understanding Carlyle’s “Worship” as a fan’s affective relation to the object of fandom. The heroes of Heroes inspire fandom (both internally to the show and in the fan communities that surround it) but it is also essential to the narrative that they are themselves fans: of heroism as ideal, of other heroes, and most especially of superhero comics. Hiro in particular, of course comes to his heroism through geek cultural literacies: he learns his heroism from comic books, is guided by Isaac’s comic visions, and fulfils his quest. This is lauded, while Nathan’s mainstream political conceptions of how to be heroic have to be abandoned before he can finally save the world.

Geek cultural literacies also provide the show with a dense array of intertextual pleasures, as literary Victoriana does in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Alan Moore, in fact, is the author of one of the main intertexts I perceived in the show: his 1985 graphic novel Watchmen also invokes the destruction of New York in the context of dubious heroism and politics, adding another layer to the political allegory of Nathan’s ascension to Congress. X-Men is the other obvious reference point; most of the powers in Heroes are also held by mutant characters in those comics and films, though they affect their holders very differently (the most powerful X-Man has the same power as one of the most ineffective Heroes, Officer Parkman, to give one brief example).

Comparing Heroes and X-Men (the first two films, primarily) shows up some interesting points about otherness and power. In X-Men, mutants have physical or psychic powers, but they are outnumbered and oppressed by the normal, normative force of ‘ordinary’ people. The good guys are invested in finding and controlling super-powered mutants, in order to encourage mutant/human harmony; the bad guys are mutant separatists who believe that persecution will never cease without violent intervention. In Heroes, the superpowered people seem to have few problems with oblivious humanity, and are mainly threatened by Linderman’s organization; until the dystopia of “Five Years Gone,” their powers are not experienced as dangerous otherness, and even in “Five Years Gone” their oppression of people is portrayed as due to Sylar’s machinations rather than any more generalized systemic othering or xenophobic fear of difference’s dangers.

I think that this attitude to mutation/heroism might possibly connect to the problems which Heroes has in portraying difference in general, as shown by the general gender stereotyping and problematic racial representations. None of the ‘Great Men’ are women, and the female characters seem to all be either ineffectual, dead, underused or evil; I still can’t quite believe they never let the Haitian have a name (you’d think that Claire might have thought to ask a simple question of the man who saved her life). This shows that Heroes locates itself in the geek/fan landscape by embracing a fairly narrow segment of geek culture, in the end: a superheroism that isn’t quite as (self-)critical as it pretends to be, and that is more interested in glorifying its unconventional Greats––in promoting hero- and Heroes-worship––than in exploring the tantalizing possibilities for sociopolitical comment in the world the show creates.

Off Topic: Electrelane (w/ Tender Forever) at the Troubadour, Thursday (5/31)

Normally I wouldn’t take up class air time or blogspace to post an advert for my homies, but I know some of you are music fans–and Brit music fans at that.

My friend Emma Gaze’s band (short hair, bottom left), ELECTRELANE has been touring with Arcade Fire this summer. Electrelane are based in Brighton. We just caught their show at the Greek from the wings last nite. But tomorrow night Electrelane will be in a more intimate setting headlining another show at the Troubadour before heading to NorCal’s Greek with AF in Berkeley.

Opening for them are “Tender Forever” (really a one woman synth band) from Bordeaux. Nice, melodic electro indie pop. Think Matthieu Boogaerts meets Stereolab and lesbionica.

Tickets are $15. Doors open at 8. Tender Forever at 9. Electrelane at 10.

Electrelane Homepage
Tender Forever’s Myspace Page

KT

Links to Heroes’ “Viral Entertainment”

A quick response to Trisha’s remarks.
1. Love Bonnie Tyler’s “Hero.” Not as good as “Total Eclipse of the Heart (Turn Around Bright Eyes),” which would also, at least thematically, be appropriate for the show’s soundtrack.
2. I can see where you’re going with why Bush might love the show, but I think the “5 years gone” episode (or whatever it’s called–aka “the future” episode) is rather overt with its allusions to post 9/11 fearmongering, indefinite detention, profiling and opportunistic commemoration. In other words, even if you’re right and Bush loves the show, the show makes no secret of hating him and the way he conducts his political process (complete with Linderman’s plan to fix the voting machines. Diebold anyone)?

For anyone interested enough to pursue some Heroes-themed viral entertainment, here are a few links…
The “Vote Petrelli” site

The Yamagato Fellowship (Papa Nakamura’s organization. According to “Entertainment Weekly,” the site “will lay crucial groundwork for next season”)

KT