"These people are so very obedient."*
- Tom Clark quoting Ed Sanders to Allen Ginsberg, p.61 Great Naropa Poetry Wars
I. A. What’s Up with the Formulation
“Best American Poetry”?
A. 1. : Post-“Best”
The other day my facebook status read, “Gabriel Gudding cannot believe what a total dweeb Theodor Adorno was.”
I had been reading Aesthetic Theory (1970) and found myself reveling in TA’s hamfisted dialectical posturing and overwrought displays of “judgment” and taste, as if he’d named one of his thumbs Hegel and the other Kant.
In 1994 I read David Lehman’s Signs of the Times. It is essentially a long facebook status about what a total dweeb Paul de Man was. I enjoyed it immensely.
In 1993 I had been reading de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology and though I’d not at that point in my life seen many of the kinds of ideational and stylistic chimeras created by the application of deterministic Marxism to literary theory, I knew that what I was reading (AI) was clearly written by a dweeb. I delighted in de Man's strained, magisterial assertions and appreciated how simultaneously empty yet pompous those assertions were.
In short, Paul de Man and Theodor Adorno were dweebs because they tried to apply the conceptual vocabulary and intellectual mannerisms of dialectic philosophy to a set of issues and concerns they called “aesthetics” when these concerns could have beeen more clearly resolved, rendered, and understood through the methods and tools of a sociology of literature and art.
A. 1. a. What this means for the rest of us.
The sociology of literature has arrived. And this means that any aesthetic project, any project implying or containing or enacting judgment, selection, taste, discrimination, and discerning judiciousness is, at base, exactly NOT about quality. It’s about social and symbolic economies. And if it’s not about quality, there can be no unalloyed “best.”
A. 1. b. How Pierre Bourdieu Saved Literature
from the “Best”
If the supposition is even partially true that aesthetics are an agreed upon, or an argued-through, collective misrecognition, a mass illusio
socially maintained for the benefit of key players – then writers and anthologists can no longer in good conscious ignore the fact that Bourdieu, Durkheim, Weber, Howard "Howie" S. Becker, Ann Swidler, Richard A. Peterson (on production of culture), Jason Kaufman (on the culture of culture), Howard Becker (on “art worlds”), Paul DiMaggio (on the institutionalization of art), Wendy Griswold (on culture and literature), Tia DeNora (on music and art in everyday life), and Ron Eyerman (on “meaning” in art) not only exist but have something instructive to contribute to those of us still lost in the religion of literature, the cult of the virtuoso, and the fetish of form/line/euphony/”epiphany”/whathaveyou or quality in general.
As my friend Gabrielle Raley, a sociologist at UCLA says,
“Overall, [the] sociology [of art] tends to look at:
How art is produced.
How art is consumed (typically involves discussion of class, race, etc., e.g. Bourdieu's "cultural capital").
The production of genres in art.
The 'doing' of art (more phenomenological, less production/commerce oriented).
There's often a theoretical divide between people who emphasize how culture is ‘produced’ (emphasis on structure, dominance, markets) and what it means’ (focus on culture, agency, meaning-making). Sociology has tended to analyze music more than visual art or literature, so you'll probably notice that bias.”
B. 1. : Disobedience to the Illusion
of Literature
"These people are so very obedient."*
- Tom Clark quoting Ed Sanders
to Allen Ginsberg, p. 61 Great Naropa Poetry Wars
"We know, captives of an absolute formula that.... to dismiss the cheat... would indict our inconsequence.... Were I not loathe to perform, in public, the impious dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the literary mechanism.... But I venerate how, by a trick we project to a height forfended -- and with thunder! -- the conscious lack in us of what shines up there. What is it for? A game."
- Pierre Bourdieu quoting Mallarmé, p 72 The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia UP, 1993)
"There is a specific economy of literary and artistic field, based on a particular form of belief....both the unbelievers and iconoclasts and also the believers, assert the possibility and necessity of understanding the work in its reality as a fetish."
- Bourdieu, ibid
· *[to which, AG, a complete dweeb, answers, "Well, it's complicated. There's an old myth...."]
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[TOMORROW I WILL ADDRESS THE DESCRIPTOR “AMERICAN.”]
