The real opposite of nostalgia is psychedelic, the reverse of remembering is hallucinating…
This line, from Leslie Fiedler’s 1968 book The Return of the Vanishing American, is on my mind constantly at the moment. I’ve been trying to process it and explain — for my own confused self — how and why Fiedler’s dichotomy is nowhere near as clear cut these days. I’m coming back to it again and again in my blog drafts.
Fiedler is talking about nostalgia and hallucination in relation to the New Western or “Acid Western”. For America, the Wild West has always been a genre-space for thinking about itself and its values but, in the 1960s and ’70s, when America seemed to be undergoing a major transformation in consciousness, the standards of the Western did too. They weren’t rememberings of a fictional past anymore but hallucinations of a still-shifting frontier.
It’s hard to see this same process today but I’m certain it’s still out there. We can think about the hauntological musics of Burial, Lee Gamble, The Caretaker and others, with their distinctly oneiric qualities, which aren’t just false memories of music’s past or visions of its degradation in the present but dreams of an emergent new.
I think we have to be more attuned to these dynamics, clouded in the fog of a melancholic present. We might even start with pop that has been through this fog and has produced some very interesting results.
I thought about this when seeing that Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde had topped Pitchfork‘s recent Best Albums of the 2010s list.
For Doreen St. Félix, who reviews the album for the list, Ocean captures “the whiplash experience of being young” in the United States today. The album’s “slight touches of distortion … call attention to impermanence, the trap of artifice, and, distantly, death.” But it’s not melancholic or nostalgic about moments past. She continues that, for Ocean, perhaps “the whole point of existence is that a dark musing on morality can — and should — be interrupted by soft flesh, a sticky plant, a designer shirt.”
What St. Félix taps into here, I think, is the missed meaning of a track like“Nikes”, most explicitly — a song about a grief for the future.
More often than not — at least according to Genius — “Nikes” is interpreted as a critique of materialism but I don’t see it that way. It’s about our pervasive hunger for the new. New sneakers. New art. New talent. But artists are not as disposal as merchandise. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. Nevertheless, it’s a desire built — materialistically — into the culture, but it’s a culture in which the youth is also dying. The roll call of RIPs is contrasted, later, by the declaration that: “We gon’ see the future first / Living so the last night feels like a past life.”
It’s a theme that continues on my favourite track from the album, “Nights”. A line like “Did you call me from a séance? / You are from my past life” slides into talk of quaaludes, new beginnings and cheap marijuana vacations. Hauntings and hallucinations slide past each other and confuse present perspectives.
It’s gothic, almost by definition. As we, in the present, shift into a new temporality, both past and future are disturbed. Frank Ocean, on Blonde, seems disorientated by the whole thing, even whilst assured of his necessary direction.
The entire album is underpinned by this melancholic psychedelia and this “whiplash experience” that I think defines contemporary culture at large — I might write about my personal favourite example of this from the last decade at a later date — but I also think it’s so frequently misunderstood.
There’s an excellent example of how it is misunderstood to be found elsewhere on Pitchfork today, in an article about Ocean’s attempt to open up a queer-conscious club night in New York.
Prior examples of cultural whiplash — related to the building of a future whilst you watch it die around you — are evidently not lost on Frank Ocean and so, to me, if any megastar was to open up a club night for a queer cause, he’s it. But he was also bound to ruffle some feathers — these things always do.
Jesse Dorris’s review of the night for Pitchfork seems conflicted about this and it is a review that I think is suffering from whiplash itself. He introduces the night as follows:
Imagine if in 1985, instead of acknowledging the existence of AIDS for the first time, President Reagan had announced the discovery of the preventative drug PrEP. Imagine if, as a result of taking it, many of the greatest artists of the late 20th century had lived to see the new millennium. […]
A press release announced that the events would pay “homage to what could have been of the 1980s NYC club scene if the drug … had been invented in that era.” […] Would Ocean’s party be an orgy … where PrEP was sold at the bar instead of vodka sodas, on the dancefloor instead of MDMA? Would he perform, surrounded by survivors of the plague years? Would there be merch?
The answer to all this was no. The reality was, he asked some people to play some music in the basement of the Knockdown Center, a snazzy Queens venue-compound just north of Bushwick. If you had to ask how to get a ticket, you weren’t getting one.
After reviewing a night that — albeit exclusive — sounds like an amazing time, with appearances from Ocean himself and UK queen of jungle Sherelle, Dorris pulls back. French duo Justice headlining the night seems to undo everything that came before them. He continues:
Today, responding to suspicion of the motives and funding for the PrEP+ party, Ocean posted on Tumblr, criticizing the pricing and lack of awareness of the drug. “I’m an artist, it’s core to my job to imagine realities that don’t necessarily exist and it’s a joy to,” he wrote. But hundreds of thousands of visionary queers and weirdo prodigies and casual romancers and hunks and femmes and dykes and people trapped in the closet and those who could never even fit inside one didn’t die just so we could stand at an exclusive party and listen to straight people play Buffalo Springfield. The living, and the dead, deserve better.
Whatever you think of Justice, I don’t get the negativity here. I can’t think of a better person to represent the future of queer DJ culture than Sherelle who has blown up here since her Boiler Room set from earlier in the year went viral. Seeing her invited to the US by someone like Ocean provokes a distinct sense of pride in what this country has been doing recently. And, of course, Ocean himself being present as perhaps the biggest openly queer person in hip hop doesn’t hurt.
Surely, for the most part, this is better than what the 1980s had in terms of representation, collective consciousness and hope? Let’s not forget that nights at the Loft were often exclusive and, shy of raising the dead, at least Ocean put a sexual crisis at the night’s heart rather than replicate the Madonna zones that DJ Sprinkles once called “the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor’s reality!”
Perhaps Ocean’s night wasn’t a complete rebuttal of that old critique but, with that kind of dancefloor in mind, Pitchfork seems like a pretty fragile-looking glass house from which to throw stones about not doing subcultures justice (no pun intended).
But this post isn’t some Frank Ocean defence that no one asked for. I wasn’t there and it’s not like I even knew about this party until the backlash, but Ocean’s own defence does seem to encapsulate the problematics of our present moment perfectly. We need artists “to imagine realities that don’t necessarily exist” and find the joy in process.
We are trapped in a moment of psychedelic nostalgia where politics in particular is determined by a cooked-up nostalgia for a time that never was. On Blonde, Ocean instead mourned lost futures and he did so beautifully, but not every hallucination of a lost future has to be so haunted, does it? Ocean’s night may not wholly live up to the contentious political standards of the present but also it seems that, in this specific case, it was incapable of living up to the expectations of an non-existent past also. And I find that an odd thing to be mad about.
A night about the past that celebrates the present and future is precisely the sort of approach we need, and it certainly sounds better than Dorris’s opening predictions. PrEP orgy with “plague survivors” and merch sounds like a late capitalist horror show. That’s the worst to be expected, surely? How can anyone be disappointed by “he asked some people to play some music”? Collective joy in the orbit of a drug like PrEP seems like as good a night as any.
What’s ironic about this, of course, is that Ocean seems to be attempting an escape from the deadlock of the decade that Pitchfork thinks he has defined. I reckon it’d be better for all of us and the decade ahead if they’d just let him.
Where to start with a night like last night at the Barbican?
“This is totally normal” was Aya’s comment as she made her way onto the stage to begin proceedings for a night that could not have been more perfectly ill-fitting for the Barbican’s main hall. For anyone who had any inkling of what they were in for, “normal” got checked in at the cloak room downstairs. This was going to be something else.
Anyone who has seen Aya perform before will be familiar with her open commentary on her performances. She treats the DJ booth like an MC treats their trestle table down your local pub’s queer karaoke night — and I must emphasise that this is a very welcome addition to any occasion.
In a small space like a bar or club, this makes perfect sense. Aya creates an atmosphere that is immediately communal. She is effortlessly entertaining. She runs the show but all whilst letting us in on what she’s doing. In the Barbican, I was anxious to see how this would translate. Her approach is familiar but also challenges whatever space she is performing in. Even the Barbican? Even the Barbican. It’s like when Wolfgang Tillmans won the Turner Prize — I’m not sure why this is the reference that comes to mind but it’s early in the morning and, to be honest, Aya has left a thousand things flying around my skull overnight. She turns a DJ set into a tombola of affects. It’s surreal to see life documented in this way, so frankly and so irreverently in spaces of high cultural capital, and it calls into question what is normal and what is radical, challenging perceptions of what can take place in bedrooms and clubs and concert halls, turning all spaces and their temporalities on their heads.
There was an interview I remember reading with Mark Fell once where he commented on why he wore a flat cap and backpack whilst doing a Boiler Room night: to give the impression to all the loitering cool kids behind him that this dog walker couldn’t stay long, sorry, but thanks. It’s a brand of Northern irreverence that always goes down well with me but is too often absent from our main cultural spaces. The first season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK comes to mind, critiqued repeatedly for sanitising a UK drag scene that is a lot edgier than the BBC and Ru Paul’s American formatting is capable of representing. Aya’s style of performance is like this. Brazenly endearing. Cheeky and caring. Criminally underrepresented. As such, she insists on making an impression. It is a way of performing that pulls people in, making you feel welcome, in on the joke, and part of an intimate experience.
It is a testament to Aya’s chops that this sort of approach carries over into a space as large as the Barbican’s main hall.
At first, walking out onto the stage, the self-deprecation started almost immediately, as she took her position on stage behind a heavily stickered laptop, calling out to the sound guy about a dodgy RCA cable, wryly commenting “it’s all part of the show, folks — I’ll buy you a drink after if you help me out”. There was an anxiety underpinning the whole affair and at first I wondered how she would win over this unusually (for her) seated crowd. But Aya brought us into her sphere soon enough.
Interestingly, despite the insane size of the venue, her performance that evening felt even more intimate than usual.
Previously, Aya’s sets have always felt self-reflective and in-the-moment, commenting on her performance as she goes, praising and deriding herself with a self-criticality that, rather than undermining what she does, only helps to suspend her audience’s sense of judgement and open themselves up to the new. This was all the more necessary on Wednesday as her set took an even deeper look into her process — of music making and being, of gender and artistic transition — than any previous performance of hers that I’ve seen.
She is a singular artist who nonetheless wants to share herself openly. There is no cloistered and protective reflex regarding her own scenic novelty. She makes the gaps in dance music’s mainstream more apparent by filling them entirely and it makes her openness on stage breathtaking. At first presenting herself as if picking tracks and A/V works from a sonic scrapbook before laying herself completely bare before an audience already in the palm of her hand as her folded skin and ball sack streams past on the enormous projection screen behind her, reciting poems, lip-syncing to Lady Sovereign edits and with a Pulp Fiction-sampling skit about “deconstructed club” thrown in for good measure.
Later, the word “unseen” dominates the screen and her vocal track. It’s hard to know what this is referring to — is there anything left unseen? It doesn’t feel like it. But, in truth, there always is. As Aya scrapes off her makeup, which has contorted her face into a Gazelle Twin-esque goblin visage, inner experience is loud in its absence. Aya has brought us together in her stand-offish vulnerability but there is so much left unsaid. In a space this large, that is obvious. She may have been successful in reducing the size of the hall, bringing us in close, but in the end we’re left all the more aware of the distance between ourselves, and left with the challenge to sustain the intimacy she has demonstrated to us once its all over.
It’s an inspired strategy. As she walks off stage and the hall returns to its normal size, the desire to remain down Aya’s rabbit hole is palpable. (An analogy that feels unavoidably sexual in the context of this performance but that’s fine.) She ends by reciting a poem on gender dysphoria and bathroom politics and the alienating inner experience of our split selves but after 40 minutes of collective joy the distance between inner and collective experience seems marginal. She leaves open a space of infinite possibilities.
As the supporting act, Aya set the stage perfectly for what is to come.
In watching Holly Herndon and her ensemble walk across the stage after an interval — during which I saw so many familiar faces and friends: it truly felt like everyone in that theatre already knew each other — Aya still reverberating in my ears, I was reminded of Pepper Labeija in Paris is Burning describing the house scene in the 1980s, explaining how a house is like a family for people who don’t have families. A different sort of family. Not a nuclear family but a grouping of “people in a mutual bond.”
Aya’s shape-throwing and on-stage sensibilities are only a short distance from this much-adored subculture but the Herndon ensemble were a welcome contrast to Aya’s solitary performance. What she left open was occupied by this group of seven who embody those nascent possibilities so absolutely — on and off stage.
And yet, watching the Herndon ensemble almost feels voyeuristic. It is immediately clear that on stage is not a band but a family and we’ve all gathered to watch them hang out.
Soon enough, though, they welcome us into the fold as well. Watching Mat Dryhurst in particular, dressed in all black, in stark contrast to the rest of the ensemble’s “technofishwife cyber-Amish electroecclesiastical Hildegardian Mad Max babushkacore” (as Sarah Shin magnificently put it), he stands out, visibly ecstatic to be there and documenting everything like a proud Dad, lurking in the background, vaping and photographing and grinning ear to ear. You immediately feel like you are watching something special — for us and for them.
Colin Self is also a stand out presence within the group, their physical affection for the rest of the ensemble leaking out from the stage.
Sharing a cuddle with different members of the group during the intervals between full ensemble performances is so touching to see. Between songs, where each singer seemingly has their mark, they are quick to dismantle the structured professionalism of a well-rehearsed performance.
And it is well-rehearsed. They demonstrate a collective voice like no other. Each of the voices on stage is a powerhouse in their own right but it is frequently difficult to distinguish what sounds are coming from which person, and which are coming from or being processed by the laptops behind them. They are one and they are many.
Later, when members of London Sacred Harp choir are revealed to be scattered around the audience to take part in one choral piece, the desire to just hug the person next to me became quite hard to ignore. (I resisted.)
Later Holly asks if we will all join Colin in a “call and response” exercise — or “Colin response”, as they put it — so that Herndon’s AI baby Spawn can make an aural map of the audience. She doesn’t have to ask us twice. Everyone around me sings and it is beautiful. I don’t hear a single bum note in the house. Spawn may absorb our voices to map us but we have already absorbed the group on stage and are ready to sing back to them with relish.
It is a show full of details and set pieces. There is a temptation to comment on them all in turn, but it is the overall feeling with which the show left its audience that feels the most important and most difficult thing to define.
After the show, my friend Col Self — her shared name with Colin was an immediate topic of conversation — who I had not seen properly for almost a year, saw me from across the Barbican’s foyer space and launched immediately into a hug. It was the most obvious greeting after an experience such as that.
We went for drinks afterwards in a bar down the road and our conversation turned to magic, “the poetics of the occult”, ritual, the power of radical anti-capitalist unreason in the 21st century, and talk of projects and collaborations abound from there. There was a sense that everyone was deeply inspired by what they’d seen: to hang out, create and be together.
I was reminded of an old essay I wrote for school back in late 2016, “Monastic Vampirism” — an attempt to explore the gothic potentials found within monastic practices, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s research that suggests early monasteries, before being subsumed into the Catholic Church as a globe-trotting institution, were proto-communist before their forced democratisation.
Herndon’s ensemble does not chime with the gothic image painted previously but they nonetheless seem to be drawing on a rich history of communal ways of life. This sort of thing is often spoken about in the past tense, as a by-gone and extinct way of being, practised only by neofeudalist hippies or anarcho-primitivists, but the ensemble are evidently aiming for something very different to the ways of old.
Leslie Fielder once argues that psychedelia — rather than being a bright, vibrant, tripped-out aesthetic — is instead the opposite of nostalgia. In our present moment, capitalist realism has reduced all alternative ways of life to nostalgic dreams of simpler times but the radicality of the Herndon ensemble’s presentation is that their way of living is adamantly future-oriented. Its nods to past forms feel like nods to the choral ensembles that Herndon has long been fascinated by, a reference to history that is not allowed to languish in the past. Song is inherently communal. Too often the hierarchy of performer and audience makes us forget this. But this is not a reminder — it’s a dream of future versions of ourselves that sing to love and heal.
As our conversation in the pub continued on, Col would insist she wasn’t high, despite her sudden enthusiasm for life, but the show itself was intoxicating. It is an acid monasticism, hallucinating new ways of communal existence, beyond the realms of capitalist normality, that can adapt to the technologies of the present and future.
Before heading home our conversation turned to Extinction Rebellion and the question of why this movement has caught on and changed the conversation but Occupy did not, despite its hype.
“There’s such a thing as the right idea at the wrong time”, said @body_drift, who I was also so happy to see. And that’s certainly true. The immanent threat of the climate emergency is hard to ignore but beyond its strong nostalgic undercurrent of hippie organising there is a sense that we are going through a shift in consciousness that is incredibly timely.
We talked about Ballard’s Drowned World and Kerans’ feeling that he’s not showing the early signs of mental illness but of a cognitive transformation for a new world around him. For him, however, this is brought on by an already irreversible climate disaster. For us, it feels different. The threat is making us prepare ourselves for something new, ahead of time.
This is to say that protesting within the bounds of the system in order to change it is one thing but the work of Holly Herndon and her crew seems to represent something else — something outside the headline-grabbing but nonetheless necessary organising; something that is in tune with the same affects that are fuelling XR’s movement but channelling them into alternative forms of life. This is to say that they represent a kind of mutual bond that is beyond street protest, that is more immediately domestic and attainable, that is already in reach and necessary to replicate. It skewers what Mark Fisher called capitalism’s “mandatory individualism” as one of the major mental obstacles to the futures we desire and it gives us a glimpse of a future that it is hard not to want once it has been demonstrated before us. It’s the sort of life-affirming performance that makes you want to hold all your friends and loved ones at once.
Beyond the songs and the spectacle, that is what I am left with after seeing this tour. The harmony of collective experience, nature and technology in productive harmony. Not just on stage but as a challenge for us afterwards. This tour is something to carry with you. The performance itself feels like only half the story.
Art Under the Influence will consider the role of art in tackling the climate emergency. To what extent is art capable of raising consciousness of sociopolitical issues? Can art influence popular opinion from the ground up or is it too heavily influenced by institutions that are a part of the problem? Is art politically galvanising for its audiences or is it little more than a beautiful intoxicant that makes us feel good in the midst of our contemporary chaos?
I’ve been working on this exhibition the past month or two and have helped organise a talk to take place in Forest Hill in London this Friday. Artist Matteo Zamagni will be talking to friends of the blog Dane Sutherland and Thomas Moynihan alongside Hayden Martin and Kate Pincott.
I enjoyed the new Netflix horror film In the Tall Grass, watched in chunks over the last week, despite all its flaws.
I live for Netflix in October. And other streaming services too. Horror content is inbound. Might need to renew my Shudder subscription just for this month too.
[Spoilers ahead, obviously.]
In the Tall Grass is part Triangle, part Children of the Corn, with a heavy dose of megalithic astrohorror. The main thing I liked about it was the film’s villain, Ross, played by Patrick Wilson, a real estate agent who gets possessed by dark powers emanating from a megalith in the middle of a field of grass from which the cast cannot escape.
He reminded me of an old post I did about The Haunting of Hill House, and a since-deleted tweet by someone who said that all horror movies, at their core, are about real estate — or, more accurately, the commodified estate of the Real.
It’s an interesting twist on the old racially insensitive trope of the American landscape and its native occupants having their revenge on those who build on their burial grounds. The film’s templexity undoes this, describing a force far older than any of us, but makes capitalist property rights a kind of insidious infection that rises out from the ground beneath our feet.
Is this the latent horror of the first agricultural revolution?
There are subtle hints towards this throughout the film, such as Ross warning his son against running into the grass because it’s “private property”, but everything comes to ahead in orbit of Becky, a pregnant woman caught between her weedy but overbearing brother who seems to have incestuous desires for her, her handsome but unreliable rock star ex who is allergic to responsibility but eventually realises he might want to start a family after all, the creepy young Tobin for whom she becomes a surrogate mother, and her own pregnant body that is working violently against her.
Becky struggles to assert her own autonomy against her social situation and nature itself — be that her own individual autonomy or the autonomy of the world as it exists around her, each always already plugged into the other.
Of course, in the end, the film bails on its own intriguing grassy entanglement. Escaping from the field through a tunnel that leads to a church, Future Tobin stops Past Becky and her brother from entering the field in the first. This strange encounter with the child seems to make her realise that she shouldn’t give up her baby, but her ex — the father? — is still somehow trapped dead within the field where he first went to try and save her.
He becomes the ultimate victim — a victim of his own social elusiveness. Becky, on the other hand, is saved. She does the right thing — reaffirming her property rights, making her claim to the estate of the Real…
It’s my bloggerversary today. Two years since I thought “xenogothic” could be a good pseudonym to shitpost about philosophy behind. It’s been a wild ride so far.
I’ve started getting paid by people to write essays and I’ve got my first book coming out. I’ve gone from <10 people in my life knowing I had a blog for the first year of its existence to getting recognised by strangers down the local pub.
This isn’t really what I expected to happen when I started here but I’m not complaining. Thanks for all the support and all the hellthreads. Here’s to loads more years to come.
I’m crazy busy this week with a lot on my plate and I’m a little sad I don’t have the time to really celebrate this. It feels like something of a rebirthday so I’m strangely invested in it and I’m sad it’s snuck up on me. I had no idea it was on the horizon until yesterday.
I’m hoping that this Sunday will be a better day to kick back and take a few hours out to do another celebratory livestream. There’s a poll going round for people to decide on what it will be and it’s surprisingly close at the moment. Go vote. Chances are I’ll get some beers in and chat shit and maybe play some games. Time TBC.
The outrage on Twitter after Martin Scorsese declared that Marvel movies are not “cinema” has been predictably cringe but interesting nonetheless. It begs the question: “What is cinema?” Or maybe, “What was it?” Does anyone make “cinema” anymore?
On closer inspection, Scorsese’s comments seem quite innocuous:
I don’t see [Marvel movies]. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
But there are still many people who loudly disagree. Indeed, his definition of Cinema is so vague that it is easily ridiculed but I’d like to unpack it all the same.
In the innumerable replies to articles about Scorsese’s statement that I saw online, discussions turned to the more generic issue of “What is art?” Anything anyone makes is art, said the many to the few — that’s the only valid democratic response. Examples were given along the lines of: “Whether someone paints pictures or makes big buildings or kooky spoon sculptures, it’s all art.” But I don’t think that’s true.
This great melting pot of cultural oneness does nothing but turn all art the colour of pathetic liberal beige and, many years ago, it was once my one-man shitpost mission to point this out at every opportunity. Even today, I’d love to see any posing of the question “What is art?” that isn’t wholly flaccid and inconsequential, whether it is uttered by keyboard critics or big art institutions on an embarrassingly banal public engagement kick. Submissions in my inbox!
Below are two instances I came across way back in 2013. One is from a fight I got into with the social media intern at London’s ICA when they did the whole “Ooo, but is it art though?” thing as a lazy and patronising way to stoke audience engagement, encouraging a criticality wholly without teeth. (I wiped my old Twitter account ages ago so my original tweets are lost to the ether but you get the idea.)
This irritation came from the fact that the ICA were not alone in this practice that was already tired and not in any way “new”.
I remember I was also living in Hull at that time, probably picking that fight with their poor social media intern on the same day I discovered that Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery had installed this inane monstrosity in their main gallery, reducing sociocultural engagement to the level of picking a local charity to donate to when you finishing your big boujie Waitrose shop.
Detached, banal and pointless.
My issue is that saying everything is art is as useful as saying nothing is art, and arguing the point doesn’t produce anything of critical value for anyone. Instead, if we want to take Scorsese seriously, or Marvel seriously for that matter, what constitutes art does not come down to a question of aesthetics or form or some vague notion of validity but down to a question of purpose.
This too is vague and so I want to make clear that this is not an attempt to tread that other tired floor that has already stalked literature for many decades. Scorsese’s comments are about 40 years too late to provoke a conversation about “high and low” cinema. The real question today is: When does “art” become nothing more than a “product”?
This is a question that has already been asked of Joker but it betrays a cynicism that sticks in its critics’ own collective maw.
If this is true of Joker or the MCU, isn’t it true of all films today?
This is a difficult question to ask because capital is so deeply entwined with all forms of production but this is already a question entangled up with how Scorsese’s comments have so far been discussed in the media. As the Metro put: “Martin Scorsese claims Marvel films are ‘not cinema’ — despite Avengers: Endgame becoming highest grossing film in history.” But what do either of those two statements have to do with each other? Everything or nothing at all?
I was reminded of Marcuse’s comments on these issues in his book One Dimensional Man. For him — speaking of literature instead of cinema but in a way that is nonetheless still relevant for us here — literature is defined for him by an “estrangement-effect” — an internal principle of alienation that refutes and “refuses” to comply with normative and populist aesthetics so as to conjure up another world. He writes:
The “estrangement-effect” is not superimposed on literature. It is rather literature’s own answer to the threat of total behaviorism — the attempt to rescue the rationality of the negative. In this attempt, the great “conservative” of literature joins forces with the radical activist. […] They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility — neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.” Thus the poetic language speaks of that which is of this world, which is visible, tangible, audible in man and nature — and of that which is not seen, not touched, not heard.
It is in this sense that “the truly avant-garde works of literature communicate the break with communication.” He continues: “With Rimbaud, and then with dadaism and surrealism, literature rejects the very structure of discourse which, throughout the history of culture, has linked artistic and ordinary language.”
It’s an interesting way of framing the matter because, turning to Scorsese’s comment that Avengers: Endgame doesn’t really communicate on a human level, this concluding chapter of the latest saga from the MCU becomes avant-garde cinema par excellence.
It is also interesting for this to come full circle in this way. After all, for all of Marcuse’s insightfulness, he too was terrified of pop as that genre tailor-made for capitalism’s inherent expansionism. Marcuse warns explicitly of capitalism’s tentacular spread and its “efforts to recapture the Great Refusal”, leading to avant-garde artists suffering “the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. “
Mark Fisher writes about Marcuse’s Great Refusal in his introduction to Acid Communism, noting instead how Marcuse’s mourning over “the popularisation of the avant-garde” was not borne of “anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture.” And Mark mourned this often and explicitly, albeit extending Marcuse’s critiques, repeatedly calling for the return of a “popular modernism”, defined for him by an experimentation that crosses boundaries of high and low, where punks who can’t play their instruments enter into the same space as jazz masters who want to push beyond the modes of expression they know so well. Mark mourned the loss of this kind of cultural horseshoe theory, where there was a gap between these two points of high and low where things could still escape into the radically new. The question of whether something is or isn’t art, is or isn’t music, is or isn’t cinema, seeks nothing more than to close this gap and trap us all within an ultimate discourse. To ask that question is to try to reel things back in rather than allow them to flow outwards.
This is what Scorsese fails to grasp but also, in his own self-defensive pretension, he embarrassingly ignores his own complicity in this same cycle. (And who isn’t complicit?) Not only does the latest Joker movie heavily ape Scorsese’s own film, Taxi Driver, but Scorsese’s last film to garner widespread attention was The Wolf of Wall Street — his award-winning account of capitalist decadence and financial crime that paints as punk the very value system he is now decrying. At the time, it seemed like Scorsese’s intention was to capture the alienating immoral and decadent spirit of the heyday of early market capitalist excess, making something new out of the finished spectacle, but he failed because he was already so wrapped up in the mechanisms he was trying to refute. His latest comments do nothing to assuage this. It only demonstrates how out of touch he is — not with “cinema” or “Hollywood” per se but with his own place within its past and present.
The Wolf of Wall Street is a fitting last hurrah for Scorsese in this regard. We might ask ourselves if the film alienates in that way that great cinema, following Marcuse, perhaps should? Scorsese and the film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio may have argued that it was “punk rock” but no one seemed capable of swallowing that suggestion without gagging. My memory is that Scorsese even faced off accusations of romanticising the excess he depicted.
Michael Laurence has written an interesting essay on The Wolf of Wall Street and the uneasy complicity of any anti-capitalist ethics. One passage in particular, which begins with a Mark Fisher quotation, sticks out here:
“So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” Yet we do not even need to go that far for ideology to work. We do not need to disavow capitalism as a totality. All we really need to do is believe that the excesses of capitalism are bad, that the few predators at the top of the food chain are evil, that the cold corporate monsters ought to be put behind bars, that the big banks are the real problem, and that greed is not good, so that we can continue to participate in a much more humane, morally acceptable, and less greedy capitalism. Of course, no such thing exists. Even more, the belief that it does exist effectively works to preclude from consciousness the existing structural violence of capitalism: that ever-present and largely invisible violence which proceeds by structuring fields of possible being and experience while discharging modes of being and thinking that cannot be absorbed into its circuitry.
Scorsese seems to encapsulate this entirely. He knows capitalism is bad and he even made a film about how bad it once got but it is a pious punch that fails to land when we consider it cost $100million to make and became Scorsese’s highest grossing film ever, raking in almost $400million worldwide at the box office. This isn’t just a cheap shot to call Scorsese a sell-out, however. What is more important is our consideration that he was once associated with the Hollywood Brat Pack — Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — who arguably gave us the cinematic world of pop blockbusters he is now decrying. Scorsese isn’t a sell-out. He’s a Dr. Frankenstein denying his own bastard paternity.
To return to the question I initially wanted to ask, “What was cinema?”, considering all of the above, I should take the opportunity to nod to that book which is making me consider everything in the past tense at the moment: Leslie Fiedler’s What Was Literature?
Fiedler’s book is great because it is not a cynical dismissal of a time gone by but rather a consideration of how we ended up in this mess of static capitalist hauntography and how he, as a self-described “crypto-pop critic”, has inadvertently helped bring it all about by trying to erase elitism from the field of criticism that he inadvertently fell into, by way of his own subversive acts of criticisms later becoming pop cultural reference points in their own right.
He too was subsumed within the system he had initially set out to refuse.
As he wrestles with how this all happened, he finds the obvious common denominator: money.
He writes:
money, (the one fiction of universal currency) is the only, and indeed always remains the most reliable token that one has in fact touched, moved, shared one’s most private fantasies with the faceless, nameless “you” to whom the writer’s all-too-familiar “I” longs to be joined in mutual pleasure. “I stop somewhere waiting for you” is a sentence not just from Walt Whitman’s but from every writer’s love letter to the world. It is only when the first royalty check arrives in the mail (an answer as palpable as a poem) that the writer begins to suspect that the “you” he has invented in his lonely chamber, in order to begin writing at all, is real, and that therefore his “I” (not the “I” to which like everyone else he is born, but that fictive “I” which he, in order to be a writer, must create simultaneously with the “you”) is somehow real too.
But this means, as all writers know, though most of us (including me) find it hard to confess, that literature, the literary work, remains incomplete until it has passed from the desk to the marketplace; which is to say, until it has been packaged, huckstered, hyped and sold. Moreover, writers themselves (as they are also aware) are reluctant virgins, crying to the world, “Love me! Love me!” until, as the revealing phrase of the trade has it, they have “sold their first piece.”
It is money that exists as the great fuel for the engine of cultural paradox and the sort of elitist cultural cannibalism that Scorsese demonstrates here anew but unchanged.
This cultural warfare may seem at first glance a struggle of the poor against the rich, the failed against the successful. But the situation is more complex than this, since, in terms of culture rather than economics, art novelists and their audience, “fit thought few,” constitute a privileged, educationally advantaged minority, while popular novelists and their mass readership remain a despised lumpen majority, whose cultural insecurity is further shaken when their kids learn in school to question their taste.
Through turns of autobiography and critical self-reflection, considerations of banned books and banned comics, Fiedler very gradually builds towards the necessity of his title’s past tense, which denotes a settling of cultural conflicts by way of the academy. Literature turned from a present concern to a past one as soon as the latest slue of new works have been adopted by curriculums. Literature, then, like an ouroboros, is defined by that which is taught as such — which is to say, literature is determined by literary studies. What is taught is what is literature is what is taught. Nothing is new until it is past.
Within that closed definitional circle, we perform the rituals by which we cast out unworthy pretenders to our ranks and induct true initiates, guardians of the “standards” by which all song and story are presumably to be judged.
Fiedler made this claim decades ago but still we are yet to learn from it and Scorcese’s comments demonstrate this all too depressingly, but so do the actions of those pop lovers now attempting to begin academic careers, raising discussions of the popular to the s. What is cinema is what is taught on film studies courses is what is cinema. Very soon the same will true of “graphic novels” and video games. It’s already starting to happen. And these courses for the new pulp media already seem as lifeless as their earlier High Art counterparts. Cultural critique ignores its own potential for cultural production and renders itself hardened but impotent. (It would be interesting to consider to what extent this is likewise true of an academic study of “politics” today.)
As such, it is not only Scorsese who is at fault here, deeming the MCU to be insufficient when placed before a canonical capital-c Cinema. The defenders of the MCU are just as clueless, showing how the MCU is inspired by or dealing with the same issues as the tragedies and dramas of antiquity. They place their works within the same standards, inflating what they have to hand to fill in the gaps. Rather than levelling the playing field, they try to raise themselves to the same standard, only diluting what they once had. Nobody wins. Pop cultural studies appear hollow whilst high art studies appear bitter. Communication falters. Nothing new emerges.
Fiedler had already witnessed this happening way back when, skewering Scorsese and the standards of contemporary cultural studies departments from beyond the grave, noting how
in recent years [there have been] attempts by academic critics of cinema (they do not like to say “movies”) to kidnap that vulgar form for classroom analysis, even to “teach” how to read it properly. But such cinéastes merely repeat — in a kind of unwitting parody — the old errors of literary criticism: on the one hand, losing sight, in the midst of jargonizing about “montage”, “tracking shots” and “auteur theory,” of the fact that movies tell stories and embody myths, and on the other, making untenable distinctions between “box-office trash” and “art films,” which turn out to be more often than not “experimental” and “non-narrative.”
To stop myself typing out the entirely of Fiedler’s book, I will stop here and simply defer to his partial part-one conclusion.
His is not an attempt to forestall judgement or kill criticism, which he writes is a drive as old and powerful and human as the stories and songs that brought it into existence, but rather to build a new criticism that eschews the hierarchical judgements of capitalist competition. It is to do away with the pre-judgements of prejudice, category and elitism.
Once we have made ekstasis rather than instruction and delight our chief evaluative criterion, we will be well on our way to abandoning all formalist, elitist, methodological criticism, and will have started to invent an eclectic, amateur, neo-Romantic, populist one that will be enable us to read what was once popular literature not as popular but as literature, even as it enables us to read what was once High Literature not as high but as literature. By the same token, we will find ourselves speaking less of theme and purport, structure and texture, signified and signifier, metaphor and metonymy, and more of myth, fable, archetype, fantasy, magic and wonder. Even more important, we will be speaking for ourselves, as ourselves, rather than ex cathedra in the name of some “tradition.”
The key to this — under-acknowledged in his own conclusions — is the acknowledgement that all that is solid melts into air. Accepting this allows us to critique culture without ignoring its biggest driver: capital. It allows us to view these pointless battles between high and low as nothing more than echoes of capitalism’s internal dynamics of class struggle. To sidestep this, wholly aware of its impotence, is to imagine a criticism that can assist in the building towards something new.
Criticism can build worlds as well as the fictions it considers, if used correctly.
This has already been happening. This was the strength of the early cultural blogosphere and remains its strength today, alebit in a few instances. It would be a shame to lose sight of that. We had a good thing going. And there are still potentials yet unreached.
I’m exhausted today. I think the last few weeks have caught up with me and I’m feeling early symptoms of burn-out. Thankfully, this week, life is expected to get somewhat back to normal. I’ll have two days off work for life admin and blogging, meaning I’ll finally get to tackle the drafts languishing unfinished that I’ve been desperate to give some attention to this past week.
I’d thought about spending this Sunday doing that as well but instead we elected to get out of London for a few hours and once again venture out for a Sunday stroll around Knole. We’ve been there a fewtimes now, and every time we do the same thing — walk through the winding valley, looking out for deer, before I have a quick look around the bookshop and we head back.
I’d never bought anything in there before but my interest in Virginia Woolf has been growing more and more in recent weeks as I make my way through her short stories, The Waves and, most recently, Mrs Dalloway. So, I decided to pick up Hermione Lee’s Woolf biography and, despite its intimidating size, it’s already proven to be a really insightful and inspiring read.
The very first chapter begins with an almost self-reflexive look at the form of ‘biography’ and Woolf’s own diaristic thoughts on autobiography. I thought I’d copy out one whole page in full because it’s made me feel vindicated in how I write about myself on this blog and how I choose to use it more generally as a public notebook and diary. Woolf is (unsurprisingly) infinitely more eloquent in talking about the same problems as I recently wrestled with in my post on being fated to a problem, and I love how Lee explores Woolf’s ‘writing self’ and her ‘myself’ as these strangely entangled but distinct ontological modes.
I’ve written about Woolf briefly for an upcoming essay to be published in a journal / collection thing but I think there’s something more long-form brewing too. We’ll see how I get on with the rest of Lee’s mammoth biography…
Virginia Woolf was an autobiographer who never published an autobiography; she was an egotist who loathed egotism. It’s one of the words she most often uses, whether she is writing about herself or other people. Many of the letters she writes contain apologies — not always entirely sincere — for their egotism. And yet, ‘How I interest myself!’ she will say, happily, to herself. She is always trying to work out what happens to that ‘myself’ — the ‘damned egotistical self’ — when it is alone, when it is with other people, when it is contented, excited, anxious, ill, when it is asleep or eating or walking, when it is writing. ‘Sydney comes & I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered & various & gregarious.’ ‘I meet somebody who says “you’re this or that”, and I don’t want to be anything when I’m writing.’
What does ‘not being anything’ mean? Perhaps it is being more concentrated, less externalised: ‘I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing; now I have forgotten what seemed so profound.’
She knows that the process of trying to explain the relation between ‘myself’ and the writing self risks being just self-absorbed, rather than profound. But she must take herself seriously: she is like a singer attending to the state of her vocal cords. ‘Myself’, for the writing self, is both material and instrument. Not for nothing did Freud, on the only occasion when they met, in 1939, give her a narcissus.
Egotism is often the subject of the diary. She is much concerned with how she writes it, and what it’s for. And its uses vary: it is a ‘barometer’ of her feelings, a storehouse of memories, a record of events and encounters, a practice-ground for writing, a commentary on work in progress, and a sedative for agitation, anger, or apprehension. In the mid-1920s, she has a self-conscious debate with herself about whether it is a diary of facts, or a diary of ‘the soul’. (At the same time she is working out how much the ‘damned egotistical self’ should get into her fiction.) She seems to have promised herself that the diary would be about ‘life’ rather than ‘the soul’ — perhaps as a way of keeping ‘egotism’ under control: ‘Did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in.’ Later she will ‘cancel that vow against soul description’: she wants to describe ‘the violent moods of my soul’. But then, ‘How describe them?’ It is difficult to ‘write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.’
