A Dialogue About Theory, Art, and the Praxis of Humanistic Thinking
How to account for my silence these past two months? Well, first of all, I have been busy, in the real-world, practical sense; busy, in the lofty-thoughts, intellectual connundrums, and writing throes sense; and busy, in the subterranean cognitive and emotional work carried on through all other activities and all day sense. This latter busy is most accountable for my silence, as it bears on what I want to do with and through this blog. I started Academy of Readers as a place to validate and explore the nature of the pleasure of reading, as a response to the shock of my first year of graduate school in the humanities, where I discovered that the majority of academics--those who are taken seriously and seen as most cutting-edge and rigorous--no longer actively talk about literary texts themselves but about the intricate cultural system that surrounds and that 'produces' these texts. I was shocked not because I distrusted this approach or disagreed with it--in fact, I was and am rather intrigued by it, believe in its value, even accept it wholeheartedly (or almost so), having continued to study it on my own in preparation for further graduate work--but because this approach has seemingly so utterly crowded out the intricate, equally (if not moreso) rigorous art of close reading of the literary text. It sounds naive, perhaps, and so some it may even sound childish, but the intellectual transition, or really, expansion, from the delight, challenge, and rigor of close reading to the equal delight, challenge and rigor of theoretical and historical contextualization has caused me no small amount of emotional pain. Laugh if you must, but there it is. I try not to write about it explicitly in here, because I never intended for this blog to serve as a personal diary--rather, my intent is and always has been for this blog to be an exploration of issues in literature and humanistic study--and also because I am too much engrossed in working out these intellectual and emotional complications in real time to be able to look at it objectively. That will have to wait for when the dust begins to settle.
In the "comments" section of my previous post a dialogue arose about art versus scholarship, theory versus experience, that in my opinion is too rich and interesting to languish as a mere aftereffect of a post. It deserves to be a post all its own. My hope is that this dialogue can be continued in the comments section of this post. The dialogue follows:
Anonymous: How can academics belittle artists, when they need them, live upon them like fleas on a dog? Their constant attention to art, it seems to me, amounts to a kind of praise. Who would read Shakespeare today if Shakespeare were not taught in schools? A few people, yes, if it didn't go out of print.
Anyway, I'm not so sure about the separation, whether it exists. One certainly can write academically artistically. See Stanley Fish. Is it not that first demand, to write academically, that frustrates you? For in order to write academically artistically, one first has to be able to write academically.
One might think an artistic ability privileges one to leapfrog the first and least glamorous requirement. But before Cubism, Picasso mastered the tradition.
Me: Ah, Anonymous, I'm not so sure about the separation, either. But I think academics do belittle artists, at times, even while they praise them; they do so every time they wield a theoretical tool without first baptizing it in the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience that have burbled within them since birth. As soon as the academic turns to theoretical discourse with the expectation that it possesses something a scrupulous attention to her own experience cannot teach her, she demeans art and it doesn't matter what she says about it; her words are empty, deadened and deadening. Artists can only create from experience. It's all they have, no matter how great their erudition. They must have great faith in the power of their experience, their barefoot, naked, wide-eyed wild streaking across the rugged terrain of human experience. Real praise of art requires that the academic, too, possess a tremendous faith in the power of her experience. She must join the artist in the language of his enterprise, or her words become strangling hands, choking her own vitality before it stills and cools the hot pulse of art. And then who cares whether Shakespeare is taught in schools? He will be taught within a dead discourse, a heart beating faintly beneath layers of corpses.
Yes, it is indeed the demand to write academically that frustrates me. But certainly I do not claim the privilege of "leapfroging" this requirement, or else I'd be ensconced in majestic fully funded pre-doctoral resplendence in my at present most favorite Large Private Research University--or in blissful intellectually stray poverty in a cramped and musty hovel, writing the Great Scholartistic Novel. No. Technical excellence is always, always the prerequisite. Woe be to she who thinks she can skirt it. But woe be to she, also, who thinks technical excellence really can ever serve as an end in itself.
Anonymous: where do theoretical tools come from if not from the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience?
Don't theoretical tools, like art, just reorder experience?
Do filmmakers belittle vision?
Me: Exactly. I'd even go so far as to observe that Theory and Art are Siamese twins: narrative streams through their shared network of veins; each feels what the other feels and knows what the other knows (though their kind of knowing may differ); each carries the burden of the other and never shall the two be separated. But just as individuals in capitalist society are alienated from their essential humanity (their living-by-nature)in their function as workers, Theory and Art can experience an agonizing rift when they are put to task by the interpretive system in which they are employed.What I mean is that often one is emphasized at the expense of the other, or one or both are hailed as an Authority, when really both are, as you say so aptly, narrative forms that "just reorder experience." When Art is interpreted as a symptom of some aspect of culture without simultaneously being appreciated for its own intrinsic value and analyzed within aesthetic confines, then Art is alienated from itself and from its twin, who falls mute from its loss. Likewise, when Theory is hailed, blindly, as The Answer, or The Way into a text or a problem, it grows brittle; it ceases to be able to nourish or be nourished by its twin, and so it, too, becomes alienated from itself.
Theory and Art are creative endeavors of the highest order and are best approached creatively, and by that I mean hungrily, or passionately--and by that, I mean apprehended via every sensual faculty one possesses. There are six commonly spoken of, but I include here a seventh: desire, which here is directly synonymous with incorporation. One must make frenzied love to these Siamese twins, must dominate them, engulf them, but not destroy them; rather, one allows oneself to become so filled with them that they begin to speak them, but with something of themselves blended in. It is a process of being created so as to become a creator. One does not then interact with Theory and Art (only at the beginning of the process, the love-making, incorporating act), one is Theory and Art. And there one's work begins.
How this creativity ought ideally (in my mind) to be carried out is the subject for a separate post. Suffice it to say, for now, that the building in which such work could take place would be like this: A tremendous library, multiple floors of the usual carrels and musty stacks. But then, in their midst: a painting studio. A performance hall. Practice rooms with pianos. A dance studio. Potter's wheels and kilns. Gallerys. Right in the midst of where academic study happens--not in a separate building.
It seems that right now too much work is done via one way of thinking, one that somehow suppresses the 'intelligence' of the senses as though they somehow are antithetical to critical thinking. It's this suppression in which I observe an artificial and by all accounts unwanted bifurcation of art and scholarship. There are numerous pieces to this, and it's complicated, so I am loving having this dialogue about it.
In the "comments" section of my previous post a dialogue arose about art versus scholarship, theory versus experience, that in my opinion is too rich and interesting to languish as a mere aftereffect of a post. It deserves to be a post all its own. My hope is that this dialogue can be continued in the comments section of this post. The dialogue follows:
Anonymous: How can academics belittle artists, when they need them, live upon them like fleas on a dog? Their constant attention to art, it seems to me, amounts to a kind of praise. Who would read Shakespeare today if Shakespeare were not taught in schools? A few people, yes, if it didn't go out of print.
Anyway, I'm not so sure about the separation, whether it exists. One certainly can write academically artistically. See Stanley Fish. Is it not that first demand, to write academically, that frustrates you? For in order to write academically artistically, one first has to be able to write academically.
One might think an artistic ability privileges one to leapfrog the first and least glamorous requirement. But before Cubism, Picasso mastered the tradition.
Me: Ah, Anonymous, I'm not so sure about the separation, either. But I think academics do belittle artists, at times, even while they praise them; they do so every time they wield a theoretical tool without first baptizing it in the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience that have burbled within them since birth. As soon as the academic turns to theoretical discourse with the expectation that it possesses something a scrupulous attention to her own experience cannot teach her, she demeans art and it doesn't matter what she says about it; her words are empty, deadened and deadening. Artists can only create from experience. It's all they have, no matter how great their erudition. They must have great faith in the power of their experience, their barefoot, naked, wide-eyed wild streaking across the rugged terrain of human experience. Real praise of art requires that the academic, too, possess a tremendous faith in the power of her experience. She must join the artist in the language of his enterprise, or her words become strangling hands, choking her own vitality before it stills and cools the hot pulse of art. And then who cares whether Shakespeare is taught in schools? He will be taught within a dead discourse, a heart beating faintly beneath layers of corpses.
Yes, it is indeed the demand to write academically that frustrates me. But certainly I do not claim the privilege of "leapfroging" this requirement, or else I'd be ensconced in majestic fully funded pre-doctoral resplendence in my at present most favorite Large Private Research University--or in blissful intellectually stray poverty in a cramped and musty hovel, writing the Great Scholartistic Novel. No. Technical excellence is always, always the prerequisite. Woe be to she who thinks she can skirt it. But woe be to she, also, who thinks technical excellence really can ever serve as an end in itself.
Anonymous: where do theoretical tools come from if not from the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience?
Don't theoretical tools, like art, just reorder experience?
Do filmmakers belittle vision?
Me: Exactly. I'd even go so far as to observe that Theory and Art are Siamese twins: narrative streams through their shared network of veins; each feels what the other feels and knows what the other knows (though their kind of knowing may differ); each carries the burden of the other and never shall the two be separated. But just as individuals in capitalist society are alienated from their essential humanity (their living-by-nature)in their function as workers, Theory and Art can experience an agonizing rift when they are put to task by the interpretive system in which they are employed.What I mean is that often one is emphasized at the expense of the other, or one or both are hailed as an Authority, when really both are, as you say so aptly, narrative forms that "just reorder experience." When Art is interpreted as a symptom of some aspect of culture without simultaneously being appreciated for its own intrinsic value and analyzed within aesthetic confines, then Art is alienated from itself and from its twin, who falls mute from its loss. Likewise, when Theory is hailed, blindly, as The Answer, or The Way into a text or a problem, it grows brittle; it ceases to be able to nourish or be nourished by its twin, and so it, too, becomes alienated from itself.
Theory and Art are creative endeavors of the highest order and are best approached creatively, and by that I mean hungrily, or passionately--and by that, I mean apprehended via every sensual faculty one possesses. There are six commonly spoken of, but I include here a seventh: desire, which here is directly synonymous with incorporation. One must make frenzied love to these Siamese twins, must dominate them, engulf them, but not destroy them; rather, one allows oneself to become so filled with them that they begin to speak them, but with something of themselves blended in. It is a process of being created so as to become a creator. One does not then interact with Theory and Art (only at the beginning of the process, the love-making, incorporating act), one is Theory and Art. And there one's work begins.
How this creativity ought ideally (in my mind) to be carried out is the subject for a separate post. Suffice it to say, for now, that the building in which such work could take place would be like this: A tremendous library, multiple floors of the usual carrels and musty stacks. But then, in their midst: a painting studio. A performance hall. Practice rooms with pianos. A dance studio. Potter's wheels and kilns. Gallerys. Right in the midst of where academic study happens--not in a separate building.
It seems that right now too much work is done via one way of thinking, one that somehow suppresses the 'intelligence' of the senses as though they somehow are antithetical to critical thinking. It's this suppression in which I observe an artificial and by all accounts unwanted bifurcation of art and scholarship. There are numerous pieces to this, and it's complicated, so I am loving having this dialogue about it.
posted by Carroll, Violinguist @ 12:09 PM
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