What, really, IS the difference between art and scholarship?
This blog arises out of an as-yet-unspoken protest, the pained cry of battered but determined idealism in partnership with a gentle but unrelenting faculty that presents itself as 'realism.' "If you want to change the conversation that goes on around the table," a co-director of my master's program advised me, "you have to get a seat at the table." In other, grander words, she was reminding me that idealism's potential to beget positive change is contingent upon a secure sense of reality. I seem to have imbibed an attitude in which "art" correlates with "idealism" and "scholarship" with "realism"--and from this attitude the protest that has formed in my mind is that art and scholarship should meld better than they do, in all our social institutions. These thoughts occurred to me in the context of clarifying for myself my purposes for this blog and re-reading Beauvoir's The Second Sex, whose "Introduction to the Vintage Edition" by Deirdre Bair quotes an early reviewer as lauding the work thus:
...more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of
recklessness that makes art sting.[1]
Presumably the reader, along with Bair and the author of this observation, grasps the observation’s inherent meaning. I, for one, was immediately reminded of the assessment in A Room of One’s Own by Woolf’s narrator of Charles Lamb’s essays:
For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their
perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of
genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred
with poetry.[2]
These observations conjoin in my mind because they evoke a similar idea: of something almost mystical, of a logic so robust, probing and thorough that it breaks its own constraints, becoming, more than an argument, a site of possibility, a narratological Babel in which multiple implications converge and clash, converge and clash. Certainly these observations are quite provocative, like the sumptuous prose of some food critics that achieves on the intellect with words the same titillation the critics claim the repast in question achieves on gustation. They make me ‘hungry’ for Beauvoir and Lamb—meaning, I desire passionately to read them, as well as intellectually. But what does this mean? Look at the assumptions regarding “scholarship” and “art” implicit in these observations: scholarship is more polished, complete in itself, than art, yet art—“reckless” and “flawed and imperfect” though it is—is “more than” a work of scholarship. Each possesses desirable qualities that the other lacks. You’d think, then, that a partnership between the two would yield the most interesting and far-reaching thought. But the tendency is for scholars and artists to belittle one another: Spivak, for example, opined that to discuss fiction on its own terms is nothing more than “gossip about imaginary people”; one academic blogger mobilizes a common denigration of academics in her blog title, Another Boring Academic has a Blog? Artists are 'undisciplined and irrelevant'; academics are 'boring and irrelevant.' This mutual denigration, in turn, cleaves scholarship and art apart, when in fact they really might not be so different--or, if different, then at least not as seemingly hostile towards one another.
You may have noticed that on my profile I blend the words “scholar” and “artist” into “scholartist,” pronounced “SCHOL` artist” or “scholAR`tist” depending upon which emphasis best describes the work of the person to whom the name is applied. I thought, briefly, that I had coined this word, but upon looking it up on Google, I discovered that others, too, feel that “scholartist” might best describe the intellectual orientation and practice of some people. Yet it’s not enough to just stick a new name to an interdisciplinary practice; there has to be a theory of how scholarship and art have been and ought to be combined, as well as an effort to demonstrate what such a combination would ‘look like,’ i.e., what kind of experience it would invoke and what new kinds of conversations it would enable. Thanks to the assessment of The Second Sex quoted above, I realized that this is what I have been aiming to achieve in, or by means of, this blog. I went back to my first posting and revised part of it to reflect this newfound piece of clarity. The following is what it now says:
…literature is an outlet to me not only for rigorous analytical exercise, but also (and not separately) for every inarticulate yearning, sorrow, joy, and passion I have ever felt and will feel. I feel like I can thunder like a giant around books, be a bull and make impossible demands (love them to decrepitude like so many velveteen rabbits, elicit life in them, vivify my life), and the books are meant to, and must, withstand everything. And all that intensity elicited by and brought to books…I do not know how best to articulate it. I do not know how best to share it with others, and engage them in conversation about it. It often seems to me that the richest, most interesting way to discuss literature is through formal and rigorous study of it in an academic setting. But in that setting, literary discourse too easily becomes brittle and impotent, bold words full of promise that is never realized; it all degenerates into hubris the way a drowned body bloats like a hungry sponge but is dead. I am not someone who feels hostility towards theory; theory excites me as an aggregate of sophisticated discourses serving as 'lenses' that enhance the naked eye of shared human experience. But without an acknowledgement of and conscious working within an experience of sensual reading, theory, along with its subject, crumbles into meaninglessness. I do not think the sensual reading experience—what elsewhere in this blog I call “passionate reading,” among other things—receives its due in the academic discourse surrounding literature. Disdain curls the lips of colleagues into scorpions’ tails if anyone dares ask, “But what does this passage in the text make you feel?” I dream of a literary discourse that holds “intellect” to be an exquisite marriage between analytical rigor and emotional receptivity, linear reasoning and intuitive logic, and thoughtful and scrupulous discipline and lightning-flash imagination. Such a discourse would never conceive of dispensing with close reading; reading would be elevated to an Art, an act of creation, not a laying of train tracks for the latest theoretical trend. Such a discourse would be its own institution, aptly named the Academy of Readers--as opposed to being dubbed the "English Department" or "Department of Comparative Literature." So I dream it, and this blog aims to initiate the invention of this discursive institution, one word at a time.
No doubt I will return to this post and revise it, as well. It has not answered the question posed in its title, not that that was my goal for it. But even this post cannot comfortably stand as it is because its definitions of "art" and "scholarship" are unclear. Funny, how the differences between art and scholarship seem so obvious, and yet...
posted by Carroll, Violinguist @ 10:15 PM
6 Comments:
No you aren't!
And no, not every academic is boring. But I think that's often the perception by people outside, indifferent to and/or hostile towards academia, unfortunately. The way I interpreted your blog title, it seems to poke fun at that perception.
It's somewhat of a shame, isn't it, that so many silly assumptions abound regarding who academics and artists are as people.
Amen to writing about what you want to write about. Nothing else matters.
As a scholar/artist hybrid myself, I have to laugh at assumptions artists have about scholars and vice versa, and the assumptions of non-artists and non-academics. But, as a student ensconced in academe, I have to pay attention to these assumptions, lest my pre-charted path to becoming a professional scholar squeeze out my artistic inclinations. In the discipline of English, one would think that scholarly training would integrate beautifully with fiction-writing, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I think the artificial bifurcation of art and scholarship would be less threatening to me if my artistic vocation were as a painter, say, and my academic vocation were as a mathematician. But when the two vocations are crowded into a passion for literature, the two faculties sometimes get confused. Art and scholarship in literature aren't too different...and yet in many ways they are.
Your comment did make me aware that perhaps I allow myself to get too frustrated by academia's splitting of art and scholarship. As much as I believe in being able to research and write about whatever one wants, as you undoubtedly know that is not always possible when one is a student, however. So sometimes I feel a bit alienated from myself in my work, and I feel I must attend carefully to that feeling, lest I lose the tender passion that originally drove me into academia.
I hope some of what I said was clear!
P.S. Elisabeth with an 's' is a beautiful name.
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.
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 (and woe also be to he or she who reads/hears/views this hapless She [or He. Hee Hee.]).
I'll get there.
"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."
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?
"where do theoretical tools come from if not from the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience?"
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.
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