Neoliberal Fatalism and the Seeming Dearth of Ambitious Art — Tom Faure

Dec 122013
 

Great post up at Jacobin today by Sam Gindin on, among other things, the lack of politically effective art today.

Part of the problem is a lack of ambition in both politics and art—the left seeming, especially since the 1990s, unable to proffer sufficiently ambitious radical projects:

The primary focus on protest carried with it an inclination to ignore and in some cases even scoff at seriously considering what it would take to fundamentally challenge capitalism and eventually replace it. Unable to think big, these protests have increasingly been unable to even win small. Unable to act more ambitiously, they are largely limited to defensively protesting the latest specific attack on our lives.

Gindin bemoans the lack of progress since the potential watershed of 1968. Drawing on Brecht’s confrontation of fatalism, Gindin suggests good activist art must re-embrace the somewhat abandoned Marxist critique of capitalism. Without it, an artist falls into disillusionment as easily as your average neoliberal young thinker-consumer. Gindin is not reinventing the wheel, here, but placing an important emphasis on the problem of fatalism, of falling into the neoliberal fallacy that capitalism is the only possibility:

It would be a shame if art, taking fatalism as a fixed reality, was reduced to consoling us in our despondency.  On the other hand, it would be naïve to expect too much from art. Though the years since Berger issued his challenge have confirmed that the soul-destroying world that capitalism more and more offers us is a fundamental barrier to human development, art itself cannot overcome this situation. Art can move us emotionally and intellectually, but however valuable it can be in this regard it cannot on its own transform the power relations of society. Such a radical change demands the development of radical political institutions and practices. Addressing this means that artists have to step out beyond their studios and workplaces to act in the world as directly political people.

Activist art must become both grounded in everyday life and embrace the incertitude of “possibility and experimentation” (Gindin’s words—I would suggest Keats’ negative capability). Until then, Gindin says, art will remain a “shill for the status quo.”

Read the rest at Jacobin Magazine.

—Tom Faure

Book Reviews FOR SALE: Another sign of END TIMES

May 112011
 

It’s a good thing the world is ending in 10 days. That’s all I have to say about this. Thanks to Chad Post for putting this up at Three Percent.

dg

Digital Reviews are the same as print ForeWord reviews in many respects: the books must meet our quality standards; we use the same proficient reviewers; and the reviews are featured on our Web site and iPhone app and licensed for publication in the top title information databases used by booksellers and librarians: Baker & Taylor’s TitleSource III, Ingram’s iPage, Bowker’s Books in Print, and Gale’s licensed databases.

Digital Reviews are different from ForeWord reviews in that they are a fee-for-service review. A $99 fee covers the expense of writing and posting the review.

via Three Percent.

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation

May 102011
 

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“Academic labor is becoming like every other part of the American workforce: cowed, harried, docile, disempowered.”

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But the tenure system, which is already being eroded by the growth of contingent labor, is not the only thing that is under assault in the top-down, corporatized academy. As Cary Nelson explains in No University Is an Island (2010), shared governance—the principle that universities should be controlled by their faculties, which protects academic values against the encroachments of the spreadsheet brigade—is also threatened by the changing structure of academic work. Contingent labor undermines it both directly—no one asks an adjunct what he thinks of how things run—and indirectly. More people chasing fewer jobs means that everyone is squeezed for extra productivity, just like at Wal-Mart. As of 1998, faculty at four-year schools worked an average of about seven hours more per week than they had in 1972 (for a total of more than forty-nine hours a week; the stereotype of the lazy academic is, like that of the welfare queen, a politically useful myth). Not surprisingly, they also reported a shrinking sense of influence over campus affairs. Who’s got the time? Academic labor is becoming like every other part of the American workforce: cowed, harried, docile, disempowered.

via Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation.

War & Culture

May 022010
 

Just following my thoughts earlier begun on the way the c(v)ulture industry skews our experience of war (“our” meaning those of us who haven’t actually experienced war). Here is a link to the beginning of an ongoing series of reviews of episodes of the The Pacific by a Marine veteran who did fight in some of the battles portrayed. Why does this man buy the HBO/Spielberg version of war while my student Ross Canton, a thrice wounded Vietnam veteran, doesn’t? Does this man want to remember his life as a made-for-TV movie? Is that what happens to memory and the imagination?

See also.

dg

Skittles Valentine etc.

Mar 312010
 

Okay, a couple of things I was reading about this morning that I can’t resist mentioning. First of all, it turns out Jesse James (not the cowboy; Sandra Bullock’s husband) had a 4-way with his gf Bombshell McGee, a tattoo parlor receptionist named Skittles Valentine, and her boss. There is something magnetic about these names. I am going to write a novel called Skittles Valentine.

The other thing is this video of militia girls in training. It made me want to join. Absolutely. About half-way through the video there is a blurred image that looks like a guy holding up a target for people to shoot at. Could this be true? How long did he survive? I guess life is cheap in the Michigan woods.

Soon I will begin writing about literature and deep things again, but this morning all I have to look forward to are packets.

dg

 

The Fine Art of Death & Dismemberment

Mar 272010
 

Marine Eugene Sledge

Joe Mazzello as Eugene Sledge

This post is prompted by working with Ross Canton who is writing a Vietnam War memoir. Ross was a radio operator and a member of a mortar team til he was wounded the third or fourth time, dreadfully wounded, hospitalized, and finally sent home. In any case, we’ve both read the standard Vietnam books; I’ve read several World War One memoirs by British writers like Guy Chapman, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. And I’ve read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory in which Fussell argues that the writing that came out of World War One established a template for describing certain life experiences ever after. Certainly, I think it is very difficult for people to write about war without falling back on types and patterns set in the early 20th century.

The other day I noticed promotional material for the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg 10-part, $195 million, HBO miniseries called The Pacific. The series is based largely on the reminiscences of three soldiers, especially Robert Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Both Sledge and Leckie were enlisted Marines (Chapman, Sassoon and Graves were all officers). The Sledge book is the best by far; Leckie gets boring with all his teenage hijinks and his endless nicknames,vague characterizations, etc. But Sledge is good and he is tough to read (like my student Ross Canton, he served with a mortar team). We have become so conscious of battlefield “atrocities”–in Vietnam, atrocities seemed to define a moment of excess inside the bizarre horror of the battlefield, excess within excess–that his matter-of-fact portrayal of the debasing experience of war and its effects is fascinating and awful. In the Leckie book there is a Marine named Souvenirs who goes around prying gold teeth out of the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers. In Sledge, you get the idea this was pretty common and at one point Sledge himself starts to think about it and is barely headed off by a gentler, smarter friend. One wonders what Spielberg will do with Sledge’s Marine lieutenant Mac, fresh from the States, who takes his carbine and shoots off the tip of a dead Japanese soldier’s penis for target practice. Or the Marine who casually shoots an elderly wounded Okinawan woman to death while Sledge is off trying to find a medic to help her. Sledge is also good on the smell of war–the heat, the rotting bodies, the blow flies, the diarrhea, the maggots. Sledge makes it clear that experiencing war is a constant struggle to compose one’s self in a world of, to us, unimaginable horror, cruelty, boredom, and exhaustion. One of his worst fears is that he will give in to fear. Many do.

The Vietnam war books I recall (and I haven’t read them for a while) might be better written, but there is a truthful naivete in Sledge’s book. And he never gets up on a moral high horse which makes me trust him. His sense of the human capacity for moral corruption is wise–I feel as if we have become more foolish about war, or the media has made us so. By contrast, there is a book called The Pacific, a companion to the TV series, which is just dreadful, thin, unpleasantly breezy, cliched, distant, and abstract. Here as an excerpt. With books like this veiling the experience of war, it is no wonder we are constantly surprised by what actually happens. At this point, one is reminded that writing well is a moral act. Think about it.

This is just a pre-thought. I haven’t studied the matter. There is a book or a paper to be written on war writing that includes things written between World War One and the Vietnam War and the wars beyond that.

Or just for starters think about the difference between the two photographs at the top of the post.

dg

The Canadian Left and U.S. Culture Criticism

Mar 242010
 

In 1968, an American assistant professor at York University observed to me that in terms of political spectrums, the Canadian Right begins somewhere left of the leftiest American Left. Here’s an essay by Stan Persky on Naomi Klein in the online magazine Dooney’s Cafe. Klein used to edit This Magazine where I once or twice published stories (I suspect this was before Klein was even born). There are a couple of interesting message vectors here. The first is that these are people who come from a Canadian Leftist tradition which, in many ways, has its roots in a Prairie Protestant religious movement of community and co-operation (unlike the U.S. where Protestantism is mostly on the Right). The second is that Canada also has, through Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, another tradition of culture criticism that rises from a study of the social and cognitive effects of technology. These two threads seem to coalesce in Naomi Klein and her critiques of market capitalism. Oddly enough, as Persky points out, Klein is getting some traction on the American Right, which seems paradoxical and fascinating. All this talk of Right and Left doesn’t mean that much any more since both sides seem to assemble slogans without giving much attention to underlying consistency or purpose. It’s strange to think that Tea Baggers and anti-globalization demonstrators actually agree on some things. Anyway this is a interesting article, not the least because it’s about how to write a bestseller against the idea of bestsellers.

dg

Feeling blue

Feb 202010
 

My favourite part is the girl who says, “I see you. I see you. I see you.”

Though I can’t quite put my finger on it, there is something ineffably sad about this (aside from the obvious comedy). It’s a parody of a reality TV show about really stupid people re-enacting a really obvious Hollywood reiteration of the Romance of the Noble Savage old-style Euro-colonial racism, thus a parody of an imitation of an imitation of a bad idea. It reminds me of Don Quixote, of course, who is imitating characters in a romantic adventure novel about knights in armour long after people had forgotten what those thugs-in-chain mail  were really like. And Dostoevsky said Don Quixote was the saddest book of all.

Maybe it’s this: our inability to feel real unless we are acting a role, our need for a gesture or form that gives us substance. When we see this in others, it’s comic. But it’s the kind of comedy that expresses a latent fear, in this case the fear that if we look too closely the Self will seem unbearably empty.

dg

Post-Structuralism, Spelling Lessons and Rats.

Feb 162010
 

I’m still reading Eagleton and have moved into the post-structuralism chapter.  I wish I had more time to spend studying theory.  I also wish that I had studied it before now.  Watching my daughter (she’s in third grade) work on her spelling lessons tonight made me think about the idea of signifier and the thing signfied.  There is something very powerful about watching Maggie work out parts of speech, about watching her form the connections with language in this very basic, very primal sort of way.  Store.  Order.  Board.  These were some of the words tonight.  I was also reading E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel this morning. His humor surprised me, and the discussion of cavemen sitting around listening to the first stories again makes me think about how we (humans) acquire language and how our desires for stories is so deep-rooted in our consciousness.  Now it’s time for reading…Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIIMH.

—Richard Farrell

The end of everything as we know it, but then I never made any money out of writing anyway

Feb 112010
 

Here’s a smart piece about the future of book publishing by Susan Piver called “Book Publishers, Stop Scaring me.” I notice posters, pundits and journalists talking about the similarities between publishing now and the music industry just before digital music hit. Piver used to be a music exec. Here‘s her take on Amazon v Macmillan and the history of the music industry.

After this I am going to take a break from the terrifying implications of the meltdown of the publishing industry and think only happy thoughts.

dg

Lish

Jan 282010
 

Despite the fact that he was Captain Fiction while he was editing fiction for Esquire and later worked for Knopf and discovered people like Carver, Hempel and Hannah, i.e. despite the fact that he has had a mainstream job list, Lish is not a mainstream writer, nor does he possess a mainstream aesthetic. He’s really a modernist of the experimental sort. This is a classic American misreading of the signs. He edits fiction for Esquire, therefore he is one of us. But mostly his own fiction gets terrible reviews, and, after he left Knopf, he hasn’t really had mainstream soapbox from which to pontificate and so he’s become a bit of a cult figure/teacher which is how America relegates and diminishes its off-centre wise men/women. His fiction is actually brilliant but looks idiotic if you try to apply mainstream expectations. The first thing of his I read was the novel Extravaganza which is basically a couple of hundred pages of old-style Jewish stand up comedy, old-style as in dating from about the 1930s. As the jokes go on and on and on, a rupture or fissure begins to appear and expand within the joke language itself. Through the rupture, words that belong to the discourse of the Holocaust begin to appear. The book had no conventional narrative  arc; the narrative, if there was any, was purely linguistic; the words became the sign, the objective correlative. The next thing of his that I read was My Romance which purports to be the text of an extemporaneous talk beginning with Lish’s father’s watch, Lish’s skin problems, his affairs, and ends up, if it really does end up, being about his father’s death (I am writing from memory). It’s much more conventional than Extravaganza but still very peculiar, self-obsessive, recursive, confessional. If you want to see what Lish means when he talks about attack sentences, consecution, torque, swerve, etc., this is the place to start. Many of the people who study with Lish are American mainstream writers trying to catch Captain Fiction’s coattails without understanding that what he teaches is really an unconventional, unmarketable, cosmopolitan aesthetic. He wants people to be brilliant, to write for the ages (not for the dumbed-down readership of our Kindle-lit era). Everything he says could make you better than you are. Do you want to be better than you are? Or worse, better than most everyone around you, including the people who buy books?

I say all this while quite aware that Lish sells a lot of snake oil and can be belligerent, self-aggrandizing and irritating. This is mystifying to people who have been educated by the marketplace to expect brilliance in neat, digestible (half-hour) packages with commercial breaks. If it helps, think of Lish’s life as performance art.

dg

Adorno and Mad Max

Jan 182010
 

I am still reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler.

Jonah and I went to see The Book of Eli Saturday night and then last night, pursuing our quest for the roots of dystopian movie-making, we rented Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. The Mad Max movie was infinitely superior–wittily baroque and light at the ending with great 80s music (sounded like Maurice Jarre). The weirdly touching ironies of the “tell” are parodic, human and funny (the girl framing each cave drawing with sticks tied together at the end of a pole). Both movies have the same plot: stranger wandering through dried up, post-apocalyptic landscape comes to a town run by evil-doers and adventures happen. Both strangers are really good at fighting. But The Book of Eli is a violent pseudo-Christian strangeness. It reveals the paranoia, selfishness and self-righteousness behind some (not all) recent threads of Christian discourse (surprising to a Canadian who grew up in a country where Christian-based political parties fired the push for universal medical care in the 1950s). Denzel, intent on his mission (to save the book), can’t stop to help a woman being raped and murdered by a bunch of motorcycle thugs. Whereas Mel as Mad Max gets into trouble repeatedly for showing pity and forgetting to save his own skin. There are no children in The Book of Eli, but Mad Max is surrounded by innocence. (Both movies make young women look great in animal hides and rags.)

I’m not sure what this has to do with Adorno except that in my head I keep thinking about how he tells us the culture industry has rolled over for the unnameable powers of repression contained in our late stage capitalist so-called democracy, pouring out infotainment, reality tv and comforting or distracting folk tales which lull our pulverized synapses. All the modern dystopian, end-of-the-world movies have happy endings, often sneakily Christian (remember the “arks” that save the world at the end of John Cusack’s latest).

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome doesn’t escape unscathed by Christian symbolism. The cave painting of Captain Walker is Christ on the cross. What does this mean? The Bible is a paradigm of a novel with a happy ending? The Biblical message has turned inexplicably dark between the 1980s and 2010?

dg

Adorno, Shklovsky and Michael Berube’s American Airspace Blog

Jan 122010
 

I’m not sure how much time I will have for this as the semester wears on. But I will try. As RichH noticed I did briefly have a post up about Theodor Adorno. I was reading his essay on Thorstein Veblen through the residency, a few lines at a time. I finished that the other night in the wee hours. Then as I was adding more things to the resource file-sharing site for you guys, I was rereading some more recent pieces on Shklovsky who is undergoing a surge (that word) of in the U.S. because my publisher Dalkey Archive is bringing out more and more of his books which were hitherto mostly unavailable. But then I happened upon a blog (American Airspace) by Michael Berube (I can’t figure out how to get accents on the letters, sorry) who is a culture critic I met years ago when I gave a talk at a university somewhere in Missouri (the name is out of my head). Michael later did a really nice piece on my novel The Life and Times of Captain N for the magazine Lingua Franca. Anyway I liked his blog post on Shklovsky although I can’t quite get my mind around some of his objections to Formalist theory–more on that another time. In any case, the whole blog itself is fun to read.

dg