This is great stuff. Cutrone reminds me of how much I love art theory and critique. One can sometimes forget, given this mad world we live in. Thank you. Merry Xmas, happy holidays to you both.
The reverse painting that Doug pulled up is interesting for a whole series of reasons. Of course nudity has been eliminated... in the prudent times we live in...
I’d love to see a conversation between Cutrone and Camille Paglia. Although hostile to “marxism” I was introduced to Arnold Hauser through her, which a lot of this conversation echoes - especially volume 4 which traces the history of art from 1848 to 1950, from the novel to film. What I especially like about Paglia is that she produced books with a sense of social responsibility. Seeking to make art and poetry accessible to a wider public. Following what Feynman and Sagan were trying to do in the field of science. I don’t know how successful any of it was but socialists could learn a thing or two from it. Perhaps a topic to explore further. She also thinks Revenge of the Sith is the greatest piece of artwork in the 21st century! Get these two New York Italians in a room together!
1:15:32 I feel this too. I don’t wanna disengage politically but I also don’t wanna solely make activist art. I’ve also seen a lot of activist artists completely bypass form or even any notion of craft but getting by calling their work art because they were sending a heavy-handed political message. And then using that activism to protect their work against any critique.
Really appreciated the discourse surrounding literature and PK Dick. I have to say, I am a profound admirer of the first 2/3rds of most of the PKD novels I have read. I really appreciate his capacity to instil enigma, tension, and paranoia throughout his writing. It seems to me that he was attempting to harness and limit his own difficulties pertaining to paranoia via his art - sublimation in action. However, I feel that his novels (at least the ones I have read) start to fray as he offers an explanation for the mystery of the text. It seems to rarely hit the mark. Doug, have you read any Gene Wolfe? Book of the New Sun is pretty great. They also reprinted a bunch of Harlan Elison’s short stories recently, which was a real treat for me as an introduction to the author. Keep up the wonderful work!
~41:00 I enjoy me some anime and I like me the anime that both has people meet their capacity for heroism(/sacrifice) and question it. It's actually a pretty common theme. Make your own decisions. Now it's good to meet your emotional landscape that would have you be a hero in the first place. Not saying you must now write stories that make people want to be detectives or whatever but that is also a direction to go in now isn't it? edit: Because there's no denying the value in those emotions both very much for the individual and to some extent for groups I guess. ~43:25 Indeed there's things to do with lightness and with seriousness. And of course one can subvert things on that level as well. Who do you want to talk to about what? Gotta be tricky sometimes!
"all of us receive literature through the novel" ... man I've been binging on myth and epic literature for a while now I guess I didnt get the memo! Lukacs's Marxist take on Cervantes later in life is great - his review of a later translation of the work is deeply insightful
~20:00 I'm thinking as a leftist it is rather silly to think that most people at any point in time really were thinking that "god is the story we tell each other about the group". There must have been (beyond-)cosmic doubt. I mean how stupid would people have to be if there wasn't? So how can you be a leftist to call that god of the group "god"? Maybe it is an aspect, sure. But not the thing as such. edit: I will add that man is quite preoccupied with exploration. Is that purely socially constructed/a story we tell ourselves? I doubt it. Don't mistake the chart for the yet unknown journey I guess. Although again I doubt people en-mass have that problem. ~27:47 But none of that was ever taken for granted so neatly in most of human history now was it? ~28:30 An attempt is made to turn em into subjects now that there is more space to tell stories of more round characters. But don't think authors know so well what would be human expected behavior in a different situation. Feels like stories always have a hard time shedding the delusions and the old ones just compressed for what feels meaningful given the context of the time. But so that's still with the novels of the time isn't it? Minus the compression. I mean AI can fix that, good for summaries. ~35:00 See of course it does. Because it doesn't work. Whether it's a novel or not. Just my opinion. Now we could talk about "over long or short", how many mistakes people must make before seeing the light so to speak. edit: expanded post
38:28 Maybe if everyone's an artist. But artists make for great tools to capitalism when they're thinking they're just doing their thing in service of the community. It is atomizing to tell tales in great detail of this or that individual as if this or that psychological hangup of an individual was so relevant to the lives of everyone else. edit: Not saying we cannot enjoy these stories of course but that is for various reasons and probably a poor fit for increasing e.g. solidarity. edit: I mean it depends. Just mind your neuroticism I guess. Being true to your art may just mean that as well but so that's tricky given the world we live in. Nice Benjamin quote.
Clinical psychology psychiatry are conducting a battle between two competing ideas, do we see people as the subject of a novel or as subjects in an epic ie are we products of our experiences or fixed identities, eg schizophrenic (psychiatry) as oppised to hearing horrible voices and having unusual believes because that was the best sense of the traumatic experiences a persons life presented them with.
Gotta recommend William Gaddis' book, JR, for marxists. THX1138 (George Lucas, not Lukács) is a decent movie with a working class sci-fi platonism message. Also, read Gogol's short stories, The Portrait and The Cloak (Overcoat), from a Marxist perspective on the effects of art and commodities on society - and Dead Souls for the pointlessness of abstract value as the driving force of social status. Suspend your judgements about Gogol's reactionary religious turn before he died. Compare Dead Souls to JR.
This is a succinct explanation of the thing I dislike most about novels, and modern art in general: its focus on the individual. Let's remember Tolkien's criticism of Dante: "He's full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities." He is completely right about that, and it damages the aesthetic quality of the Divina Comedia! People are bland and uninteresting, I don't care about them and I certainly don't want every work of artistry to be about them. Worse, not just has the incredible inventiveness of human imagination channeled itself on narcissistic masturbation, the consciousness of that loss itself is getting lost, and concessions that had to be made out of necessity have become restrictions to the imagination from the beginning of the bourgeois era onwards. Let's take for instance the printing press, whic killed the richness of gothic calligraphy with its necessity for strict typing, so that now it has become almost completely forgotten that calligraphy can be used in interplay with narrative. Let's compare that with Tolkien's Tengwar, which, being not just a featural alphabet but designed along an abstract yet most coherent correspondence to phonic features using a two-dimensional matrix with diacritics, are an artistic achievement on a level deeper than any novel ever was, and yet, he manages to include it in a narrative. Modernity has long ago become a straightjacket that has naturalized itself until it was taken as a second skin, and there is a straight line from the first works of bourgeois art to Arendt's recognition now free time has universalized itself its purposes have become forgotten and the artistic world today, whereas Tolkien's work, being the most thorough artistic attempt to escape modernity, is also its greatest work of literature by far. Yet, in the last century at least, through science fiction and, to a lesser extent (outside of Tolkien), through fantasy, there had been a short recognition that a work of narrative fiction can actually be about something more than the individual, in works like "Expedition" by Wayne Barlowe or civilizational tales like Aasimov's. World-building became finally, and admittedly in strongly bastardized form, an artistic activity in itself again. Alien biology could become an object of artistry itself, like the amazing alien concepts in the "Xeelee Sequence". The terror of insignificance became once again remembered in Lovecraft. And still every once in a while a work comes around that captures this, like "Outer Wilds", that is artistic in a way beyond the clichés of modernity, but in fact, consciousness is receding and narrative has once again become focused on characters and their petty internal struggles. But the important point stands: the transition to bourgeois art has already been a loss of artistry in a variety of aspects that should have been taken up again but remain, for the most part, forgotten. As to artistic RUclips, there is this sub-genre of videos called RUclips Poop, which has an unfortunate name but is basically what instrumental music is to music: the abandonment of linguistic meaning to allow for pure play with form, and some of these people actually take their artistry at least somewhat seriously. I know little about it and only because Emplemon, who makes good videos about a variety of stuff, used to start out with YTPs, and, though RUclips made him delete his old work, it can still be found on the Internet Archive. I'd say they are well-composed, with a lot of density, some of which is superfluous like in metal but some of which is genuinely necessitated by the structure. There is some deep cross-referentiality in this work (and from the work into his newer videos - lots of things that are kind-of like inside jokes). So there is some somewhat-serious play with form in that genre, but it is so far away from normies that I didn't know anything but the name of it until recently.
This is a good comment. To me, Tolkien’s real wisdom is that he rejects mere analogy in favour of creating a completely independent totality in its own right. Nothing in middle earth merely “represents” Jesus, factories, the middle class, or anything else. If you wanted to make those connections it would have to be a comparative analysis between those things and the contents of his novels. I’m curious about what your take on Dune’s value is. In my opinion it has to be included as one of the major literary achievements of the 20th century novel.
Modernist art does not focus on the individual, it focuses on formal experimentation. The role of the creator is to define an internally consistent universe within the artwork (or sometimes a series of works) that has its own rules. This is the true meaning of "world building", and it applies to all modernist art. This is something that artists working in very different mediums have in common: including, for instance, Kandinsky, Klee, Cage, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Kafka, Joyce, Cortazar, Coltrane, Braxton, Monk, Zorn. "World-building" is not something Tolkien invented, and the fact that Tolkien also did it just proves that he's actually a modernist--after all, when vikings sat around and told stories, they didn't need to create a world and a mythos to tell their tales, what makes them traditional is that they experienced their own cultural myths as natural and given. Modernity is precisely the moment when the old myths and religious tales seem to be losing in cultural relevance, and it's this loss which necessitates world-building in the first place. Reactionary modernism, which seeks to build worlds on the basis of the old myths, is still a form of modernism which can only arise in a situation where the old myths are not taken for granted.
This comment seems both intelligent and coming from a position of being well-insulated from socioeconomic isolation and deprivation. (I could be wrong - no insult intended). I agree that much modern fiction uses the hero's journey type character arcs to create idealised individuals, but often it does so to highlight the alienating effects of individualism. One of the side effects of purely instrumental music (abandoning linguistic meaning in favour of pure intellectual play) is precisely that it depoliticises the participants, providing a temporary escape. I love jazz, for example, but I've noticed that it attracts people who perceive themselves as "above binary politics," which effectively maintains the status quo if the political is dropped entirely. Yogas, meditations, theurgy and athletics can all dismissed as navel-gazing to the extent that they're depoliticized by being removed from linguistic meaning. I think all of these are very important, but for some reason I feel compelled to embrace and defend the dialectical project. I like Plato and Gogol precisely because they push readers into aporia. "However much depersonalization is one of the thematic presences of the novel (JR), it is not for Gaddis the end of the matter. He insists on tensions, with the latter deriving from counterpointing depersonalized voices with their (futile) effort to communicate. These are virtually all desperately lonely voices reaching out to express themselves but coming away frustrated and baffled. Language fails them when they attempt to communicate [...]" -Joy Williams (Introduction to 'JR' by William Gaddis)
@@BarklordYou are making exactly the kinds of arguments that Stalinists made in order to censor and force artists to conform to ideas of social realism developed by Soviet bureaucrats. Abstract art was criticized as being merely "formalist", that is, as not expressing an officially sanctioned ideological position. And instrumental music, of course, is the worst offender. Is this really a position you want to defend? I would like to live in a society where artists have freedom to create amazing abstract art--even if the work itself isn't political, political freedom means that artists are free to pursue their craft as they see fit. If artists sometimes seem to be "too free" compared to the actual political situation society is in, that's an indictment of society lagging behind art--it's not a problem with art. Art with explicit political content is precisely the kind that reinforces the status quo, and it is exactly what they teach young artists to do now. On the other hand, art that genuinely plays with form and with expectations actually forces those who encounter the work to think differently in order to comprehend it--and being forced to think differently is precisely the type of disruption of the When artists try to make explicitly political art the result tends to be both bad art (because it must be easy to digest for the consumer in a hurry), while at the same time being ineffective in terms of political results--the worst of both worlds.
@@TheCyborgk You're arguing beside the point because you're focusing on modernist art whereas my primary target was modern art. In other words, you're focusing on a self-aware current in art of the last century whereas I'm taking issue with art from the beginning of modernity on. Note also that you're mostly citing musicians. Music is somewhat special among the arts with its inherent closeness to abstraction. But even there, it has to be said that the experimentation of those you cite was actually within a fairly narrow range of parameters: twelve-tone music contains in the name that not even equal temperament (historically a very new invention and to be distinguished from well-temperament) is questioned. There has been an enormous amount of experimentation in the descendants of classical music, but mostly under the banner of post-modernism and outside of the range of what modernists would accept. But note that the primary point of contention in the video was the novel, which reached its apex early on in the 20th century and has stagnated ever since. I imagine Cutrone would just link this to the failure of revolution, but that is too convenient to my taste, as if there weren't deep problems with the aesthetic before that. Also, again, I was underlining how there was experimentation in the 20th century, but it falls outside the bounds set up by Cutrone, which were precisely about the individual.
I guess I'm not surprised but it's interesting to note that Chris seems to be un-self-reflexively committed to a view of art as Distinction (in Bourdieu's sense).
My view of aesthetic judgment, taste and the aesthetic education of form is that of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, which they considered a universal human faculty that everyone has!
i don't find the characteristics of the reductive idpol style of "critique" unique to progressives what i think it's really about, and a symptom of, is the inability (which chris alludes to) to think about the substance of political and economic life beyond this or how those things really connect with identity. the limits of this particular notion of "identity" which has been popularized thru this style of criticism are easy to describe and talk about, but difficult to overlook (precisely because they are superficial and in your face). hence as much as progressives praise netflix shows for "positive representation" (which sometimes indistinguishable from tokenism to me), "anti-woke" people can't help get outraged by black little mermaid or lupin iii. how can they when that's the image right on the box? in a way the outrage is justified if you believe the fact that what the studios are doing is empty, patronizing tokenism and pandering. except it's also silly because it's not merely "the woke mind virus" or "the agenda" that's behind it. i don't really buy the idea that writing has become radically worse because of "wokeness," as if all the effort and energy that would *usually* go into the task of writing creative scenarios has been cordoned off to be used instead for hiring specific quantities of people of different races and genders. as if only one thing or the other is possible. however, i find that even outside these camps that lift these superficial traits in TV shows and videogames and such into the content of serious moral disputes, and elevate the act or refusal of consumption into moral or political acts, the rest of the people in "fandoms" participate in consumption in a similar way, just without worrying about the so-called moral or political consequences. they don't have any better an understanding of the setting and narrative content (or lackthereof) in fiction, and how disconnected these things often are from the personalities and identities of the characters. this is because they are either attracted to or identify with the characters themselves based on these superficial traits all the same, and don't understand how they could be informed by something like material conditions. superficial traits including not just the idpol/intersectional characteristics, but things like personality, hobbies, fashion, appearance... all viewers want is characters who are attractive and "relatable," yet being relatable just means they have hobbies, personalities and interests the viewers have, or more realistically have learned to aspire to emulate. i think it's worthwhile to examine the extent to which characters are formulated deliberately to be taken "out of context" and reproduced/consumed again in both official spinoffs, as well as fan art/fan fiction/erotica, to become the content of "head-canons." the fictional "universe" is designed to be infinitely extendible, revamped and malleable. i think this is something that writers and producers are well aware of as they are going through their processes. consequently, coherence and meaningfulness in narrative and setting become increasingly diminished, because it's clear the particulars don't matter much anyway. i think the indifference of the larger? group, which doesn't care as much either way about the "culture war" debates, is prudent. on the other hand, the (consequent?) low expectations regarding what fiction ought to provide, based on an assumption that it just cannot really matter at all, are a little depressing. i get the sense attempts to expand the stylistic or thematic ground of mainstream media are seen as a kind of elitist corruption, as if it isn't the elitists themselves who are cynically convinced of the worthlessness and disposability of popular fiction being part of its very purpose as "entertainment" (entertaining means no thinking!); or as if the elitists themselves aren't perpetually dazzled by the notion that there's no actual difference between a sculpture and a toilet
whats funny is that the question of identity ends up being a distraction from the actual artistic content. im not calling out just "woke" people in that respect, it's interesting to see how the "anti-woke" folks attack works for "diversifying" the cast in a work which is objectively bad regardless of the identity of the actors or characters. often the works have legitimate problems that go ignored by the "anti-woke" critics because they too are caught up in the question of identity of the characters. instead of criticizing the little mermaid remake for being a cheap money-grab, they obsess on the irrelevancy of the fact that they cast a black actress. what's understandable is not only the desire for audiences of all backgrounds to have characters they can "relate" to but that actors of various identities have opportunities to find work for their craft. the downside of a film industry that disproportionately casts white actors is that it limits the opportunities for non-white actors. this is an understandable frustration for those nonwhite actors that don't already have marketable names like Denzel Washington. I have zero interest in watching the little mermaid remake - the original animation is fine, and don't need to watch another worse version of the same story. but the actress who played Ariel should have the same opportunities to get ahead as anyone else with talent in Hollywood. presumably, art should reflect the existing society in various ways. the reason they don't is largely commercial, and that's both in terms of over and underrepresentation. hollywood producers just want marketable movies, and if the zeitgeist is favoring less diverse casts like in the 1960s, that is what they will make, but if the zeitgeist is favoring more diverse casts like in the 2010s, that is what they will make. yet audiences only have the adequate cynicism about these choices when it's not favoring their own tastes. moreover corporate understanding of changes in taste has something of a lag, and tends to use those tastes to distract from worse writing so they can save on the labor costs for creating original content. a lot of this is just a symptom of America's own deep pathologies when it comes to identity that comes from its history of slavery etc whose cultural consequences continue to echo in the existing tastes, preferences, and cultural assumptions of Americans. even the categories we use can trace their origin back to that era. Americans of all backgrounds have been socialized to "relate" to characters based on certain traits, whether identities or subcultures that have been crafted and cultivated by clever marketing techniques. these debates will continue so long as the deeper systemic and cultural causes have been addressed.
Chris do you consider yourself the last Marxist because you are the last person teaching people how to be Marxists, rather than what Marxism is? Is this why you hate the the east west Marxism distinction?
banging ep
50:05 Chris has got something here. When I finish a good movie I feel more free in my own life than before. Hadn't quite put that word to the feeling
This is great stuff. Cutrone reminds me of how much I love art theory and critique. One can sometimes forget, given this mad world we live in. Thank you.
Merry Xmas, happy holidays to you both.
I like the guest. Good podcast 👍
Great episode! I had the same reaction as Doug at 1:03:57. Only i exclaimed "ugh!"
What on earth is happening...
The reverse painting that Doug pulled up is interesting for a whole series of reasons. Of course nudity has been eliminated... in the prudent times we live in...
The video artist you were talking about with the alphabet in the kitchen is Martha Rosler
Of course!
I’d love to see a conversation between Cutrone and Camille Paglia. Although hostile to “marxism” I was introduced to Arnold Hauser through her, which a lot of this conversation echoes - especially volume 4 which traces the history of art from 1848 to 1950, from the novel to film.
What I especially like about Paglia is that she produced books with a sense of social responsibility. Seeking to make art and poetry accessible to a wider public. Following what Feynman and Sagan were trying to do in the field of science. I don’t know how successful any of it was but socialists could learn a thing or two from it. Perhaps a topic to explore further.
She also thinks Revenge of the Sith is the greatest piece of artwork in the 21st century! Get these two New York Italians in a room together!
1:15:32 I feel this too. I don’t wanna disengage politically but I also don’t wanna solely make activist art. I’ve also seen a lot of activist artists completely bypass form or even any notion of craft but getting by calling their work art because they were sending a heavy-handed political message. And then using that activism to protect their work against any critique.
Really looking forward to that Vijay Prashad interview. 😊
Really appreciated the discourse surrounding literature and PK Dick. I have to say, I am a profound admirer of the first 2/3rds of most of the PKD novels I have read. I really appreciate his capacity to instil enigma, tension, and paranoia throughout his writing. It seems to me that he was attempting to harness and limit his own difficulties pertaining to paranoia via his art - sublimation in action. However, I feel that his novels (at least the ones I have read) start to fray as he offers an explanation for the mystery of the text. It seems to rarely hit the mark.
Doug, have you read any Gene Wolfe? Book of the New Sun is pretty great.
They also reprinted a bunch of Harlan Elison’s short stories recently, which was a real treat for me as an introduction to the author.
Keep up the wonderful work!
~41:00 I enjoy me some anime and I like me the anime that both has people meet their capacity for heroism(/sacrifice) and question it. It's actually a pretty common theme. Make your own decisions. Now it's good to meet your emotional landscape that would have you be a hero in the first place. Not saying you must now write stories that make people want to be detectives or whatever but that is also a direction to go in now isn't it? edit: Because there's no denying the value in those emotions both very much for the individual and to some extent for groups I guess.
~43:25 Indeed there's things to do with lightness and with seriousness. And of course one can subvert things on that level as well. Who do you want to talk to about what? Gotta be tricky sometimes!
Doug have either you or Chris shared favorite novels?
The original title for Tolstoy’s War and Peace was War - What Is It Good For.
"all of us receive literature through the novel" ... man I've been binging on myth and epic literature for a while now I guess I didnt get the memo!
Lukacs's Marxist take on Cervantes later in life is great - his review of a later translation of the work is deeply insightful
@ yeah I was just being cheeky. I’ve read my vico
hang on, is the whole sujet / fabula distinction even in Lukacs?
~20:00 I'm thinking as a leftist it is rather silly to think that most people at any point in time really were thinking that "god is the story we tell each other about the group". There must have been (beyond-)cosmic doubt. I mean how stupid would people have to be if there wasn't? So how can you be a leftist to call that god of the group "god"?
Maybe it is an aspect, sure. But not the thing as such. edit: I will add that man is quite preoccupied with exploration. Is that purely socially constructed/a story we tell ourselves? I doubt it.
Don't mistake the chart for the yet unknown journey I guess. Although again I doubt people en-mass have that problem.
~27:47 But none of that was ever taken for granted so neatly in most of human history now was it?
~28:30 An attempt is made to turn em into subjects now that there is more space to tell stories of more round characters. But don't think authors know so well what would be human expected behavior in a different situation. Feels like stories always have a hard time shedding the delusions and the old ones just compressed for what feels meaningful given the context of the time. But so that's still with the novels of the time isn't it? Minus the compression. I mean AI can fix that, good for summaries.
~35:00 See of course it does. Because it doesn't work. Whether it's a novel or not. Just my opinion. Now we could talk about "over long or short", how many mistakes people must make before seeing the light so to speak.
edit: expanded post
❤
38:28 Maybe if everyone's an artist. But artists make for great tools to capitalism when they're thinking they're just doing their thing in service of the community. It is atomizing to tell tales in great detail of this or that individual as if this or that psychological hangup of an individual was so relevant to the lives of everyone else. edit: Not saying we cannot enjoy these stories of course but that is for various reasons and probably a poor fit for increasing e.g. solidarity. edit: I mean it depends. Just mind your neuroticism I guess. Being true to your art may just mean that as well but so that's tricky given the world we live in. Nice Benjamin quote.
Clinical psychology psychiatry are conducting a battle between two competing ideas, do we see people as the subject of a novel or as subjects in an epic ie are we products of our experiences or fixed identities, eg schizophrenic (psychiatry) as oppised to hearing horrible voices and having unusual believes because that was the best sense of the traumatic experiences a persons life presented them with.
Kino.
Gotta recommend William Gaddis' book, JR, for marxists.
THX1138 (George Lucas, not Lukács) is a decent movie with a working class sci-fi platonism message. Also, read Gogol's short stories, The Portrait and The Cloak (Overcoat), from a Marxist perspective on the effects of art and commodities on society - and Dead Souls for the pointlessness of abstract value as the driving force of social status. Suspend your judgements about Gogol's reactionary religious turn before he died. Compare Dead Souls to JR.
This is a succinct explanation of the thing I dislike most about novels, and modern art in general: its focus on the individual. Let's remember Tolkien's criticism of Dante:
"He's full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities."
He is completely right about that, and it damages the aesthetic quality of the Divina Comedia! People are bland and uninteresting, I don't care about them and I certainly don't want every work of artistry to be about them. Worse, not just has the incredible inventiveness of human imagination channeled itself on narcissistic masturbation, the consciousness of that loss itself is getting lost, and concessions that had to be made out of necessity have become restrictions to the imagination from the beginning of the bourgeois era onwards. Let's take for instance the printing press, whic killed the richness of gothic calligraphy with its necessity for strict typing, so that now it has become almost completely forgotten that calligraphy can be used in interplay with narrative. Let's compare that with Tolkien's Tengwar, which, being not just a featural alphabet but designed along an abstract yet most coherent correspondence to phonic features using a two-dimensional matrix with diacritics, are an artistic achievement on a level deeper than any novel ever was, and yet, he manages to include it in a narrative. Modernity has long ago become a straightjacket that has naturalized itself until it was taken as a second skin, and there is a straight line from the first works of bourgeois art to Arendt's recognition now free time has universalized itself its purposes have become forgotten and the artistic world today, whereas Tolkien's work, being the most thorough artistic attempt to escape modernity, is also its greatest work of literature by far. Yet, in the last century at least, through science fiction and, to a lesser extent (outside of Tolkien), through fantasy, there had been a short recognition that a work of narrative fiction can actually be about something more than the individual, in works like "Expedition" by Wayne Barlowe or civilizational tales like Aasimov's. World-building became finally, and admittedly in strongly bastardized form, an artistic activity in itself again. Alien biology could become an object of artistry itself, like the amazing alien concepts in the "Xeelee Sequence". The terror of insignificance became once again remembered in Lovecraft. And still every once in a while a work comes around that captures this, like "Outer Wilds", that is artistic in a way beyond the clichés of modernity, but in fact, consciousness is receding and narrative has once again become focused on characters and their petty internal struggles. But the important point stands: the transition to bourgeois art has already been a loss of artistry in a variety of aspects that should have been taken up again but remain, for the most part, forgotten.
As to artistic RUclips, there is this sub-genre of videos called RUclips Poop, which has an unfortunate name but is basically what instrumental music is to music: the abandonment of linguistic meaning to allow for pure play with form, and some of these people actually take their artistry at least somewhat seriously. I know little about it and only because Emplemon, who makes good videos about a variety of stuff, used to start out with YTPs, and, though RUclips made him delete his old work, it can still be found on the Internet Archive. I'd say they are well-composed, with a lot of density, some of which is superfluous like in metal but some of which is genuinely necessitated by the structure. There is some deep cross-referentiality in this work (and from the work into his newer videos - lots of things that are kind-of like inside jokes). So there is some somewhat-serious play with form in that genre, but it is so far away from normies that I didn't know anything but the name of it until recently.
This is a good comment.
To me, Tolkien’s real wisdom is that he rejects mere analogy in favour of creating a completely independent totality in its own right. Nothing in middle earth merely “represents” Jesus, factories, the middle class, or anything else. If you wanted to make those connections it would have to be a comparative analysis between those things and the contents of his novels.
I’m curious about what your take on Dune’s value is. In my opinion it has to be included as one of the major literary achievements of the 20th century novel.
Modernist art does not focus on the individual, it focuses on formal experimentation. The role of the creator is to define an internally consistent universe within the artwork (or sometimes a series of works) that has its own rules. This is the true meaning of "world building", and it applies to all modernist art.
This is something that artists working in very different mediums have in common: including, for instance, Kandinsky, Klee, Cage, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Kafka, Joyce, Cortazar, Coltrane, Braxton, Monk, Zorn.
"World-building" is not something Tolkien invented, and the fact that Tolkien also did it just proves that he's actually a modernist--after all, when vikings sat around and told stories, they didn't need to create a world and a mythos to tell their tales, what makes them traditional is that they experienced their own cultural myths as natural and given.
Modernity is precisely the moment when the old myths and religious tales seem to be losing in cultural relevance, and it's this loss which necessitates world-building in the first place. Reactionary modernism, which seeks to build worlds on the basis of the old myths, is still a form of modernism which can only arise in a situation where the old myths are not taken for granted.
This comment seems both intelligent and coming from a position of being well-insulated from socioeconomic isolation and deprivation. (I could be wrong - no insult intended). I agree that much modern fiction uses the hero's journey type character arcs to create idealised individuals, but often it does so to highlight the alienating effects of individualism.
One of the side effects of purely instrumental music (abandoning linguistic meaning in favour of pure intellectual play) is precisely that it depoliticises the participants, providing a temporary escape. I love jazz, for example, but I've noticed that it attracts people who perceive themselves as "above binary politics," which effectively maintains the status quo if the political is dropped entirely. Yogas, meditations, theurgy and athletics can all dismissed as navel-gazing to the extent that they're depoliticized by being removed from linguistic meaning.
I think all of these are very important, but for some reason I feel compelled to embrace and defend the dialectical project. I like Plato and Gogol precisely because they push readers into aporia.
"However much depersonalization is one of the thematic presences of the novel (JR), it is not for Gaddis the end of the matter. He insists on tensions, with the latter deriving from counterpointing depersonalized voices with their (futile) effort to communicate. These are virtually all desperately lonely voices reaching out to express themselves but coming away frustrated and baffled. Language fails them when they attempt to communicate [...]"
-Joy Williams (Introduction to 'JR' by William Gaddis)
@@BarklordYou are making exactly the kinds of arguments that Stalinists made in order to censor and force artists to conform to ideas of social realism developed by Soviet bureaucrats.
Abstract art was criticized as being merely "formalist", that is, as not expressing an officially sanctioned ideological position. And instrumental music, of course, is the worst offender. Is this really a position you want to defend?
I would like to live in a society where artists have freedom to create amazing abstract art--even if the work itself isn't political, political freedom means that artists are free to pursue their craft as they see fit.
If artists sometimes seem to be "too free" compared to the actual political situation society is in, that's an indictment of society lagging behind art--it's not a problem with art.
Art with explicit political content is precisely the kind that reinforces the status quo, and it is exactly what they teach young artists to do now.
On the other hand, art that genuinely plays with form and with expectations actually forces those who encounter the work to think differently in order to comprehend it--and being forced to think differently is precisely the type of disruption of the When artists try to make explicitly political art the result tends to be both bad art (because it must be easy to digest for the consumer in a hurry), while at the same time being ineffective in terms of political results--the worst of both worlds.
@@TheCyborgk You're arguing beside the point because you're focusing on modernist art whereas my primary target was modern art. In other words, you're focusing on a self-aware current in art of the last century whereas I'm taking issue with art from the beginning of modernity on. Note also that you're mostly citing musicians. Music is somewhat special among the arts with its inherent closeness to abstraction. But even there, it has to be said that the experimentation of those you cite was actually within a fairly narrow range of parameters: twelve-tone music contains in the name that not even equal temperament (historically a very new invention and to be distinguished from well-temperament) is questioned. There has been an enormous amount of experimentation in the descendants of classical music, but mostly under the banner of post-modernism and outside of the range of what modernists would accept. But note that the primary point of contention in the video was the novel, which reached its apex early on in the 20th century and has stagnated ever since. I imagine Cutrone would just link this to the failure of revolution, but that is too convenient to my taste, as if there weren't deep problems with the aesthetic before that. Also, again, I was underlining how there was experimentation in the 20th century, but it falls outside the bounds set up by Cutrone, which were precisely about the individual.
I guess I'm not surprised but it's interesting to note that Chris seems to be un-self-reflexively committed to a view of art as Distinction (in Bourdieu's sense).
My view of aesthetic judgment, taste and the aesthetic education of form is that of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, which they considered a universal human faculty that everyone has!
i don't find the characteristics of the reductive idpol style of "critique" unique to progressives
what i think it's really about, and a symptom of, is the inability (which chris alludes to) to think about the substance of political and economic life beyond this or how those things really connect with identity.
the limits of this particular notion of "identity" which has been popularized thru this style of criticism are easy to describe and talk about, but difficult to overlook (precisely because they are superficial and in your face). hence as much as progressives praise netflix shows for "positive representation" (which sometimes indistinguishable from tokenism to me), "anti-woke" people can't help get outraged by black little mermaid or lupin iii. how can they when that's the image right on the box?
in a way the outrage is justified if you believe the fact that what the studios are doing is empty, patronizing tokenism and pandering. except it's also silly because it's not merely "the woke mind virus" or "the agenda" that's behind it. i don't really buy the idea that writing has become radically worse because of "wokeness," as if all the effort and energy that would *usually* go into the task of writing creative scenarios has been cordoned off to be used instead for hiring specific quantities of people of different races and genders. as if only one thing or the other is possible.
however, i find that even outside these camps that lift these superficial traits in TV shows and videogames and such into the content of serious moral disputes, and elevate the act or refusal of consumption into moral or political acts, the rest of the people in "fandoms" participate in consumption in a similar way, just without worrying about the so-called moral or political consequences. they don't have any better an understanding of the setting and narrative content (or lackthereof) in fiction, and how disconnected these things often are from the personalities and identities of the characters. this is because they are either attracted to or identify with the characters themselves based on these superficial traits all the same, and don't understand how they could be informed by something like material conditions. superficial traits including not just the idpol/intersectional characteristics, but things like personality, hobbies, fashion, appearance... all viewers want is characters who are attractive and "relatable," yet being relatable just means they have hobbies, personalities and interests the viewers have, or more realistically have learned to aspire to emulate.
i think it's worthwhile to examine the extent to which characters are formulated deliberately to be taken "out of context" and reproduced/consumed again in both official spinoffs, as well as fan art/fan fiction/erotica, to become the content of "head-canons." the fictional "universe" is designed to be infinitely extendible, revamped and malleable. i think this is something that writers and producers are well aware of as they are going through their processes. consequently, coherence and meaningfulness in narrative and setting become increasingly diminished, because it's clear the particulars don't matter much anyway.
i think the indifference of the larger? group, which doesn't care as much either way about the "culture war" debates, is prudent. on the other hand, the (consequent?) low expectations regarding what fiction ought to provide, based on an assumption that it just cannot really matter at all, are a little depressing. i get the sense attempts to expand the stylistic or thematic ground of mainstream media are seen as a kind of elitist corruption, as if it isn't the elitists themselves who are cynically convinced of the worthlessness and disposability of popular fiction being part of its very purpose as "entertainment" (entertaining means no thinking!); or as if the elitists themselves aren't perpetually dazzled by the notion that there's no actual difference between a sculpture and a toilet
whats funny is that the question of identity ends up being a distraction from the actual artistic content. im not calling out just "woke" people in that respect, it's interesting to see how the "anti-woke" folks attack works for "diversifying" the cast in a work which is objectively bad regardless of the identity of the actors or characters. often the works have legitimate problems that go ignored by the "anti-woke" critics because they too are caught up in the question of identity of the characters. instead of criticizing the little mermaid remake for being a cheap money-grab, they obsess on the irrelevancy of the fact that they cast a black actress.
what's understandable is not only the desire for audiences of all backgrounds to have characters they can "relate" to but that actors of various identities have opportunities to find work for their craft. the downside of a film industry that disproportionately casts white actors is that it limits the opportunities for non-white actors. this is an understandable frustration for those nonwhite actors that don't already have marketable names like Denzel Washington. I have zero interest in watching the little mermaid remake - the original animation is fine, and don't need to watch another worse version of the same story. but the actress who played Ariel should have the same opportunities to get ahead as anyone else with talent in Hollywood.
presumably, art should reflect the existing society in various ways. the reason they don't is largely commercial, and that's both in terms of over and underrepresentation. hollywood producers just want marketable movies, and if the zeitgeist is favoring less diverse casts like in the 1960s, that is what they will make, but if the zeitgeist is favoring more diverse casts like in the 2010s, that is what they will make. yet audiences only have the adequate cynicism about these choices when it's not favoring their own tastes. moreover corporate understanding of changes in taste has something of a lag, and tends to use those tastes to distract from worse writing so they can save on the labor costs for creating original content.
a lot of this is just a symptom of America's own deep pathologies when it comes to identity that comes from its history of slavery etc whose cultural consequences continue to echo in the existing tastes, preferences, and cultural assumptions of Americans. even the categories we use can trace their origin back to that era. Americans of all backgrounds have been socialized to "relate" to characters based on certain traits, whether identities or subcultures that have been crafted and cultivated by clever marketing techniques. these debates will continue so long as the deeper systemic and cultural causes have been addressed.
Chris do you consider yourself the last Marxist because you are the last person teaching people how to be Marxists, rather than what Marxism is?
Is this why you hate the the east west Marxism distinction?
Yes.
The vibe on these just gets more and more nauseating
How so?
❤