88 Comments

1. Stan:

   Wow. Kudos to Malooga, and to De for bringing this one over. This is a very high-nutrient post. I want to add just a signpost on masculinity.

   De and I collaborated/discussed/unpacked the male violence of Man on Fire some time ago, and I included that bit as a section in Sex & War. We also had more than one exchange on how masculine violence (and violent potentiality) have morphed in response to the evolution of American capitalist patriarchy.

   One of those threads in our exchanges was related to my own intentionally provocative claim that “perfect” masculinity is indistinguishable from nihilist sociopathy. In the same way that our ecological universe is “advancing” in exponential step-changes toward the destruction of biospheric complexity, there is an analog in the universal association of violence with masculinity… In the execrable Man on Fire, we saw the portrayal — complete with sexual revenge themes that mapped directly onto Abu Ghraib — of male violence as what Walter Wink would call “the belief in redemptive violence.” In fact, the religious (and therefore moral) quackery of MOF at least attempted to ground its narrative in a familiar gendered moral convention. The writers and producers felt obliged to dress this shit up in morality, even if the Good Guys and Bad Guys were racially and nationally encoded (as in Coens’ film apparently) good-violent Americans versus bad-violent Mexicans.

   The kind of violence described in this review appears to have been more unabashed about violence for its own sake. That this VFIOS has been shifted from the creepy theatrical wrestling spectacles of WWF (or whatever they call it nowadays) enjoyed by proletarian males to the suites of Santa Monica “serious” film review crowd is a real indicator of just how decadent we have become as a culture.

   I just wish it wasn’t always an afterthought to talk about gender. I haven’t read all the comments on Louis’ blog, though I got a smattering from lurking at his Marxmail site; so I may be missing something.

   It goes without saying that the categories of race, class, nationality, gender, et al, exist in a mishmashed, mutually-recursive, and inextricable gestalt of some kind; but how does gender continue to come last? This real violence and its representation — “redemptive” or nihilisitic — in art and culture is above all masculine… masculine… masculine.

   10 February 2008, 7:55 am

2. Tom:

   There is a minor act of altruism in the film; when Moss returns to the crime scene with water for the dying Mexican. This act, more of an afterthought, is what sets off the action as it allows Moss to be tracked.

   11 February 2008, 1:26 pm

3. DeAnander:

   @tom — ah yes, the “no good deed goes unpunished” theme beloved of the anti-altruists. he attempts one act of kindness and look what happens… powerful propaganda against helping others…

   11 February 2008, 7:09 pm

4. stacia:

   ‘canuckistan’?
   can’t you just say Canada?

   11 February 2008, 10:39 pm

5. john steppling:

   This film is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel. I happen to think its among the top five or six novels in the last thirty years. The film is about as good an adaptation as one can find….but thats another story (adaptation to the screen). I found this book and film both to be expressions of the pathology of modern existence. One of the problems on the left is the reductionist reflex that demands art be *instructive*. Chigurh is, in a sense, the post modern demon (in the book is depicted as blue eyed and pale). The sheriff in the novel spends the last fourth of the book ruminating on his own complicity in the violence he ostensibly is trying to stop. He feels defeated by the savagery around him and wonders at the human condition. This is all dealt with in short hand in the case of the film….and that would bring up a complicated argument about film art that is not really to the point here. What *is* to the point is that writers such as Pinter, for example, or McCarthy, are not overtly political (or not often) but manage in their disruptive ways to force an awakening. It has obvious political point, on the surface, but it most certainly does as one digs deeper. Benjamin described Beckett as a more revolutionary writer than Brecht….by which he meant Brecht had overt political aims (great as they were) but Beckett had expressed something far more disturbing about the human condition. I read david walsh on this film over at wsws…..and Im a friend of david, but I think he got this film wrong too. Art isnt about instruction………its about a complex dialectic of forces …..and No Country for Old Men is stunning in its structure and in its resistance to formula. The violence seems, to my mind, to bear no relationship to a film like Man on Fire which is pure hollywood studio kitsch. This is anti kitsch. In the book Chigurgh leaves 3/4th of the way through. Its a strange departure for satan to make. The emptiness one feels is what McCarrthy has the sheriff talk about at the end of the novel. There is a scene in the book where the two boys, scared, help Chigurh…..its a terrifying scene for it suggests the seductivness of power and the ways in which domination work. In fact, contra to the above post, this is highly shakespearean film………McCarthy falls in line behind Melville and Shakespeare in a sense, and all of them follow the King James bible in terms of narrative tropes. Auerbach’s famous essay on Homer and the KJ bible suggests two basic narrative forms……epic and the mysterious…….and this is the mysterious, as was kafka, and as is Pinter. McCarthy is one america’s great artists. What he is saying is that shit happens, yes, and today the response afforded one in our endless society of the spectacle, is adumbrated and constricted somehow. The loss and failure of everyone in this narrative are deeply suggestive of the bedrock state of the modern psyche. I also wish to add that I dont see at all the racist implications here. I think its hard for one to sell that argument at all….its certainly not there in any McCarthy novel Ive read. A film like The Kingdom, on the other hand, is pure orientalism and racism….but not this.

   12 February 2008, 8:16 am

6. john steppling:

   follow up link to this review….of book…..

   http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=431

   12 February 2008, 8:27 am

7. Tom:

   DeAnder: Not necessarily. Moss goes back knowing full well the potential, even expected, consequences. “No good deed goes unpunished” is invoked as often by altruists and martyrs as by their opponents. Look at Christ on the cross, or more particularly Maloogas expectation of “getting our heads blown off.” The point is that you don’t perform good deeds for a reward (at least in this world) as that transforms altruism to mercenary self-interest.

   There is also an element of self-deception to Chigurh “personal integrity” and “moral code” which Kelly MacDonald’s character touches on in the end. She tells him that coinflip deciding whether he kills her is nonsense, it is he who decides, not the coin. The nihilism-as-fate of Chigurh and those like him is practiced and artificial. They impose this monstrous injustice then claim that it is inevitable and that they are detached from it. Her refusal to play along with this fake idea of fate, even at the cost of her own life is minor act of resistance, but resistance nonetheless.

   What’s more is that Chigurh himself seems to be aware of this self-deception on some level. In the scene at the gas station where he flips a coin for the clerk’s life, he ends by telling the clerk “don’t just put it in your pocket where it will become just another coin.” Pausing to add “Which it is.”

   The cliché of the remorseless killer with at personal code of honor isn’t to be accepted as correct anymore than the southern-fried homilies of the local sheriff.

   12 February 2008, 11:36 am

8. DeAnander:

   @stacia, sorry, just a feeble attempt to satirise the US right wing jargon; US rightwingnuts refer to Canada as “Canuckistan,” i.e. a communist province of the Soviet Empire. one of their many over-the-top bits of silliness. no offence meant, clearly the joke (which wasn’t all that clever) misfired.

   me, I am very glad to be in Canada. though it is getting more privatised and piratised under the Harper neocon gang as each month goes by, it’s still a kinder, less brutal and more thoughtful body politic than the current US.

   12 February 2008, 2:00 pm

9. john steppling:

   Well, it dissapoints me that the response here is so predictable. The complaint that no progressive voice is heard in the film, or book, is really the basic problem of leftist critics these days…..maybe always. Art is not here to lecture. Lectures do that fine, and essays. The questions McCarthy raises are about personal identity and the chain of relations in bougeoisie society that implicate everyone in the violence around us. The dialogue in the film (and the film has several big problems…..most clearly in how Chigurh is depicted) is straight from McCarthy, so to call it southern fried homilies suggests a rather bad ear on the part of the listener. Im curious what people here think of as good art these days? Im serious in this…….because for me McCarthy is perhaps, along with Pinter, the best living writer in English. The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do. The pathologies of modern society, the inequalities and contradictions of advanced capital find expression in the wholesale sadism of these characters — and the sheriffs slowly dawning awareness of compassion and more importantly his own complicity. Alientation operates this way. Adorno certainly understood this about culture……as did Horkheimer and Marcuse. So the quote above is almost ironic given the comments so far.

   13 February 2008, 10:14 am

10. Andrew:

    What a wonderful, thoughtful and thought-provoking review. I will see, and probably enjoy the film, but still agree with the incisive comments about mass-produces stories. Upon the birth of our eldest, we cancelled cable access, for many of the reasons above. Both my mate and myself are devotees of Jerry Mander’s brilliant “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”. Most people — of those who could actually juxtapose “television” and “elimination” in the same sentence– think the issue is content. Content can always be defended as there are enough exceptions to obscure the rule. The issue is mostly independent of content, though it is related to the homogenisation of content: what is the difference between CNN’s Iraq covergae and “Missing in Actio II”?
    As a fellow Soviet Canuckistanian (I embrace the moniker with pride) has said, the “medium is the message”.

    My fellow Canucks are unaware just how sinister Harper and his cronies are, largely due to the unambiguously cynical and corrupt nature of our “Liberal” alternative and an obedient corporate media. Imagine Bush with brains, drive and less checks and balances and you get the picture.

    I believe that our version of your Democrats (Liberals) are more self-serving and hypocritical than yours. True, we do have a leftish, quasi-credible alternative, but it functions mostly as a vote sponge for disaffected voters, though the NDP usually gets enough seats to marginally soften the tone of national debate.

    Harper’s trolling for a majority and he just might get one. We will have deserved it, most of us, thought the Afghans won’t have.

    13 February 2008, 1:44 pm

11. Louis Proyect:

    Steppling: “The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do.”

    But it does not reflect the world as it is. The indigenous people in “Blood Meridian” have no humanity. For me, it is like reading a novel about the Nazis killing Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto which puts them on the same plane. It is a deeply offensive theme, not to speak of the awful, overwritten language. It is like reading “Mein Kampf” written as a University of Iowa writers workshop submission.

    15 February 2008, 6:17 pm

12. DeAnander:

    Steppling: “The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do.”

    I was thinking about this contention, which is routinely invoked by everyone from pornographers to propagandists — er, what am I saying? by pornographers and other propagandists — to claim that their work is not propaganda, but is somehow “objective” (ah, the good ol’ Objectivity meme).

    Here I’m inclined to quote (or misquote) D Jensen: “every writer is a propagandist — including me.” every piece of literature is a kind of propaganda in the sense that it has been filtered repeatedly through authorial, editorial, and publishers’ agendas.

    C McCarthy chooses — in the tradition of H Ellison and other horrormongers of the literary world — to focus narrowly on what is worst and most brutal in the human condition. except for a less absurdly clunky prose style I am not sure how far different he is from a Bret Easton Ellis.

    at any moment in time, the human race is busy committing atrocities and cruelties, and also, maybe right next door, committing acts of great courage and altruism. the first act of non-objectivity is the choice, from among an infinite number of historical or contemporary subjects, of a particular story to tell. it could be the story of the Chiapas uprising or the Mondragon co-ops or the Maquis. or it could be the story of a Mafia family or a serial killer. a decision has to be made, and someone makes it.

    what narrative the writer chooses to narrate, and whom he chooses as protagonist, is relevant; it serves the writer’s agenda, it demonstrates the writer’s position, it is not “objective.” even an allegedly fact-based book like one of Junger’s (The Perfect Storm was his big hit), or a biography, still serves the author’s intent and presents us with a moral-of-the-story which is meant to instruct us.

    when people hotly claim that Art need not and should not represent a moral agenda, they forget Zinn’s dictum that you can’t be neutral on a moving train art is not reality; it is a highly filtered cartoon of reality, and that cartoon is always a political cartoon, one way or another. the story, and the moral the story tells, will always be pointed and selective. it will humanise some characters and dehumanise others, internalise some points of view and externalise others, tell us that some things are believable and some things are unrealistic, some things are possible and some things are not, some behaviours are rewarded and some are punished.

    and it will tell us what matters in every line and paragraph: the choice of narrative, cast, which interactions are described in full and which are left in the background, which objects and artifacts and settings are described and how they are described, will tell us repeatedly (whacking us over the head repeatedly with, in fact) what the author thinks is important and relevant and therefore, by mirror neurons or whatever mechanism you want to blame or credit, what we as the reader will — temporarily — also accept as important and relevant for the duration of our suspension of disbelief and our immersion in the experience. if the book is a very powerful one, or if we have a habit of reading in a specific genre with consistent narrative rules (boyshit suspense/adventure, for example, or girly supermarket romances), the repeated messaging about what is important and what is not important may eventually become permanent programming. and isn’t that what propaganda aims at?

    when this is done flagrantly and clumsily, especially in service of an agenda that may not even be the writer’s own (i.e. paid PR flacks, professional black-ops myth-makers, and other salaried liars and spinners) we do call it propaganda — and sneer at it. when it’s done flagrantly and clumsily in earnest service of a worthy moral agenda, like tediously predictable “racial reconciliation” movies or quaint Victorian or Edwardian morality tales for the kiddies, we also sneer at it a bit and call it preachy; sermonising often spoils a good story, at least if you’re an adult (kids can probably overlook, for example, the heavy handed Christian symbolism of C S Lewis’s kid-books, but for an adult reader it gets to be a bit much after a while).

    but when the sermonising or preachiness upholds an agenda that we are not allowed to name (like, say, heteronormativity or male supremacy or capitalism or neodarwinism) it passes for “objective” just because our literary feelers aren’t calibrated to scan the bar code on the agenda; we come up against a Laingian void — the Unmarked Category — be it neoliberalism or masculinism or US exceptionalism or whatever, and have to resort to unfamiliar “left-specific” jargon, clumsy locutions, and “argh can’t quite put my finger on it” unease to identify it.

    imho there is an established ideology of despair regarding the human condition; nihilism, cynicism, anomie, whatever you want to call it. and it has a powerful literature of propaganda conveying the moral lesson that life is meaningless, people are stupid and cruel, everyone is our for him/herself, no one can be trusted, the most you can hope for is to grab some bling while the grabbing is good. this moral lesson greatly serves the imperial/capitalist system… first, it defines ugly, greedy, grabby, and violent criminal behaviour as perfectly normal and only to be expected — indeed, as all that is possible or reasonable; next, it defines altruism, loyalty, compassion, and so forth as unrealistic, fictional, mythical, not to be attempted or expected in the “real” world (else the attempter will meet with severe negative consequences); third, it seeks to instil despair and a loathing for our fellow humans, just as flagrantly and overtly as chirpy feel-good kiddie stories seek to instil hope or good dental hygiene or kindness to elders. it is essentially a propaganda for the normalisation of sociopathy, and in a sociopathic and elitist economic and political regime it is — predictably — a preferred and encouraged literary and artistic form.

    above all, superaccumulator elites (whether they be pharaohs or kings or CEOs) need to convince the people that another world is NOT possible: that justice is a chimera, loyalty and commensality are a pathetic delusion, there is nothing to be done and nothing to hope for or strive towards. the literature of despair serves this agenda well.

    literature that blissfully denies the potential wickedness of human behaviour is no more preachy or biased or unrealistic than literature that denies the potential goodness of human behaviour. the literary school of the Unrelentingly Grim and Ugly (not to be mistaken for the Cautionary Tale as in Swift or Sinclair) should not be accepted passively, w/o critique, as some kind of objective form outside politics and ethical discourse; it is a sermon in its own right, just a sermon for a different creed.

    much of contemporary pornography is, I would say, the distilled essence of the nihilistic school of literature, w/o any highbrow pretensions to cloak the sermon: it openly celebrates cruelty, greed, and hatefulness, and expressly denies that any sexual relations other than instrumentality and exploitation are possible.

    and now we get to the big weaselly area: under what circumstances is a deeply dystopian, grim, dour, and hopeless piece of literature a cautionary tale, i.e. a warning against the worst excesses of our human nature, rather than a normalisation of them? satirists and cautionary fabulists have often been accused in their day of undermining moral fibre, being too shocking, too graphic, too negative, stripping away the decencies that make human society bearable. was e.g. Lord of the Flies a cautionary tale, or just a cry of despair? I’m not enough of a lit crit to pinpoint the distinctions but I would say that in most cautionary tales there is at least one character or group of characters who represent the other world that is possible, i.e. altruism, decency, kindness. they may or may not “win” (the story could have a happy or tragic ending) but they do exist and their moral qualities are not derided as illusory (though they may not be sufficient to carry the day).

    I’ve got a relevant quote or two somewhere around here…

    This one will do…
    

    What encourages me in this process is the “delight” that I take in the human struggle. Delight in mankind [sic] — that was the idea launched or rather relaunched in the twelfth century by the forces of humanism as they woke society from its Dark Ages.

    The Roman poet, Terence, had said long before: “I am human and nothing human is foreign to me.” It was an attitude the humanists embraced in what they saw as a struggle between delight and self-loathing — delight in your fellow man and woman, sympathy for them; in other words, a sense of society.

    — J R Saul, The Unconscious Civilisation, peroration of ‘The Great Leap Backwards’.

    I could pick quite a few nits here; the glorification of the Enlightenment and the glib dismissal of a very rich and varied historical period as “Dark Ages”, for one. A big dose of Eurocentrism, for seconds… but JRS imho is onto something in his analysis of the difference between a stance of loathing for one’s fellow human beings, and one of delight and/or sympathy. We will not build a society of sharing and mutual aid if we believe that none of the people around is is decent or deserving of help, that they are all a bunch of greedy dirty ratfinks. The very concept of “society” (the very existence of which neolibs like Margaret Thatcher openly denied) presupposes a kind of mutual regard, interest, and trust for our fellow human beings.

    so (winding up this overlong comment at last) I agree with Malooga’s analysis that literature/movies which present us (people) as uniformly self-interested and/or helplessly trapped in structures which prohibit the expression of our human sympathies and empathies are — whether expressly intended to be or not — a very effective propaganda for the new right and the new corporate/financial aristocracy.

    15 February 2008, 7:24 pm

13. Richard:

    I agree with most everything you say here, DeAnander, except I think this movie is quite excellent. There’s an argument to be made that what we see in the movie are different views of masculinity–none of which “work”. And, for one example where I differ with the interpretations of the film given above, I think that, though the movie sympathizes with Sheriff Bell, it doesn’t subscribe to everything he believes or says. Proyect says this in his review: “At one point, Bell tells a colleague that everything started going downhill when young people began to dye their hair green and put spikes through their noses.” This is true. He does say this. But there is no reason to think that this is the movie’s perspective, even if Bell serves as something of a conscience in it. I think there are other complexities in the movie that are missed by what I see here as a rather reductive political response (even one that I’m extremely sympathetic to).

    Malooga says “Yes, the cinematography and the production values were top-notch, but one expects that from any Hollywood film, and has for a long time.” Hollywood movies evince a lot of skill wasted on garbage. Praise of the Coens for this film is not for that kind of basic skill. It is for how they use visual elements to tell their story, a talent which is largely lacking in your basic Hollywood movie.

    With respect to John Steppling’s remark that art is about how things are, not how they should be–I used to hold pretty strenuously to similar views, and I like what DeAnander says in response. But I think art that does not send the kind of message I would prefer can still be “great”. Great art can still have inadvertent (or even intentional) negative propagandistic value. I’m reminded of Edward Said, and his cultural criticisms: he was discussing art he felt to be great, but art which depended on a certain worldview/condition to be produced, and also reinforced that worldview/condition.

    16 February 2008, 9:50 am

14. john steppling:

    well, let try to answer a few things here……though I may not to get all your points DeAnander.
    First…I never used the word *objectivity* — nor would I. So, I think the very notion of realism or naturalism or objectivity is specias when applied to any cultural artifact. You seem to be criticizing McCarthy for what he chooses to focus on. That seems to be a rather pointless undertaking. *He* wrote about what he chose to write about — thats his vision, and not yours. Now, you can argue that what he chose to focus on is irrelevant or meaningless — but I would argue the contrary. In fact, given another week of school shootings, more bloodshed in the name of western superiority — the imperialist expandsionist project— a book like No Country for Old Men (I will get to the film version in a second) resonates rather profoundly. Now, if you are suggesting, as you seem to be, that an artist *should* choose a morally uplifting protagonist, then I think you would have to deny most of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Flannery O Connor, Beckett and Genet and Pinter. So, clearly art would tends to, historically, focus on the failures and weaknesses of man, of the human condition. Beckett said once *failure is more interesting than success*. In any case, its not hard to find countless very negative progtagonists….killers, liars, weaklings, traitors, and collaborators. Are you actually suggesting these works are all to be discounted for this reason?

    Now, next, you seem to be saying that a McCarthy (and i guess shakespeare and Dante and Kafka and Mann etc) are ideologists of nihilism. Correct me if Im wrong here, but I would argue art is not about moral instruction — if it were we would have a very different literary canon than we do. Maybe you think that would be a good thing, I dont know. Adorno said cynicism is just another mode of conformity. So it is, but i see nothing cynical in McCarrthy, in fact I see a highly moral writer….same as Melville and O Connor and Sophocles for that matter. WE might profitably introduce the idea of what is tragedy at this point. But first……art that focuses on what is wrong does not need to provide *solutions*……and second, most importantly, a Cormac mccarthy or a Flannery o Conner or a Melville do NOT instill self loathing and apathy in people. This is just a very wrong headed idea and Im almost at a loss as to how to explain the many ways in which it is wrong. Your logic would demand we have *happy endings* and positive clearly defined moral lessons. This is usually how one can describe bad art. Its afterschool specials and its cheap best seller bromides. Your basic hollywood romantic comedy is what instills loathing…..and anomie…..because IT LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Life is not like that…….for me life is a great deal closer to the world of McCarthy. Art is there to awaken people and to do that art must disrupt and subvert expectations —- and it cannot do those things by telling polyanna stories about noble and altruistic do gooders. Life is tragic….as the buddhists say, it IS suffering. It is short and brutal (as someone else said :)) And so I would suggest the exact opposite of your conclusion. You may or may not think McCarthy is a good or great writer…..thats a good discussion, but what you are arguing in the above comment is a confused and reductive notion of how art operates. i would even say undialectical. Tragedy, to return to that idea, is the flip side of comedy…..hence those greek masks….they contain each other…..Beckett certainly saw that……….but shakespeare as well….and all of these notions evolve through time. We dont relate to greek tragedy as the greeks did….clearly, because of our notion of civic responsibility etc…..but we still to some degree feel close to Shakespeares. After WW1 aned the industrialized death of the western front and then Hiroshima, the anonymous death of air warfare……our notion of sacrifice and tragedy is altered….in complex ways. Its not nearly as simple as you would like it to seem. I have little interest in *cautionary tales* for they are usually bad art. They are simplistic and reductive. Good art and good books and films are always about many things….they raise questions and demand engagement…….and are often not pretty and are usually disturbing. McCarthy is always disturbing….but for me is a truthful writer and he writes of a world I see everyday…the brutality of advanced capital.

    16 February 2008, 3:17 pm

15. john steppling:

    two other quick thoughts. I want to make clear that there is indeed good art about noble self sacrifice. But the reason we narrative to each other….that man tells stories at all……seems to be to ask questions ,and drama is a by-product of story….and drama comes from conflict…….so conflict is usually in some way at the center of all this. Resolution of conflict cannot be told dishonestly. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest for example is a tragic story, but an uplifiting one…..and maybe its a bit too positive in the end….one could argue that……..still, the system of oppresion continues to function in that novel….the big *indian* (sic) escapes….but the rest of the patients remain….perhaps altered and perhaps not. What i see is mass media and hollywood changing even this sort of fiction where you have a film like Girl Interrupted where the system is *helpful * and careing…….whoopi goldberg is the good Nurse Rachet…….not the oppresser and not the life negative force. So, indeed the entertainment industry turns out material in support of their knee jerk beliefs….class division and on and on and on……but its perhaps even more crucial then to spot the authentic voice when it appears !! Because things do tend to get more reactionary all the time.

    16 February 2008, 3:28 pm

16. Louis Proyect:

    Cormac McCarthy’s studious refusal to spell out what he thinks about society, politics, etc. is rather clever. It allows a whole Cormac McCarthy cottage industry to sprout up in academia providing grist for the journal/conference mill. Melville, who McCarthy is inexplicably linked to (it is rather like linking John Philip Sousa to Beethoven), was never coy about telling people what he thought about society, politics, etc.

    —

    While Herman Melville never achieved the sort of superstar status of Dickens or Twain, he too attempted a career as a public lecturer. Part of his repertory was a talk on the South Seas. Although the full text is not extant, we do have notes from a “phonographist” from the Baltimore American newspaper on February 8, 1859.

    Melville recounts Balboa’s discovery of the South Seas: “The thronging Indians opposed Balboa’s passage, demanding who he was, what he wanted, and whither he was going. The reply is a model of Spartan directness. ‘I am a Christian, my errand is to spread the true religion and to seek gold, and I am going in search of the sea.’”

    Melville wonders if the Europeans will begin to tour the charming isles of the South Seas? His reply:

    “Why don’t the English yachters give up the prosy Mediterranean and sail out here? Any one who treats the natives fairly is just as safe as if he were on the Nile or Danube. But I am sorry to say we whites have a sad reputation among many of the Polynesians. They esteem us, with rare exceptions, such as some of the missionaries, the most barbarous, treacherous, irreligious, and devilish creatures on the earth. It may be a mere prejudice of these unlettered savages, for have not our traders always treated them with brotherly affection? Who has ever heard of a vessel sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside–splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?”

    The final paragraphs are the phonographist’s own words and it is too bad that we don’t have Melville’s. They deal with the colonization of the South Sea islands:

    “The rapid advance, in the externals only, of civilized life was then spoken of, and the prospect of annexing the Sandwich Islands to the American Union commented on, with the remark that the whalemen of Nantucket and the Westward ho! Of California were every day getting them more and more annexed.

    “The lecturer closed with an earnest wish that adventurers from our soil and from the lands of Europe would abstain from those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our manners, while they turn an earthly paradise into a pandemonium. And as for annexations he begged, as a general philanthropist, to offer up an earnest prayer, and he entreated all present to join him in it, that the banns [public announcements] of that union should be forbidden until we had found for ourselves a civilization moral, mental, and physical, higher than the one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.”

    full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/melville.htm

    16 February 2008, 6:12 pm

17. john steppling:

    and what is your point louis? You continue to make this same argument…..which is that artists MUST state clearly their politics…..this is simply sophmoric thinking….because i could site you a hundred great works of literature in which the author remains silent on political and social issues….at least directly silent. Your demand seems deeply confused…..and while you can argue against mccarthy, you cannot demand he do what YOU think he should — and lets also remember, as Adorno was quick to point out repeatedly, that there are huge numbers of great right wing or even fascist artists. Are we to discount Ezra Pound’s poetry because of his politics? Bresson was a devout christian and a great filmaker….but did he ever address politics directly? no. What to do with him? I guess he has no importance then, according to you. Diego Rivera had leftist politics, mark rothko didnt…..and so what? Rivera’s politics mediated his work, but for Rothko and Bresson, it was mystical and religious. Are they inferior because of it? Goya was political in all senses of the word, but Velasquez was not. Both are geniuses to my mind. Genet was a defender of palestinians….but once said, if they were to get their own country he was done with them, for he was against all nations. He has anarcho-nihilist. Bill Burroughs? Strange politics, no? Great writer to my mind. I could go on and on and on. You have even stated on your own site that two of your favorite writers are reactionaries (Waugh, go figure, and Naipaul)…….so one senses some confusion in this last comment. Someone mentioned Edward Said……whose books on orientalism are hugely important. He was quite quick to point out his love of Dickens…..who he also saw as a de-facto colonialist (one might argue that, but thats not the point). You have only these strange ad hominum arguments, Louis….that McCarthy is bad because he writes bad prose……thats a meaningless comment. What Melville thought about the english in the south seas is interesting and to his credit…..as was Conrad’s anti imperialism…..but conrad also had a few blind spots. What of it? Is Nostromo a lesser book for it? Or Lord Jim?

    17 February 2008, 3:16 am

18. john steppling:

    let me add for the sake of clarification that in one sense ALL art is political. Benjamin thought beckett more revolutionary than brecht despite the former never talking directly about political or social issues. Still, his work resonated in political ways. I would argue the same for McCarthy. What is NOT political is the kind of fatuous bland crap turned out by studios these days. Sit coms on TV, American Idol, or things like Man on Fire (since that was refrenced here) or Lord of the Rings…..the list is endless…..these are the cultural product who purpose is to keep people asleep and distracted. They are good for business, for when you leave the cineplex after Welles Othello, you dont feel like shopping….nor after No Country for Old Men in my opinion. After Spiderman, more distraction seems in order……so people go buy some new trainers. Art should be difficult and demand reflection. If it does that then it contains a political element.

    17 February 2008, 3:37 am

19. Stan:

    I haven’t seen this film. But as to the canon being filled with people who express no point of view on moral questions, let me review the bidding on those I know something about.

    Hat tip to my professor-past Frank Reuter who sometimes lurks here. He instructed me in the intricacies of Beowolf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; and lo and behold they did express points of view — very conservative ones — that were abslolutely reflective of the dominant court episteme of their times.

    Melville’s opus is a biblical allegory. Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer are deeply political writers. Elliot described the alienation of modernism very well, then injected a reactionary solution of Order into his work.

    When Rockefeller fired Diego Rivera, his call to action after the conflict settled was to encourage “color and form” neutrality as the New Cool in art.

    For that matter, Man on Fire is pretty political, as we explained, coming as it did in the middle of a public controversy about the use of torture, with an advocacy of torture sanctioned by God.

    The inescapable politics of any cultural production — especially stories — is that stories serve a critical purpose in our cultural formation by telling us how to be. Not merely reflecting reality — whatever that is — but formative of culture and therefore even of personality. This moral dimension of art cannot be abracadabraed away by liberal appeals to 1st Amendment (not saying that is an argument by anyone here) that shift premises. This confronts art with responsibility, in the existential sense expressed by Camus and others, whether artists choose to accept it or not.

    At some point, when it comes out on disc, I’ll see this film (no way am I paying $11 for a cinema ticket right now. $22 if Sherry and I go together). Then I can revisit this issue as it pertains to NCFOM. But I’d actually like to see a discussion of, say, Lord of the Rings; because this is the stuff that a jillion people have watched — often again and again — and it is formative; and by unpacking it in a public discussion using interpretive POVs that are not yet available to many of those jillions, we stand a chance of getting into their heads… and they into ours.

    That’s political.

    17 February 2008, 8:01 am

20. john steppling:

    stan…..my point is that the political dimension in any cultural artifact or product does not have to come through (and usually doesnt) the top text (as it were). Art is always reflective of its time, and I certainly have never suggested otherwise, in fact quite the opposite. But, and this is the crucial point, that work of art is mediated in other ways as well. But when you say critical *purpose* I would suggest one has to be careful with that word *purpose*. This raises a germane question about the role of culture in general. I teach at a film school, so I often wonder at what exactly art institutions are trying to do. In my case I suspect the real drive is to produce directors for Lexus commercials and polish daytime soap operas. But can institutions ever be other than that? The institution will never support an artist too critical of said institution. The dissenting voice is always marginalized. Now, i also thought i made clear that I wasnt saying art was only there to reflect reality — only that it wasnt there solely to tell us how to be either. It must try to tell the truth — a loaded comment I admit. —- But it does many things…..and Shakespeare is a good deal more than a relfection of the assumptions behind monarchy — if he even is that. Is Lear ONLY about the court episteme? I would suggest most definetely not. So, a Lord of the Rings is worth looking at because its wildly popular….and because there is really NO sub text and because it functions as a piece of kitsch nostalgia and apologia for class division and kingship. I see in this entire new wave of harry potter knock offs a nostalgia (manufactured) for colonial white hegemony. A Cormac McCarthy is to my mind a moral writer who addresses many of the basic social linkages in capitalism and the psychological deterioration under same. He is also a near religious writer. Thats all up for debate….but my objection is treat art reductively. If No Country for Old Men relfects much of the bigotry and narrowness, and more importantly the suffering of modern america….or post viet nam america in this particular case….then that is a valid choice. To complain it doesnt do other things is like complaining that Velasquez didnt paint the poor as Goya did. He didnt, but he did something else that also has validity.
    As for rivera and rockefeller…..that is true, but it doesnt mean a Mark Rothko or DeKooning are unimportant. Or even that they are not political. This leads me back to my question about what role culture is supposed to play in a society. In *this* society lets say. Adorno and Horkheimer set the terms that still apply it seems to me when they began to address mass entertainment and media, as did Benjamin too. Studio corporate products, which includes the film version of NCFOM, is more worth pondering than to field accusations that mccarthy hasnt done this or that. McCarthy like all artists focuses on what concerns him. I have argued he is an important writer. Others dont think so. But I dont think you can wave him away because he isnt overtly instructive of the values we agree with. I think he does express those in an interesting way. But there is, for me anyway, a lurking topic here having to with ANY studio product because there are labor issues behind it and because sometimes, as Godard often wondered about, all film in cineplex context contains something that supports the master discourse. Godard suggested that a close up of a face on a 40ft screen is inherently authoritarian. I wonder if there isnt truth in this.

    17 February 2008, 9:14 am

21. DeAnander:

    I suppose it’s completely apolitical that — unless I’ve missed something — every author cited by Steppling as “great” is male and many are notorious misogynists? but then, I suppose many female writers don’t decribe the world as Steppling “knows” that it is, so their art doesn’t count as “real”. or maybe reading books by girls is too sissy

    17 February 2008, 11:12 am

22. john steppling:

    no deanander, not all of them were men…..Flannery o connor is a woman. You see how stupid you make yourself look. Im trying to discuss things and Ive been quite civil. Now you start insulting me……but really, do you think your comments are serious in this context? If you dont want discussion, you should really just announce, *total agreement required* and I wouldnt bother. This is an important topic DeAnander….IMHO. Culture matters — adorno said, as maybe Ive already quoted, that fascism came to germany as a result (in good part)of the destruction of education. This is a patriarchy…..western civilization has been such….and Im not sure who was a mysogynist and who wasn’t….by your reckoning….but you seem quite keen on knowing the cheap bios of these artists rather than the works … but this desire for agreement does you no credit. Maybe try to answer my arguments. A better strategy I would think. The history of western culture is, alas, largely documented by men…..this is worth keeping in mind all the time…..but it also doesnt mean there is a reason to not discuss male writers. And for the record, a number of the people Ive cited were marginalized in other ways….by sexual prefrence, poverty, race etc. But again, insults are the province of those without any game.

    17 February 2008, 11:41 am

23. xenia:

    Just because someone is in the cannon, it does not make them an artist (even a good, albeit reactionary one). Winston Churchill got a Nobel Prize for literature, for chrissake!

    Very significantly, there are cultural differences. Burroughs to me is barely an artist, but that’s because his experience and his mode of expression do not resonate with me at all. To be more blasphemous, Mozart never meant anything to me. The much-vaunted clarity of his music I tend to find in other traditions.

    Sure, I like to think that art is on some level transcendental and universal, it can be healing, shared by all and so on. Yet, we are also formed in our taste by what we are exposed to. In that sense too, art is political, because that is a political decision. My parents’ generation love Mexican music, because that got a lot of play in the 1950s, instead of US music. But look at people who grew up in the 1960s, when cultural politics changed — it’s all Beatles and they would not think of Mexican music.

    17 February 2008, 1:44 pm

24. xenia:

    Also, as a European and Yugoslav who does Latin American studies, I seriously doubt that there is such a thing as western culture…sometimes it seems to be a very American concept, invented to disassociate from the stolen Native American lands and the strong African presence. Western culture is mostly a fantasy.

    It’s quite known most western Europeans are disappointed with modern Greeks…but that’s because they think Greece is next door to England. It’s not!!

    Only since the “war on terror” do you get that term a lot in Europe. Incidentally, this is where Adorno does fail, as brilliant as he is in writing about “culture industry” (because he does not understand folklore, blues, flamenco… at all).

    17 February 2008, 1:52 pm

25. Stan:

    I’ve actually sidestepped the NCFOM debate; and wasn’t debating at all (at least by intent). My observations were simply about the inescapability of politics in art.

    As to Lear, of all the plays by the bard, that one is imo the most consistently epistemic of its day, almost unadulteratedly so. Deeply, deeply religious in the very way that medieval Catholicism was still carried as content into the stylistic revolutions of the Renaissance. Lear’s ranting in the storm on the heath is an almost essential rendering of the belief that the gravest sin of all is despair, slid into along the slipperly slope of pride. Blaspheming that “Man’s life’s as cheap as beasts” is not mere metaphorical language; this has a very precise and (then) well-understood doctrinal meaning that is nested into a strict cosmology, complete with chains of being and celestial spheres that make music. Cordelia as representative of Virtue (also called naturalness) is almost a carciature.

    [another hat tip to Dr. Reuter’s classes some 33 years ago]

    17 February 2008, 1:58 pm

26. john steppling:

    Stan……i feel like I must not be communicating my points here. I said Lear was not JUST about its moment in time……but it is, indeed, expressed through the prism of the time….although I think I would argue with Dr Reuter about the heath speech. Jan Kott’s interpetation in his great book Shakespeare Our Contemporary is to the point here. Kott was a pole and came to shakespeare via translation. His was a very political reading of those plays — in the light of communism at that time, and he saw the mad tom/Gloucester scene as the precursor to Beckett and inherently theatrical in modern terms. But I digress…any art work is political….i think i said this already……ANY art work…..the question is do we interpret it superficially as one dimensional *instruction* or dialectically — .

    Allow me to quote Kott on King Lear;
    “only the Fool stands outside and does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances; of law , justice, moral order. He seeks brute force, cruelty, lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool knows that the only true madness is to regard this world as rational. The feudal order is absurd, and can be described only in terms of the absurd.”

    So, its tragedy performed by clowns….like Beckett. Shakespeare is of his time…and reflects it, but he is a great writer because he is also beyond his time.

    17 February 2008, 3:19 pm

27. James M:

    For the record, I saw and did not like No Country For Old Men … but not for philosophical reasons. It simply has to do with the fact that the amount of cold-blooded murder packed into that film far exceeds my recommended daily intake. Other people seemed able to handle it; I came away nauseated. Also, Tommy Lee Jones’ folksy philosophical soliloquizing struck me as a little, ummm … inauthentic.

    But I read an interview recently with the Coens where they described their movie as a “horror film,” and something clicked. Somehow, situating the film within a genre took away some large chunk of its objectionable-ness. A genre has certain rules, designed to create a certain tone, evoke a certain mood which is the signature of the genre. And no, this does not exempt the film from political / philosophical considerations and criticism; but it gives a better sense of what the filmmakers were out to accomplish, and whether they achieved it … and to me, at least, it makes going to certain extremes, as the Coens did here, more acceptable. They set out to create a mood, and they succeeded — it just happens not to be a mood I like to be in for two hours. Sky-high body counts do not translate into my preferred idea of horror, for whatever reason.

    I haven’t read McCarthy, so I can’t speak to his intentions, but I can envision the Coens, as artists, saying “Let’s make a horror film” … which, of course, being the Coens, won’t conform to conventional notions of the genre, but could still fit within the general rubric. In their case, they use a philosophical premise — that no good deed goes unpunished, that greed is the primary human motivation, trumping compassion more often than not … that far from there being some cosmic lawgiver in the sky dispensing justice, there’s merely random chance, that the vicissitudes of our fates are really just the outcomes of rolling dice, or more precisely in this case, the flip of a coin — and use that premise to inspire horror, because that is the tone they’re setting. And really, what could be more horrific than that premise? I don’t think they necessarily need to believe in it to make the movie.

    I agree with Stan that stories have the effect of creating or reinforcing a larger cultural narrative, and that we often tell stories, consciously or not, for that reason — but also, I think sometimes we simply tell stories to scare the shit out of each other. Been doing it for as long as we’ve been around, as far as I can tell. Perhaps in Louis P.’s world, there isn’t room for such trivialities — perhaps every story, to be worthwhile, must reflect and help advance The Struggle. And that’s fine with me. But in my world, a good horror story is its own justification.

    And, as I said, these films are still fair game for criticism. I will criticize the modern slasher film, for example, to no end for its misogyny and its revelry in cruelty. These films have been better termed “torture porn,” which I agree with. It’s quite a different story, though, when a film seeks to portray violence as something to be titillated by, as in these films, versus when it’s appropriately situated within a context of horror and revulsion … as I feel it was in NCFOM.

    Speaking to whether we must agree with an author’s politics to enjoy their work — I’m a big fan of the stories of Paul Bowles, which often tread the landscape of horror, however unconventionally. His signature work is “The Sheltering Sky,” which, much like NCFOM, uses a philosophical premise — in this case, “existence-precedes-essence” existentialism — to propel his narrative. His story of westerners in an alien wasteland is driven by the premise that we are, underneath our enculturated veneer of civility, mere wild animals operating on instinct … and that this veneer is much like the blue sky above us, just an illusion protecting us from the ultimate horror, which is the Void which surrounds us and lies at the core of our beings. Now, being someone with a rather mystical bent, I couldn’t disagree more with this premise. And yet, I will unhesitatingly recommend this to anyone as one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and I resonate with it in ways that, years later, I’m still trying to find words to explain. Go figure.

    Another of his short stories, “The Delicate Prey,” is of such a short length and minimalist style that it may actually be almost devoid of any detectable philosophical perspective … what it is, however, is a damned good horror story. It has no redeeming positive social value that I can tell; it paints no ennobling picture of humanity. But it is damn sure Art, a beautiful thing to behold.

    On a side note, I was troubled to read Mr. Steppling throwing out the word “stupid” in reference to DeAnander. Aside from being obviously a completely ridiculous characterization, which tends to reflect more upon the person doing the characterizing, it’s also troubling in terms of the timing of its use, right after De makes the first mention (as I can recall) of misogyny in this conversation. If, as I suspect, this timing is more than coincidental, it would seem to be just another example of lefty-boy emotional backlash against any mention of feminism. I mean damn, De sure does have this annoying habit of failing to submissively agree with every male opinion on this site, but you don’t have to go calling people names. And John, weren’t you the one throwing out charges of “ad hominum” [sic] attacks earlier?

    Echoes of Kathy Sierra …

    17 February 2008, 3:22 pm

28. john steppling:

    james….Ive been nothing but civil until DeAnander suggested I was excluding woman writers because it was too *sissy*. I said such remarks made him look stupid……which I maintain it does. But perhaps you need to re read that exchange. First, he was factually incorrect and second rude and snide. I was not. I responded to his attack on me….and really, I think in a pretty reasonable way.

    MODERATOR: DeAnander is not a he.

    17 February 2008, 5:44 pm

29. john steppling:

    and james…..I love Delicate Prey, I think its a small bit of genius. But then you say it paints no enobling picture of humanity….and this is exactly to the point. Art is not required to do so. That is what i keep calling simplistic. Art functions in a good many ways, and often this dialectic unearths the deeper toxins before anything of a cure can occur. But without that excavation you will never find the deeper truths. Thats my opinion anyway./

    17 February 2008, 5:49 pm

30. DeAnander:

    Tsk tsk, my bad not to have noticed F O’Connor buried in the long litany of Famous Male Writers. One token female, of course, completely changes the picture — just ask those who perceive Condi Rice as a trailblazer for women’s rights and proof of the feminist creds of the Bush Regime

    Perhaps I was just so boggled by an attempt to invoke the (imho shallow boyshit merchant) Kesey as a Great Name, that a coupla neurons misfired I thought the whole Nurse Ratched theme had long since been critiqued to death as a famous instance of Enemy Womanising, if I may coin a phrase. Certainly not the example I’d pick of how Art stands “outside” politics.

    All I can say about McCarthy’s work from personal experience is that 2 friends of mine read “The Road” and both reported — not quite in these exact words — that it filled them with such despair and horror that they felt like giving up entirely and running away to join the Amish, or a nunnery, or pulling the covers over their heads and never getting out of bed again. “Don’t read it,” said one. “You’ll be paralysed for days.” So I didn’t, since the experience of being bludgeoned with horror is something I can have any day just by scanning the news.

    Frankly imho there is no horror theme in fiction that can compete with what we are currently, this very minute, doing to the biosphere and to each other. Or what men are doing to women and kids, every day. Internet porn is one big shop of horrors; when we call slasher flicks “torture porn” are we implying that there is not torture in “normal” porn? ‘cos the celebration of inflicting pain and humiliation on women is everywhere. Patriarchal poetry is patriarchal politics is the same, as a very famous writer once said (or something very like it) who does not appear in Mr Steppling’s list [actually it’s surprisingly difficult/nonobvious to find the text of that poem online… lots of papers about it, quoting it, discussing it, but hard to find the full text.]

    Incidentally, iirc W Shakespeare wrote a lot of his stuff to flatter the ruling family; chunks of it are blatant swiftboating of prior contenders for the English throne… It’s still lovely stuff, but stand outside politics it does not, and deliver a tailored, directed political message it does. The groundlings were to understand clearly that Tudors were better than Plantagenets and that Richard in particular was such a vile creature that dethroning and replacing him was not usurpation at all, but — hmmm — “regime change in the cause of goodness and freedom”. It’s better literature than, say, Atlas Shrugged by miles and miles, but (at least in parts) equally an apologia for a particular political faction. Perhaps what we mean when we call a piece of literature “great” is that it has managed to transcend its agenda… that there was enough of playfulness or insight or compassion about it that even when its context as propaganda had faded, it was still worth reading just for enjoyment. (Which I fear can hardly be said about any of Rand’s output, alas — what potboilers.)

    I still suspect there is something deeply gendered about the genre of Despair and Horror Fiction, and about its readership. How many obsessive Artists of the Horrible are men, vs women? Does it prove some kind of toughness to show how much horrible graphic description of violence, pain, and cruelty one can read w/o closing the book or watch w/o running from the theatre? certainly slasher flicks are a kind of ritual hazing or proving ground for teen boys (and a way to subject girlfriends to cultural discipline: this is what happens to women alone, this is what happens to women who wander off, this is what happens to women who are too curious or not pretty enough). Does it prove some kind of toughness to stare directly into the worst side of humanity and say, “This is what’s real, and I can handle the awfulness of that”?

    It all reminds me too much of the “realism” of neocon economics and the necessity for imposing suffering and “market discipline” on country after country, because any more kindly or humane social order is “unrealistic” — because we know that humankind is “really” greedy, selfish, ugly, violent, and generally vile.

    Art is not required to do anything (except to flatter the reigning monarch, revile rival aristocratic families, sell books, inflate the author’s reputation, etc) — but can we really judge –say — Triumph of the Will only on its cinematography? Or watch a late-model lavish and well-acted miniseries like “Masada” w/o recognising it as fulsome pro-IDF propaganda? or not recognise the ideology of despair and loathing as part of the neocorporatist political moment?

    17 February 2008, 7:55 pm

31. Louis Proyect:

    “I’ve always been interested in the Southwest,” McCarthy says blandly. “There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.”

    More profoundly, the book [Blood Meridian] explores the nature of evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white, Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier.

    “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

    NY Times, April 19, 1992

    17 February 2008, 9:45 pm

32. DeAnander:

    Hmmm. why am I not at all surprised by this quote?

    “freedom” here meaning the freedom to live in a world dominated by bloodshed, empire, enslavement, colonisation, etc? the “freedom” of the Free Market again? if we desire — let’s say — to improve the species by ending, or at least struggling against, slavery, somehow that desire for freedom will “enslave” us and make us less free? talk about Newspeak.

    I have to wonder whether Mr McCarthy might not be so complacent about the story of the conquest of the Western half of the North American continent, if his racial subgroup had been on the losing rather than the winning side? maybe if he were living on a reservation somewhere with all the consequences of defeat and occupation, he might think that a bit more justice (and even some harmony) and a bit less bloodshed would not be such a bad thing.

    maybe Mr McCarthy wouldn’t be so convinced that a world without bloodshed is a terrible and dangerous idea, if his own personal safety were at risk from, say, US bombers or other mafia hitmen — or if he were swept up by HSA and extradited for “rendition”? but of course, having such an Anglo face and an Irish rather than Arab sounding name, that isn’t going to happen to him

    my personal suspicion is that those who are convinced that the world really needs no improvement or change, are those who happen to have won the lottery — be that racial, financial, national, gender… in other words, if you’re white and male, the son of a successful lawyer, and talented enough to swan around your whole life on writer’s grants and academic appointments without, say, having to work 13 hrs a day in a maquiladora, enlist in the army, flip burgers, or work the killing floor at a meat plant… sure, a bit of poverty now and then as you struggle your way towards the Oprah reading list, but it’s voluntary poverty… then I guess the world probably does look like it’s pretty much good enough just the way it is.

    for the rest of us, trying to improve it a bit makes a lot of sense — it makes only sound common sense (and good solid collective self-interest, fwiw) to “take the human for what the human is and believe it is worth trying to to better.”

    17 February 2008, 11:04 pm

33. Kevin Gannon:

    For what it’s worth, I got the feeling McCarthy wasn’t thinking about progressive activists when he said that, but more along the lines of communists and/or fans of the “nanny state”. “Improvement of the species” has a wide range of interpretation, and might be anything from Greenpeace to nazi ideolology.
    Thanks for the great posts here everyone, and just for the record, I think NCFOM is brilliant, watched it twice already. For the “sky high body count” guy, a sky high body count is what you get from Robocop, Predator, or Terminator. I counted 10 people killed on screen in this movie. I might be off by a few, but it’s a very small number by any action/horror movie standard.

    18 February 2008, 1:22 am

34. James M:

    the experience of being bludgeoned with horror is something I can have any day just by scanning the news.

    The aversion to horror fiction is certainly understandable in this light, but just to make sure I’m understood: I don’t read it for its resemblance to real life, I read it for its artifice. If I wanted real life, I’d read a history of the plague, instead of The Masque of the Red Death.

    Does it prove some kind of toughness to show how much horrible graphic description of violence, pain, and cruelty one can read w/o closing the book or watch w/o running from the theatre?

    I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly don’t read Poe / Bowles / whomever as a test of my manliness. And I don’t go near the slasher stuff — I think your analysis of that is spot-on.

    How many obsessive Artists of the Horrible are men, vs women?

    Good question. The only woman who comes to mind is V.C. Andrews, who “ranks with Stephen King as one of the all-time best-selling denizens of mass-paperback gothic horror.” From what I hear, her books are absolutely without redeeming value. This, apparently, is part of their allure among a mostly-female audience.

    But then again, how many painters in the Louvre are men? How many composers of symphonies? How many writers, period — comparatively speaking, over the course of history? Patriarchy has kept women out of artistic fields since its dawn; who knows how many female Artists of the Horrible there would be if the chance had been there. Boyshit is everywhere, yes — but I don’t know that the desire to tell (or hear) a scary story is unique to one gender.

    Re: The McCarthy quote — that is certainly a reprehensible point of view, and if that’s what he’s peddling, I want none of it. I don’t think I could separate his artifice as a writer from his philosophy, like I can with Bowles — because this philosophy is more immediately dangerous (e.g. if it’s making your friends want to retreat into a convent) than a little harmless existentialism here and there.

    I am at least glad, however, when a writer (like Ayn Rand, also) frankly identifies their premises, instead of trying to mystify them. Somehow, if nothing else, their honesty about being misanthropes seems commendable.

    18 February 2008, 1:22 am

35. john steppling:

    I confess Im growing a bit tired of having words put in my mouth DeAnander (I gave up a long time ago on Proyect)… but let me say all this yet again. First…..Flannery O Connor is a token female? That means what…..she is the only woman artist i happened to mention, therefore there must be a quota system here I didnt know about. I could also cite Alice Munro and anne waldman and a good many other women artists that I love. The point was that i listed who I did because of the context of what i was saying…..but lets go over yet again a few points. If you can stop with the snide tone and little cute emoticons it might help discussion too. Just, you know, my opinion.,

    First…if you bother to read my comments on Kesey and OFOTCN you will note i say its a *too uplifting* book (meaning borderline sentimental), but the point was that in comparison with a film like Girl Interrupted the politics of the story have shifted. The system is *your friend* in the latter while Kesey at least clings to a healthy anti-establishment sensibility — but no, I dont see it as a particularly profound book. And while one could certainly critique Ratched in the above mentioned frame, this is beside the point in the context we are discussing.

    Now Im sad your *friends* didnt like The Road…..but well, thats your friends. I have some who loved it. That kind of anecdotal remark is all but meaningless DeAnander — and art works in various ways as Ive said. I asked before, so I might have a better handle on your position, what does pass for great art in your mind?

    Per Shakespeare; FOR THE FIFTH OR SIXTH TIME, I agree all art is political…..how many times do i have to say this before you process it. My point is that a writer like Shakespeare is not JUST a reflection of the time in which he lived…..or rather, he is a relfection of his time but he also transcends it. And of course he flattered the court, but like Goya (a good example) he also subverted those flatteries and was well enough aware of the poisonious nature of power. In fact, he largely wrote on this subject. Now, Pinter writes about power too, but in a totally different way, from another strategy altogether. But neither are flattering mankind nor writing “enobling” portraits of man. Is that what they have to do to be considered of value? You describe Shakespeare as better than ayn rand……well, gosh, I guess so…..but then say shakespeare is an apologia for a certain political faction? This is really beyond simplistic. I think critics from Ted Hughes to William Empson to Jan Kott would disagree. But then I can already hear that none of those critics are women. Kott is a useful signpost here because he came from eastern europe and politicized Shakespeare a great deal, influencing along the way Peter Brook and Peter Hall. I could suggest a viewing of the great Soviet film version of Lear……fascinating to see how they approached it……but see, Shakespeare is more than just a simple apologia, and he has helped shape western consciousness and even shaped the language we use to struggle through daily reality. So I find a conclusion that suggests all he did was sort of transcend his “agenda” to be pretty limited. But hey, thats just me I guess.

    Now, nobody says you are staring into the horror and saying *I can stand this* — thats absurd and not worthy of a serious discussion. Do you HONESTLY think that a McCarthy or a Melville or whoever is doing this? And next, McCarthy is not a genre writer to my mind…..so we conflating things a bit to start lumping him in with pulp fiction. This is interesting though, because one might discuss a Raymond Chandler in this context. But I want to stay on message as Rove would advise me. My point has been that to critique McCarthy as some (you and proyect for sure) as a writer who says “freedom ” is the freedom to live in a world of bloodshed is an argument couched in bad faith. He is doing nothing of the sort. You may not like his writing for whatever reasons…..Proyect has given his arguments on that…..I dont agree, but its a valid position…….but you DeAnander seem to have no position on his work other than to suggest he is one dimensional. You seem to base this on your *two friends* who were depressed by The Road. Well, fuck, its a DEPRESSING book, but i would say thats the point. Tragedy is superficially depressing and later, in a deeper sense, it becomes liberating. McCarthy says bloodshed is everywhere…..and I would agree. He also says those who think man can be improved are the first to give up their freedoms….which I take to mean superficial and ephemeral freedoms….those of distraction…..the freedom to buy one of seventy brands of toothpaste. All the while another form of enslavement is taking place. I think you and Proyect might benifit from examining your own agendas in this debate. And I respectively request you read what I actually wrote before making comments on what I DIDNT write. I dont know exactly what McCarthy meant in that quote…..which probably has a context we dont get right here, but its not a meaningless comment to wonder at the idea of *improvement* — which is a concept often linked to Enlightenment values and assumptions and which has been co-opted in this culture in amazing ways.

    Art is there to awaken us to the world…..the political, historical and spiritual world around us….for advanced capital (as guy debord said over and over) is there to keep us alseep……the Spectacle is for distraction, to numb us and keep us from deep feeling or thought. Great art, and I consider McCarthy great, is to help awaken….the bloodshed and violence in his books is stark and part of a project to demystify the assumptions of *the West*. You may not agree he is doing it at all well, but that is what is being attempted. IMHO. Now, that myth is patriarchal and racist and all about violent oppression — and conquest….but thats not McCarthy’s fault anymore than its your fault. To demand artists paint uplifting visions of man’s goodness is reductive and simplistic….and those who demand it are the ones afraid to confront the real horror of The Spectacle. The real life negative numbing of mass marketing and industrialized death and sound bite salves for the suffering of the planet.

    18 February 2008, 3:43 am

36. Legume Sam:

    I’m amused by the long literary critiques in here, but perhaps this is only my knee-jerk reminiscence of the time I spent getting college degrees in the 1980s and 1990s. There is, after all, serious work to be done in bringing about what Teresa Brennan called a “civilizational U-turn,” reversing the world society that burns 85 million barrels of oil each and every day.

    That aside, I tend to find the reviews of movies to be much more entertaining than the movies themselves. I watch “Ebert and Roeper at the Movies” and feel like I’m getting more than I would at the movies themselves, not to mention more cheaply. When I was pursuing my Ph.D. in Communication, I was encouraged to theorize the mass media; the dropping of names such as those of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on this blog, then, produces a warm feeling in my heart out of memory of those days. In them I felt I could understand my own feelings about art — art, then, is about the social triumph of exchange value and the cash nexus; it’s about driving to the shopping mall and paying eighteen bucks to enter the theater rather than actually watching the movie. “Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part,” to quote those whose names are dropped in such celebration. Art, schmart; what’s (perverse, yet relatively safe) fun is watching the critics twist themselves into knots over it while the world goes to Hades in a handbasket. So, no, I haven’t read McCarthy, nor have I seen “No Country for Old Men.”

    Nowadays, my theories of the mass media center on the question of “why is there a camera there?” If it were real, there would be no camera there; people pose for cameras. If it were real, it would not cater to the desires of the viewing audience; merely filming reality would be too boring. Film is boring, then, but not merely because (as Proyect says) film is “merely reinforcing of the most jéjune values of contemporary society, albeit dressed up in pretty wrappers.” Even if film expressed the “right” values it would be boring. Film is boring because its attempt to replicate experience comes off as boringly false.

    John Steppling’s appreciation of Cormac McCarthy in terms of “the narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be” is certainly a valid assertion of enjoyment rights; who (esp. among the Rotten Tomatoes crowd, eh?) doesn’t like a realist moment? The question is begged, however, of why one needs art to experience realism. A hint at an answer is to be found in that word, experience; art contributes something to experience that can’t be found in the present-day, ideological, variant of “experience itself.” Maybe John Steppling gets that “something” out of reading McCarthy or watching “No Country for Old Men.” I’m OK with that, and I’m willing to defend John Steppling on it, though I’m still far, far, FAR away from being persuaded that I need to experience any of this “art.”

    Against that reading, though, we have DeAnander’s cautionary statement:

    imho there is an established ideology of despair regarding the human condition; nihilism, cynicism, anomie, whatever you want to call it. and it has a powerful literature of propaganda conveying the moral lesson that life is meaningless, people are stupid and cruel, everyone is our for him/herself, no one can be trusted, the most you can hope for is to grab some bling while the grabbing is good. this moral lesson greatly serves the imperial/capitalist system…

    Against this, John Steppling thinks that McCarthy is a “highly moral writer.” But, honestly, does that even matter? Art is not the ad hominem judgment we make of its creators; it’s a contribution to experience. I get enough ideological despair out of other people when I talk to them about ecosocialism. Why do I need more of it from a movie? Eh John?

    18 February 2008, 6:48 am

37. john steppling:

    Sam — I think you raise really interesting questions….and ones I tried less clearly to allude to early in my response to stan. The question of corporate production of ANY and ALL hollywood studio film, and really just about ALL film, is a genuine issue in all this. Warner Bros produces a film like Blood Diamonds, and ostensibly its about exploitation by the diamond cartels (DeBeers essentially) and yet what is the exact nature of the exploitation of the film company on location? I had a long debate about some of this with Colonel Chabert at her blog…….and I didnt agree with her, finally, but I think she made quite important points. Before directly addressing what you asked, let me say that one can’t fully debate the film end of this discussion without addressing the way mass media and technology have mediated the daily lives of westerners. So there are two topics…the film and the book. The issues are related but are not the same I dont think.

    So, yes I think it matters. I think culture matters profoundly, for it is how we order our thoughts and create/structure our inner lives. The quote about art reflecting the world as it is seems to be getting a lot of attention. I thought i had clarified it more in the next posting….but my point is that art is not meant to be *enobling* or superficially uplifting. Its not instructive in that sense. Now, i dont agree that film is boring. Nor do I at all agree with Proyects reductive description of it. Fassbinder, Bresson, pasolini, Bergman, and these days Bruno Dumont or even some of Claire Denis (Beau Travais for sure) are hardly boring nor are they at all reinforcing the values of contemporary society. Proyect contradicts himself (a habit of his) when he gives very glowing reviews to kistch like The Sporanos. So, film neednt be only studio pulp — and I tried to mention Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in this context. But the experience of art….the experience of the engagement with art, is something quite important to my mind. Yes, reality TV has so saturated pop consciousness that people DO perform as if on camera even when there is no camera. Absolutely. Its quite terrifying to watch in fact, and I see it in my students all the time. But what you describe as ideological despair is not what I think one gets out of what DeAnander calls *depressing* works like The Road. Depressing is a superficial description of anything anyway, its almost pop psychology. Does one come away depressed from Hamlet? From a reading of Crime and Punishment? Or from Dumont’s Flaners or Clarie Denis’ Beau Travais (two of my favorite recent films)?? I dont. My students seem not to — in fact quite the opposite. I ran into a student on the way out of the theatre after NCFOM……she was excited, said it a joy to see a film without the usual formula and with the courage to not resort to a happy ending or easy resolutions. This I take as a very good sign.

    But sam, you raise a terrifically relevant point about listening to critics rather than seeing the film. Post modern art is about *chatting* after viewing the installation or whatever…..there is no experiential content to that….its all theory and distanced….while I would argue a Rembrandt or a Goya provides one with a great deal of experiential content. Its very different……they are not the same thing. But this is era of post-irony. All is ironic. Sincerity is suspect it seems….and this accounts, in my opinion , for part of the backlash against mccarthy. I dont advocate realism….let me be clear…..mainly because I dont know what it is. Someone famous said , the theatre director from france, and i cant recall her name…she said something to the effect that if you look out the window at your dog in the backyard it seems natural…..but if you stare at it for six hours it stops seeming natural. The very notion of naturalism is indeed a construct of post enlightenment thinking……a dependency on science…..on some sort of definition of rational. I think life is quite irrational and I think art helps to mediate that irrationality. Montaigne said man is neccessarily insane…..for to stay sane in such a world is a sign of madness itself. Our own mortality and our fear of it, is there every second. I dont want to go all buddhist on everyone, but Lacan said some of this too, and Ernest Becker…..our fears of our transcience, our inevitible death, is a good part of what drives art and cultural output. All art is political and all art is, I think, in some sense religious. Your quote from Hork and Adorno was in the context of the culture industry…..and adorno’s opus Aesthetic Theory makes pretty clear his devotion to what he saw as *real* art.

    18 February 2008, 11:33 am

38. DeAnander:

    To demand artists paint uplifting visions of man’s goodness is reductive and simplistic….and those who demand it are the ones afraid to confront the real horror of The Spectacle.

    speaking of being misquoted I don’t recall ever having “demanded” that artists produce uplifting visions — and I certainly would not have said “of man’s goodness” — merely contending that we have every right to analyze the degree to which they intentionally or accidentally prop up abusive systems. for those traumatised by Stalinism, I wholly understand the warning lights that flicker on as soon as we apply political critique to literature — but imho there is a world of difference between official State censorship and the free expression of criticism by individuals of the corporate media in which we are marinated.

    all this kerfuffle about Great Art frankly leaves me yawning — for a start it’s Eurocentric in the extreme — and given the bloody and indeed omnicidal track record of “the West”, why on earth should we assign any but the most dubious significance to those officially recognised Great Artists who have “influenced Western thought”? either they have been doing a piss-poor job of influencing it — since the outcome is so intractably, consistently stupid and destructive — or their much-vaunted influence has been incredibly sinister.

    if pressed I would say that Great Art is, evidently, art which educated people with leisure time enjoy and collect, and which provides a living for an extensive cottage industry of critics and instructors-in-appreciation who in turn, self-referentially, get to define what is Great Art. like haute couture or haute cuisine, it’s an amusing (and it can be a delightful) hobby for a privileged few who play a gentle game of point-scoring by dropping all the right names, and who demonstrate their social position, memory skills, and a certain amount of personal discipline by the hours they have been able to spend training themselves in appreciation of the fine points of whatever — be it wine tasting, snuffbox collecting, Noh theatre and fine calligraphy, or film crit.

    I’m not knocking any of this — it is harmless enough and far preferable to foxhunting — just another version of knowing the entire game history of the Dodgers or being able to identify every make of train engine past and present on UK rail. we all enjoy knowing about things, memorising lists, having expertise — it’s a human thing, and was once actually essential to our survival. the civilised, cultivating utter ignorance of the processes that keep us alive, instead demonstrate a scintillating mastery of useless knowledge.

    this kind of thing is a hobby that, having the privilege of some education, I often indulge in myself; but like “high” finance, it’s merely a game of juggling abstractions. (imho you can always tell how far something is divorced from the everyday business of living by how often “great” or “high” or “advanced” is prepended to its name — and here I’ll invoke Veblen as shorthand for an analysis of disutility as a marker of status).

    but no, I don’t believe in transcendental, magical qualities in Art with a cap A; I did once, years ago, but I don’t any more. it is discussed here with almost religious zeal, like a salvational option, a way to save our souls from the “irrationality” of life. but here again I differ with the first premise: I don’t see anything irrational about life, even its seamy side. violence and greed are perfectly rational. killing people to steal their stuff, or to keep a secret, or because it makes the killer feel powerful, is perfectly rational — sociopaths are often extremely, narrowly, obsessively rational. there’s nothing irrational about the exercise of power. and there is nothing irrational in resisting it, when it’s being exercised at your expense.

    the essential difference I suppose between my POV and Mr Steppling’s is that while he considers McCarthy’s work to be a courageous critique of the Spectacle [and I couldn’t agree more about the poisonous nature of the Spectacle and the tragedy of the imaginary camera which increasingly dominates people’s perception of their own lives], it sounds to me like merely another part of the Spectacle aimed at a more upmarket audience — another nickel-a-look horrorshow to keep us comfortably numb, engaged with fantasy, camouflaging the structures of power and the flow of resources with a smokescreen of “everyone’s equally nasty and nothing makes any sense.” (to me this is tangentially reminiscent of those who obscure the fundamental dynamic of the Occupation of Palestine by handwringing over “so much violence and hatred on both sides,” thus veiling the relation between occupied and occupier and the real possibilities of justice and redress)… theft makes perfect sense; the real question is what the heck to do about it.

    there is a Spectacle for the highbrow and the middlebrow as well as a Spectacle for the lowbrow: I just don’t see McCarthy’s work and the rest of the genre — especially as translated to film — as functionally different from a Survivor show or a slasher flick, even if it is better crafted.

    this whole thread if pursued far enough would inevitably lead us to a critique of “civilisation” and the whole ranking system of “high and low”, “advanced and primitive”, “fine art vs craft”, that the civilised use to keep the feral, the peasant, and the indigenous firmly in their place.

    who the heck has six spare hours to stare at their dog, anyway?

    18 February 2008, 2:35 pm

39. john steppling:

    well, DeAnander……let me get this straight. Art with a –as you put it — capital *A* is equivalent to stamp collecting or wine tasting. Thats a curious position — so me let see if i can follow the logic here. Because western civilization is corrupt and life negative and exploitive, the art that came out of this civilization must not be doing its *job*….correct?! Well, for me the demands of engagement with art are rather intense and revealing of ourselves….but as an aside, if this is so meaningless, why are you writing about it? I mean you could write about snuff box collecting probably and save time. But ok, lets brush aside that contradiction for now. I feel somehow I better lay out a little of my background….since you seem to infer a few things (upper class, leisure, social position etc)> . I came from a welfare family, dysfunctional drunks and unemployed types…..and i went into rehab and jail far more than I went to school (never went to college)….so like stan in a sense Im an auto-didact. I teach now where i teach because i became a writer…..and got a few rewards for that but then split. So in no way is my perspective upper class or anything like it. I felt saved by art…..when i saw my first Beckett play at 16 I think my life changed forever. Prisoners all over grasp Beckett….ask Rick Cluchy…..but enough bio. Your attitude strikes me as resentful somehow. I asked before, and I ask again, what art matters to you, or does it matter at all? You seem to imply it doesnt matter. Well, ok, we’re back to why you bother to write on this thread……

    To suggest that art is a high brow leisure class recreation is highly insulting to the working classes. Dont they deserve the enrichment that comes from a great painter or a Bach or a Bowles or a Tolstoy? The point is not that art is part of the oppressive machinery……its that great art actually is act of resistance. You seem unable or unwilling to differentiate between art and kistch entertainment. For you its all the same. Is a Pasolini part of the petit bourgeoise system ? Genet? Villion? I would suggest its rather your position that smacks of privledge and condescension to the lower classes. If you really are trying to say a Shakespeare is simply another nickle a look horror show (as you put it)…then I dont know…but you think that….REALLY???? So great art is just eurocentric and part of the system of oppression. Although also sort of harmless, right?

    Let me add finally, that as for euro-centric. This is just one of those words that get tossed around a lot. In some contexts it has meaning …. in others none. Yes, what we think of as *A*rt is mostly part of a european tradition….although today I think thats a mute point. But it does not render it any less an act of resistance….AND more to the point, an act of personal awakening. To live in a world without Tolstoy or Bach or whomever is not a world I want to live in. The poor masses in Lagos and Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City and Sao Paulo and etc etc…..they can full well appreciate art. They create it….they create their own. Im western, american, white….and so I link with my experience. You should be careful about assumptions though, DeAnander….they get you into trouble. Art was appreciated by Marx, by william morris and by Lenin. That should tell you something.

    18 February 2008, 3:19 pm

40. john steppling:

    and apologies for the typos (and stuff like mute point instead of moot)…..just a bit rushed.

    18 February 2008, 3:37 pm

41. Legume Sam:

    To John Steppling:

    I don’t know what good it does your cause to suggest a canon of authentic art. “Fassbinder, Bresson, pasolini, Bergman, and these days Bruno Dumont or even some of Claire Denis (Beau Travais for sure)” may not be boring to you, but do they interest everyone? DeAnander’s comments point to how late capitalist society has reified you into your place within an “extensive cottage industry of critics and instructors-in-appreciation who in turn, self-referentially, get to define what is Great Art.”

    Culture may matter profoundly, but “it is how we order our thoughts and create/structure our inner lives” only if we are actually in dialogue with it. If we’re not, then we’re actually in dialogue with some other culture. This is what makes the criticism part more fun for me than the actual viewing of culture. Art itself provides no particular experiential content unless we are paying a specific type of attention to it, and so with dialogue about art we can see what people really think about it, thus what type of attention they are paying to its content.

    What to do? Sometimes in dialogue it is best to address the audience as it is, especially if it doesn’t appear as if they want to do the hard work of addressing you as you are. Since many the folks who read this blog know Marx, you could try ruthless historicism, as that’s a marxist trope: historicize yourself, historicize McCarthy, historicize “No Country for Old Men,” historicize its audience.

    As for Adorno’s endorsement of some culture, there’s a contradiction to be explored there. Remember that Adorno also once said that “after Auschwitz, all culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.” Adorno was the quintessential philosopher of the early era of consumer society. He suggested in Negative Dialectics that “the power of the status quo puts up the facades into which our consciousness crashes. It must seek to crash through them” — Adorno thus advocated the freedom to think in a historical age which (as he saw) was without revolutionary content. Adorno’s prose moved around, constantly in search of the comment which will expose ideology, in hopes of moving readers toward a nonideological philosophical experience. His words motivated people toward no specific action. He was himself a representative of the (capitalist) academy of his time.

    Nearly forty years after Adorno’s death, our situation is different. At some meaningfully-soon point the ship will go down on the society which in Adorno’s time was still engrossed in its peak experience. We may at some point need a revolution at the point at which such a thing will be least accessible. I think my piece on capitalist discipline and ecological discipline expresses a direction in which it will have to go.

    18 February 2008, 3:57 pm

42. john steppling:

    sam, I look foward to reading your piece. For the moment allow me make clear that Im not suggesting a canon of any sort. I was trying to suggest artists I found important…those who had somehow managed to find a means to avoid the endless provess of co-option that this system attempts. Other people will have their own canon of sorts, I suspect. I also dont think art (or is it Art?) is for mass consumption (sic) — it doesnt have to be. Im only arguing that art as a political force, at least on a personal level, and a force of personal awakening (religious?) exists. DeAnander may feel my position has been reified, although she doesnt exactly say so (you do) but Im not at all sure I agree with that. You can read more of my dialogue with guy zimmerman here:
    http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/

    if you dig back to a posting intitled Post Modern Demon, I believe we are talking about No Country for Old Men.

    18 February 2008, 5:02 pm

43. john steppling:

    oh, and I think Adorno did not expect his words to move masses into action — that does not mean they did not, and do not continue to, have a political effect.

    18 February 2008, 5:03 pm

44. James M:

    “Film is boring.”

    The last “great” film I saw (twice, no less) was called There Will Be Blood. It has been compared extensively to NCFOM, but the comparisons are superficial. They are very different films, especially in the sense that “Blood” does contain a moral center (however understated.)

    The climax of the film, most agree, is the scene where the oil derrick erupts and we witness the mad glee on the oil-blackened face of main character Daniel Plainview, peeking out of the darkness and lit a flickering orange & red by the raging fire before him. Multiple layers of symbol, and centuries of history, compressed into one 16:9 frame.

    Another scene, much less spectacular, moved me greatly. Plainview and his son, on the pretense of hunting quail, are surveying the oil-rich land they wish to buy for a song from a family of goat farmers. The son asks the father, “How much are we going to pay them?” Plainview grins, and replies “Not oil prices … we’ll pay them quail prices.” And then laughter, in which the son is invited implicitly to participate. This scene summarizes for me the death of innocence, and of the sense of fair play and compassion, that capitalism demands each of us undergo at a young age. And it happens just this subtly, as a hand-me-down from father to son.

    Now, to witness these scenes, I am apparently willing to get in my car — fueled by the diminishing supplies of black gold that inspired Plainview’s madness, not to mention contributing to global warming — and drive to the Emeryville Megaplex. Whereupon I exit said vehicle into a carcinogen-filled parking garage, and then pay $11 for the privilege of sitting in an climate-controlled dark room with a big screen. The megaplex, incidentally, sits on top of land stolen from the Ohlone, who, as a consolation prize, had a street running through the mall complex named after them. Also, this land is a redeveloped landfill, which is termed by geologists a “liquefaction zone.” Meaning, when the next big Hayward Fault earthquake hits (any day now, they tell us,) the ground will become the consistency of quicksand, and me and my fellow mirage-bedazzled movie patrons will, along with this multi-million-dollar complex, be swallowed by the earth.

    Sometimes I think of Emeryville as a nice little microcosm / metaphor for this whole system.

    Taken in this larger context, moviegoing seems a little absurd, I have to admit. But something compels me to do it … and it isn’t because I’m seeking “boredom.”

    18 February 2008, 5:26 pm

45. Chris:

    I have read McCarthy’s The Road. I and everyone I know who has read it was surprised by the paradoxically uplifting and hopeful aspects that outshine the despair and hopelessness. I highly recommend it and I want to thank Oprah for exposing probably millions of readers to a book that they might never have given a second glance.
    Another book that I found greatly disturbing but more overtly politically symbolic or allegorical is Blindness by Jose Saramago. Horrible and enraging things occur in the book. I don’t for a minute believe that he is advocating any of those things by writing about them. Many acts of love and compassion occur as well. Even though I don’t know him well enough to speak authoritatively on his intent I have a sneaking suspicion that he would strongly encourage such behavior.

    18 February 2008, 5:30 pm

46. DeAnander:

    You should be careful about assumptions though, DeAnander….they get you into trouble

    my, that’s a nice bit of condescension coming from the guy who so confidently assumed that I’m male

    I know plenty of people from poverty backgrounds who at some point in life learned to appreciate literature, foods, etc. usually considered the province of the upper classes. to what extent these things were inherently so wonderful, or whether the sense of upward mobility and escaping from oppression that they lent to the struggling person was the attraction, I’m unable to say. for e.g. my mother, who came from poverty, I think the pleasure of appreciating good wine is at least as much in the satisfaction of occupying social territory that was forbidden to her parents’ generation, as in the taste of the wine itself.

    imho what elements of culture people learn to appreciate is not predictive of their background (not nearly so much as it was even 100 years ago) and so I think we can quite accurately characterise some cultural artifacts and tastes as historical products of the upper class or a caste system, without falling into the reverse generalisation that all persons who enjoy or engage with these artifacts are upper class. upper class tastes/modes always percolate downward; the high heels that working class American women routinely wear, and the heavy makeup as well, were once the high fashion of a select few aristos. so it doesn’t surprise me — or imho invalidate my view of the Canon model of Art as deeply linked to class and the history of patronage of the arts, etc — that any individual appreciator of any part of the canon can be of any class background whatsoever. some of the biggest snobs in the world are “self-made men”

    if first exposure to Beckett was a life-saving experience, that’s great. however, I also know people who swear their lives were saved, as miserable alienated teenagers, by watching Star Trek. maybe that makes Star Trek Great Art. or maybe it means that at certain points in our lives any random voice can speak to us, at a critical moment, with the power of epiphany or the possibility of escape — even art that contains a high percentage of kitsch. unhappy lives have also saved by discovering Christ, or falling in love, or realising that what one really wants to do is be a baker rather than a mechanic. I don’t see that this really makes an argument for some kind of inherent universal quasimagical power in cap-A art as opposed to any other kind.

    If you really are trying to say a Shakespeare is simply another nickle a look horror show (as you put it)

    actually I didn’t say that about WS, I said it about NCFOM and/or The Road, or by extension the contemporary genre of “gross me out with unlimited violence and pain” lit. (unless Mr S is calling C McCarthy “a Shakespeare,” which seems a bit hyperbolic even for a fan…?) misquoted again, alas.

    though in his own time, of course, the blood-n-guts aspect of WS’s plays was quite an attraction onstage — despite the then fairly basic state of the art in prosthetics and stage trickery — so there was a horrorshow aspect to the original performances that has been toned down a lot over the centuries (and then gleefully revived in some recent productions).

    there’s a schadenfreude element in observing other people’s pain, death, humiliation, etc. which is tweaked by various forms of public entertainment — people used to come in droves (and bring picnics) to observe a hanging or a lynching, or of course to the officially-funded Colisea of a previous “full spectrum” dominator nation. my contention is that much of the shock/horror lit plays to this schadenfreude or vicarious/voyeuristic sadism in the audience rather than eliciting any sense of compassion for the observed suffering: while it titillates at the time of consumption, its net effect is to numb and desensitise the viewer/reader. I think we can to some extent infer the progress of the numbing process by the steady escalation of the ingenuity and nastiness of the violence/voyeurism mix required to sell books/movies.

    because I tend to regard this process of numbing as a handy social control mechanism by which authoritarian elites defuse public resistance, instil despair, and normalise violence and domination, I find it worth studying and thinking about, with some hope of undermining or challenging — or at least discussing — it. hence my interest in Malooga’s film review which raised exactly this point.

    as to “the masses” — if there is such a generalised entity, which I seriously question — of course “they” (we) deserve access to every kind of art, and the leisure to enjoy it and think about it — just as “the masses” deserve really good food and the leisure/resources to eat for pleasure and health rather than for quick low-grade fuelling of the body to labour further for others’ profit. “the masses” have a right to enjoy Shostakovich, but imho also have every right not to have a canon established by the upper classes imposed on them, to be told that they are required to like Shostakovich (or even the far more accessible Bach) or Tolstoy or even Shakespeare, in order to “advance” themselves.

    maybe there is such a thing as the “universal story,” a commonality between all forms of storytelling that would make, say, Beckett translated into !xu (!Kung language) moving and engaging entertainment to an audience of !Kung. I have my doubts… sometimes I suspect that the commonality of “great art” across cultures is actually a commonality of the culture of elites, i.e that all imperial cultures tend to generate similar art forms at their peak.

    Art was appreciated by Marx, by william morris and by Lenin. That should tell you something.

    it should tell me what? that three names picked from the officially approved canon of famous western whiteboys were, themselves, appreciators of the officially approved canon of famous western whiteboys as it stood in their own day? how self-referential is that?

    am I supposed to be surprised by this? or impressed? are these names supposed to be so iconic that I pull my forelock and cry “Gimme that Old Time Religion! it was good enough for Lenin, and it’s good enough for me!” ?? as I’m neither a marxist nor a leninist (though I admit to having a slight fellow-feeling for Wm Morris), why should dropping these particular Great Names have some kind of trouncing effect on my longstanding skepticism about the whole Western Canon concept?

    and why, in g-d’s name, is it that so many of the same people who repeatedly rave about how Art is transgressive and rebellious and freeing and inherently subversive, always-but-always resort to a memorised litany of canonically-approved Great Names in order to determine what is and what is not “great” art — and to instruct others in what they should and should not appreciate? there is something so inherently authoritarian about the whole framing… a kind of orthodoxy, imho as stifling as any other (be it Party discipline or liturgical discipline).

    as far as I am concerned, end of topic…

    18 February 2008, 9:15 pm

47. Legume Sam:

    Just to play with the echo here:

    “Film is boring.”

    In this stage of my life-cycle I find nature to be more exciting than film. I’m not thinking of nature in the sense in which it is depicted in Wordsworth’s Prelude, no, but rather nature as an ecosystem, nature as it has been studied by botanists and ecologists and entomologists and geologists and so on. With film I feel manipulated; its fast actions and camera movements feel too much like immediate gratification. Film seems too easy, arousing my suspicions. Understanding nature, moreover, is more of a challenge, and I like that challenge.

    19 February 2008, 12:22 am

48. john steppling:

    well, I never assumed you were male./…..where did that come from? Im not sure I assumed anything about your gender. (insert cute emoticon of choice here).

    As for *end of topic*….Yeah, I don’t blame you. (insert another cute emoticon here).

    And if you had bothered to read a bit more carefully, you’d note that I said I didnt really believe in some *canon*….that people best start to dig for themselves. You can try as hard as you want to turn me into an elitist or class collaborator or social climber….self made or otherwise, but I suspect this demand says a good deal more about you. Again, you seem the one with issues about condescension. In any event, the reason those names appeared (which you angrily denounce as famous western whiteboys…) is because they happen to have rather profound observations to make on art and culture. I’ll add Adornon again….who for all his faults, remains the best philosopher of culture in the 20th century…IMHO.

    The question of *universality* is interesting. Its safe to say, unless you can really back up your arguement, that an appreciation for Tolstoy needn’t be, or actually usually ISNT a product of ruling class imposition. Your position is that a love of Tolstoy if just a learned social ornament — that such work is also only harmless — better than foxhunting. You say the purpose of dark stories or films is to titillate and then to numb…and yet I gave examples of students who believe otherwise (and above comments have said otherwise)…but perhaps you know best what other people feel.

    ** on the one hand you say the ruling class imposes a canon, and also somehow simultaneously uses shlock art as a control mechanism. So the canon is for those social climbers who want to breathe the air of the upper bourgeoisie, and there is schlock for those who dont. But all of it , to your mind, is in the service of elitist domination. If i re read a lot of the comments here, in fact most of them, I see people engaged with questions of art. In fact engaged enough to write about it. You do them a disservice by suggesting they could just as well could be wine tasting or collecting snuff boxes. Again,it is you who are the class elitist I fear.

    19 February 2008, 2:44 am

49. DeAnander:

    well, I never assumed you were male./…..where did that come from?

    17 February 2008, 5:44 pm, to be precise.

    (link to original in this thread)
    

    james….Ive been nothing but civil until DeAnander suggested I was excluding woman writers because it was too *sissy*. I said such remarks made him look stupid……which I maintain it does. But perhaps you need to re read that exchange. First, he was factually incorrect and second rude and snide. I was not. I responded to his attack on me….and really, I think in a pretty reasonable way.

    MODERATOR: DeAnander is not a he.

    19 February 2008, 1:20 pm

50. DeAnander:

    In this stage of my life-cycle I find nature to be more exciting than film

    I couldn’t agree more, LS. thanks for introducing some freshness to the exhausted topic. imho there is far more interest in a cubic inch of healthy topsoil than in all the output of Holly- and Bolly-wood combined; and what is going on in that cubic inch of topsoil is far more relevant and important to the survival of anything recognisable to me as “my” culture (including the fun froth on the top, such as the output of the -woods and the content of bookshops). I don’t know why I would waste scarce reading time on “doom porn” (a phrase that could do with some unpacking) when I could be reading Mycelium Running.

    19 February 2008, 1:27 pm

51. James M:

    Echoing back …

    In this stage of my life-cycle I find nature to be more exciting than film

    imho there is far more interest in a cubic inch of healthy topsoil than in all the output of Holly- and Bolly-wood combined

    It’s nice to imagine a day when I will attain to this enlightened state … and there’s only about 10% sarcasm intended with this comment. The sarcasm comes from the perspective that I don’t think there will ever come a time when film ceases to be important to me, ceases to have something to teach.

    The seriousness comes from agreeing with D. Jensen’s counter-intuitive (if you live in this culture) thesis that we are actually understimulated by the glut of video games, tv shows, and other aspects of corporate monocultural output, compared to how stimulated we could be by the natural world. And unfortunately, the same filters I apply in city life to screen out the daily obscenities like jackhammers pummeling pavement, car exhaust assaulting my lungs, and the sad ratio of concrete, steel and plastic to green space, are the filters that get applied to my time in nature. I’m so used to having to desensitize myself, it’s difficult to re-sensitize to the fine details of the natural world, in which there are no shortage to take delight.

    But for better or worse, I seem to have cast my lot in documentary filmmaking (shooting one right now) … which means trying to fit the complexities of Life into a 16:9 rectangle, making pale facsimiles of reality, participating in the Culture of Make-Believe.

    Even Jensen, though, was recently issuing a call for entries for his “Endgame International Film Festival” … indicating his belief, which I share, that film does have some worthwhile role to play.

    19 February 2008, 3:33 pm

52. Richard:

    Wow, this thread took a really dispiriting turn. As I mentioned above, I thought Malooga’s review was interesting, but overly reductive. I thought what she (?) said about film in general was more interesting (for example, it’s absolutely worth reflecting, and interrogating, how expensive even the cheapest movies are to produce, and what that says about it as an art form), though I thought that those things perhaps got in the way of her response to the film.

    DeAnander, I found your replies to John Steppling to be a bit odd in the context of the thread. You might not care what I think, I don’t know, but for what it’s worth, I think this is one of the best sites on the web; I come here all the time for great insight and important discussions–I love the focus on gender, and masculinity, and local solutions, and financial problems, as well as the posts that discuss things in historical context. I’d comment more often, except that I often feel overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of your knowledge and Stan’s knowledge, and both of your abilities to marshal that knowledge (and the apparent speed with which you do so). But here, I felt you were off base more than once. I didn’t think Steppling was perfect, but I could sense his building frustration, and to an extent I shared it. It seemed clear to me that at no point was he either erecting or assuming a canon (white male or otherwise) to try to trounce you in the discussion. He was arguing on behalf of art and the experience of it, and trying to make claims on how that experience can and does help people in their everyday lives, including helping people understand the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism, authority, etc. I thought he was making pretty good arguments, especially as against the reductive propagandistic argument above. I didn’t see much engagement with those arguments. (Calling you stupid was wrong, but the comment he was replying to struck me as especially glib and unhelpful in the context of the discussion.)

    I really got the sense that you had no interest in anyone even trying to argue in favor of art, that you weren’t interested in a discussion, except insofar as it supported the reductive idea of the propagandistic role of art. To end the discussion by chiming assent with Sam’s comment favoring nature over film sort of reinforces that sense. (I mean, you know, I love nature too, it’s endlessly fascinating and beautiful! But I also like movies. Yet I think an excellent argument can be made that there is fundamentally something wrong with movies as a form, given how they are produced, how much they cost, how those facts, no matter the ultimate content, serves to undermine any good messages that may or may not be in them.)

    I’d like to make one other note: I doubt that anyone particularly cares whether or not you read, for example, The Road. I’m guessing that this is what you’re referring to as “doom porn”. Well, it’s not doom porn. It is a heartbreaking work of fiction (and, for the record, I am not a huge McCarthy fan by any stretch–though, yes, for the record, there are those critics who would include him in a “canon” of great writers that also includes Shakespeare). Among other things, I found it to be an interesting evocation, much like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, of what we could be headed for if things continue as they are. In many respects they are very different books, but they have that in common. In The Road, things appear hopeless, and in fact, the father’s view is that things are hopeless, but he tries to keep his son more hopeful (that is, keep him believing that it’s worth going on, even as he doubts it), even as he tries to discourage his son from trusting other people. Yet, to the extent that the book has what could be called a hopeful ending of sorts, then it’s because we see that the boy is right, his father wrong. In order to survive, he must rely on other people (strangers) to help him, as we must work together to get out of the mess we’re in. This is likely not McCarthy’s intended “message”, to the extent that there is one, but it’s in there. Anyway, this is not an argument that you “should” read it. I just wanted to throw an alternative reading at you to run alongside your friends’ assessment.

    Anyway, I’m coming in late; I don’t mean any offense. I’m only commenting now because I’m confused as to how this discussion unfolded the way it did.

    19 February 2008, 3:54 pm

53. Legume Sam:

    Maybe I’m just getting old or something…

    19 February 2008, 11:00 pm

54. DeAnander:

    I mean, you know, I love nature too, it’s endlessly fascinating and beautiful! But I also like movies.

    oh dear… I wonder if I can explain how deeply alarming I find this. and I don’t mean to yomp on Richard specifically or personally — I think this is actually a solidly majority sentiment among our contemporaries. that’s what’s scary about it.

    rough translation:

    I like oxygen, it smells nice. But I also like chocolate.

    There’s a big difference, eh? “Nature” is not a spectacle, not an accessory, not an artifact, not decorative, not optional, and hence qualitatively utterly unlike anything human-made. It is nothing less than the substance of every breath we take, every molecule of water in our bodies, every calorie we consume and expend. We could live the rest of our lives without ever seeing another movie, and we all be just fine. We cannot live one more hour, let alone one more year, without what we vaguely call “nature” — biotic (especially microbiotic) processes. “Nature” is not chocolate, it’s oxygen… Movies are not oxygen, they’re chocolate.

    Which one can we literally not live without? Statements such as Mr Steppling’s above:

    To live in a world without Tolstoy or Bach or whomever is not a world I want to live in.

    are incomprehensible to me — and not because of the syntax. It’s the sentiment that flummoxes me completely.

    It seems that we are about to be living in a world without polar ice caps — if indeed such a world is possible for us to live in, in any way that will be halfway recognisable as a continuation of the civilisation we’ve become accustomed to. That is going to make a hella lot more difference — most all of it highly negative and damaging and possibly lethal — to billions of people than the existence or nonexistence of Tolstoy or Bach. They are luxuries. I am not saying that art/beauty/ornament is a luxury per se — we humans seem to need it deeply, self included — but that institutionalised, reified, Received Art, the whole game of Great Art and Fine Art, of schools and modes and criticism and collecting and valuation and the NYT list and the Oprah list and so on, is a civilisational luxury, not unlike pyramids or supercolliders.

    This whole hotly debated thread here is a luxury activity… and the energy and expropriation regime that supports that luxury — our “civilisation” — looks to be just about over. Can we imagine the whole industry of professional lit crit, the elaborate social structure and hierarchy of the publishing and movie industries, the rubber chicken dinners, the signings, the academic departments, the apparatus of Big Lit, without the fossil-based infrastructure and the spare wealth to support it all? Will the NYT Review of Books still be publishing in 10 years? how expensive will a cinema ticket be when gas is $20/gal and rationed? how many people will be driving to megaplexes? will what we now call the movie industry survive, or be replaced by something entirely different? and what will that mean for the whole cult of the Auteur and the Survivor-show aspects of Getting Famous?

    Meanwhile, a lot of people are about to lose their lives (and already have) due to the scramble to loot the resources that support the civilisation known as the “West”, as in that “Western Thought” that is supposed to be such a Holy of Holies. Are those people comforted to know that they are dying to support the resource extraction pattern that — in the end — enables luxuries like the informed and properly reverential appreciation and iconification of Tolstoy and Bach, “advanced” literature and music? I kinda doubt it.

    The really troubling question is whether it is possible to have e.g. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Bach — that is, canonical art and/or the whole apparatus of fame and “sophisticated” art/lit — without the looting apparatus of an empire to support the accumulator regime that enables the leisure (and the appreciation cult/fetish) that enables the consumption of the luxury of formalised, reified fiction and music. This really is a bothersome question. We could claim that capitalism is not necessary to support, e.g. formalised public art like the ballet or the symphony, since the Soviets had fine examples of each; but the Soviet system was also based on liquidationist industrialism — having in thermodynamic terms more in common with capitalism than different from it.

    Anyway to me, at this point, even the Greatest Names of my own cultural canon — even the books and music I personally love the best — seem like irrelevant ephemera compared to a functioning biosphere and a stable climate, adequate topsoil, low toxicity, etc. They are simply no longer fetish-objects or ikons for me — they’re chocolate. Very nice — addictive even — very pretty, very tasty, but hardly to be compared with oxygen, water, trees, earthworms, survival skills. I no longer feel that proper acculturated sense of reverence and awe when the Great Names are recited or even when the idea of Transcendent Art is invoked; I feel that sense far more these days when contemplating the ATP chain in mitochondria, or the role of mycelium in maintaining robust forests — and for good reason: my very life — literally — depends on these, daily.

    At one time, say 25 years ago, I did feel correct cultural awe when contemplating the ikonic Daimyo, very much. I believed in cap-A Art and all the rest. I would have been shocked — with that quasi-religious horror, the sense of deep kapu violation — by the burning of a book; and I can recall feeling distressed if I met any Anglophone who wasn’t familiar with at least the core works of Shakespeare, or thinking a person rather deprived if they hadn’t familiarised themselves with the cinema of Kurosawa. I now consider myself deprived because there isn’t a stream within a hundred miles of me that any person can confidently drink from, there isn’t an oyster in my local bay that I can harvest and eat because they are all contaminated, I can’t cross the nearest street w/o risking death by automobile, it’s hard to find any food locally that isn’t contaminated with pesticides and nutritionally deficient thanks to monopoly chemical ag practise. There are illiterate peasants who are better off, in the immediate physical sense of food and water security and a degree of independence from the (imho doomed) industrial system, than I am. (There are also lots of illiterate peasants who are far worse off, I hasten to say, being dispossessed of their land or held in peonage etc).

    Familiarity with Kurosawa’s gorgeous work does not console me in the least. It used to. Not any more. It is not on the same plane; it’s lovely rococo work, costly veneer, the curly bits around the edges — doesn’t make up for structural rot in the bearing walls. Kinda like the famous (apocryphal?) story of trading Manhattan Island for a handful of plastic beads. They may be the most beautiful plastic beads in the world, but I can’t eat them; whereas Manhattan Island, before the whitefellas killed it, absolutely teemed with generous life. “Civilisation” gives us Bach and the bombing of Baghdad — apparently as terms of one contract which, as with the Mafia, we cannot get out of.

    So as I slowly came to understand, on a gut level, that we are burning a biosphere, not just a book — the very biosphere of which we are an inextricable feature — the fetish-value of civilisational artifacts pretty much collapsed for me. Our biotic illiteracy now seems to me a far greater and more immediately life-threatening — a more tragic — problem than our cultural literacy or lack thereof. The existence of cap-A Art, of human-made “landscapes” of symbol, story, and artifact, is something that all “great” (i.e. extractive, accumulator) civilisations have in common; ours is nothing special in this regard. For all I know, the poetry of Rapa Nui was ravishingly beautiful. Many such civilisations have crashed and burned thanks to their disconnect from physical realities and their preference for living in fantasy and for artifact; their cap-A Art did diddly to prevent it, and in some cases (moai, anyone?) actually accelerated the collapse. So how much does it “matter”?

    Perhaps some of the vehemence or provocativeness of my argument is due to the well known “lapsed believer” phenomenon: the fiercest atheists are those who have lost their faith, not those who never had any in the first place.

    More than once upthread, Steppling peremptorily demanded to know what kind of Art matters to me — as if, having rejected his canonical menu, I were required to provide a competitive Name-list of my own. [This reminds me so strongly of the porn wars and how often the porn posse would demand to know, “If you don’t like our kind of pornography, then what kind of pornography DO you like?” — the answer “I don’t,” was not supposed to be an option…] I guess my answer at this point in my life would be: the art that really matters to me is made by people I know, for the people they love.

    One of the most moving poems I have ever read will never be published. It was written by a longtime friend, for her lover. No one involved will ever be famous; it is a piece of art that matters very much to me. I have in my possession a handful of paintings by friends — quite gifted watercolourists — of places we have all known and loved; and some very small wooden sculptures also by a friend. They matter more to me than any painting by a Famous Name in a museum. The musical performances that have meant the most to me are those held in the houses of friends. I guess Art, for me, is gradually becoming relocalised — along with food and organising — and losing its cap-A in the process. It doesn’t take a billion other people — let alone a coterie of advanced critics — to tell me how important this art is.

    To take art out of the context of community and the ties of friendship — embeddedness, if we want to get jargonistic about it — and abstract it into a national/cultural identity marker, or a class marker, or a for-sale commodity object, increasingly seems to me to vitiate its meaning and substitute a kind of sterile standardised abstraction, like delocalised food without terroir or provenance. It substitutes a refereed “star system” for personal knowledge. It suggests that we all are supposed to find our personal meaning-of-life from a set of narratives written by distant strangers — often, if we are female or nonwhite or whatever, strangers whose prose directly and frequently insults us, which we are supposed to forgive and overlook and make allowances for due to their ineluctable “universality”.

    It bothers me that in our culture there are a lot more people who know all the characters in, say, Hamlet (for the highbrow) or The Sopranos (for the lowbrow) than who know the names and stories of all their neighbours — more people who know the plot of Brothers K or the background for Tale of Two Cities or Les Mis (or the entire epi list for Star Trek or the 5-year story arc of Bab 5, reverting to the lowbrow again) than know the history of their town or province or where their food comes from. Only the wealthy can afford to spend more mental effort on fantasy and entertainment, and on fashions and trends from far off “cultural centres”, than on survival and local knowledge; we have been very wealthy a long time, thanks to extensive looting and liquidation, but pretty soon now it seems we will not be so wealthy any more. Then our civilisational bias towards highly developed fantasy and make-believe (so much more interesting than boring peasant stuff like actually growing food) may turn out to have been a rather bad idea. (Which, speaking as a lifelong bibliomane and lover of fiction, is a melancholy reflection.)

    This, I suppose, makes me a ghastly Philistine if one still believes in the artifactual exceptionalism of cap-A Art… and a raving loonie if one doesn’t believe that civilisational collapse is a possibility. As they say, your mileage may vary.

    All this is a speculative train of thought — and tied deeply into post-industrial relocalisation strategy, at present still mostly theory — which I have not had time to pursue to any firm conclusion, merely unsettling questions. I would like to think that we could have it all — symphony orchestras, ballet, “great art” in attractive spacious galleries, all the drama and public catfighting of lit and theatre crit, big screen movies with surround sound, stadium rock bands, book tours, all the Spectacular curly bits around the edges for fun and social justice, sustainable energy demand, peace, food security, etc. … but increasingly I wonder if we can.

    20 February 2008, 3:04 am

55. DeAnander:

    @Sam — I think we all are. I know that ever-more-imminent mortality has certainly changed my PoV on a number of pretty important issues.

    20 February 2008, 3:08 am

56. john steppling:

    keep trying to post De……but in any event, Ive written on this here:
    http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/?p=265#more-265

    20 February 2008, 4:03 am

57. john steppling:

    i hope i dont repeat myself (double post), but let me just add that to oppose nature and culture is fatuous…..and art is meant to stave off the emotional deadness of The Spectacle. Ed Said to Adorno to Norman O Brown all saw how crucial art and culture was to a fight against domination. Colonialism, Imperialism, Fascism; this struggle includes the melting ice caps — but appreciating Bach doesnt mean one must bomb Baghdad….thats an absurd linkage. I listened to coltrane last night, and it seems obvious to me that such beauty is part of the resistance to hegemonic western waste capital. To not understand that seems unfortunate.

    20 February 2008, 4:07 am

58. john steppling:

    ok, and another quick (ha) response. When you say you appreciate the poems of your friends, that seems to be somehow another false opposition you’ve created. This antagonism to what you call capA art is being conflated with the issue of discrimination in culture. Nobody has suggested any kind of defense for *fame*…..famous artists…..as you seem to want to keep pointing to …..in fact, the notion of fame has always been a bit anethma to art. There are no cap A or small a art works. I would argue that in a sense art has always been localized…its part of and intrinsicly connected to the place of its creation. Now, if you found that poem meaningful, thats perfectly wonderful … but as you say nobody else will ever read it. Culture is communal somehow….its not really private. That unpublished poem serves those who read it. Fame and celebrity are the invention of mass culture and marketed reality and the commodification of everything, including identity. People sell their own invented selves these days….and quite cheaply. Nobody suggested anywhere on this thread that art should be an identity marker. Quite the contrary. Your hostility to the western canon seems to have little to do with individual works and more with the idea of a western canon….and I agree. Ive already said this. I asked what art was meaningful to you and i get an answer that compares that request with a debate about pornography. Bad faith again, DeAnander.

    Art from the very beginning has been about a sense of shared emotion and idea. One of the beauties of artworks is that they ARE intended for an audience, not just for yourself. I would be the first to decry the commodifying of art. Ive said this now five or six times……and this is where discrimination comes in. I dont see that learned process, which is also in some degree inate, as in anyway a mechanism formed from within the system of domination. Coltrane shared his vision, and his feelings. So did Bach and so did Goya and etc etc etc. Was Coltrane a part of this society? did he learn his tools from the an inherited vocabulary of music tradition? yes. He did something special with those tools, though. Why do you think people have always created art? Always, in all cultures. Prehistoric man painted in caves that nobody could reach — no *audience*. So, indeed, the spritiual or shamanistic or religious aspect or impulse exists even seperate from audience. But most personal expression is meant to help stabilize our sense of our own existence…as a community if not a species. People have I believe pretty fragile psyches…..and art is about the raising of questions and an acceptance of the mystery and contradiction at the heart of existence. I see no reason any appreciation of art or Art must be exceptionalist. I agree about localized food and I have my summer planned around growing food….but my fear is that the repulsion we all feel from The Spectacle is lessened by an understanding of culture …. not mass marketed studio film nor pop commodity culture…but from something authentic….. but i worry that this repulsion is beginning to crush ALL appreciation. I feel this in myself, often. After how many billion bad movies and books and TV shows is it any longer possible to really HEAR anything or SEE it.?? Bach is not a famous white boy…..he is close to a divinity for me, as is Coltrane as is Goya and Beckett. I can still hear and see them. But maybe eventually it will all sink beneath the toxic weight of globalized gangsterism. With NATO inventing a new garrison state in Kosovo, I wonder, too. That I share with you. This all began with cormac McCarthy — and i still maintain he is an authentic voice. He only recently recieved any fame and its amusing to watch his one appearance in the media…on Oprah. He looks very uncomfortable….he is *suffering * I think. I worry fame will swallow him too….as it has many gifted artists (Brando comes to mind). But i still go to the mat insisting on the real concrete importance of artworks …..without them the fight to stop the madness is only more difficult, not easier.

    20 February 2008, 7:29 am

59. Richard:

    I should clarify. That particular sentence of mine did not come off how I should have liked it (I’d like to be able to unwrite it). I was in no way intending to equate movies with nature. I don’t see “nature” as an accessory or merely spectacle (though I suspect you’re right that such a view is essentially the norm). Let me put it this way. Everything you say about nature, I agree with. I am frankly frightened by the ecological disasters we have caused. I’m not going to elaborate on that point. I find much in your comment enormously compelling. For example, it bothers the hell out of me that I can recite baseball trivia at length but can tell you little to nothing about the plants that should be local to where I live in Baltimore. It scares me that I don’t know how to grow food or fix things. It scares me that that might matter very soon, before I have taken the opportunity to learn.

    I think art is vital for humans, but I honestly don’t think anyone here was arguing in favor of Received Art, per se. I think that’s been a straw-argument in this thread. You’ve noted that John Steppling has repeatedly mentioned this or that name, and demanded to know what art did matter to you. Some of the names he mentioned happen to also be in the so-called canon, but I don’t believe that those names were invoked for the purposes of trumping you with the canon, or were mentioned merely because they are “accepted” as great art. It seemed to me they were mentioned because they mean something to John Steppling.

    Now movies as art, are highly problematic, more so than literature or music (I’m referring here to just lit and music themselves, not the massive, destructive industries that have built up around them in the west, or the excessive proliferation of “product”), it seems to me, not least because of their prohibitive cost. But movies exist, and I do like to watch them, and we were supposedly discussing one here. I felt that in the discussion of a movie, bringing in “nature” was sort of a conversation stopper. I might argue that humans can’t “do without” art (more to the point: as long as there are humans, there will be art of some kind), but we can quite easily do without movies, and it’s possible that we should (and that we will have to whether we want to or not). It is unquestionably a bourgeois, industrial artform.

    I don’t know. I agree that this discussion is a luxury, that movies are a luxury, that all of this depends on destruction and privation, and that it is all going to come crashing down sooner or later. But, that doesn’t change the fact that, for me, my deepening understanding of the crises facing us, and my desire to try to change my life, coincides with my deepening appreciation of that art that means something to me (or, actually, coincides with my discovery of that art–mostly literature–that means something to me). In fact, the latter has helped me with the former, as well as with the issues in my own personal life that are inextricably bound up with the former.

    20 February 2008, 9:42 am

60. James M:

    The really troubling question is whether it is possible to have e.g. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Bach — that is, canonical art and/or the whole apparatus of fame and “sophisticated” art/lit — without the looting apparatus of an empire to support the accumulator regime that enables the leisure (and the appreciation cult/fetish) that enables the consumption of the luxury of formalised, reified fiction and music.

    An indicator toward an answer may lie in the fact that the word “civilization” means both “living in towns and cities” (the accumulator regime) and “refinement of thought, manners, or taste” … what constitutes “refinement” being obviously a point of contention.

    I am tending to think the answer is “no.” A lot of things are apparently impossible without civilization. A lot of things are also apparently impossible with civilization.

    20 February 2008, 2:49 pm

61. john steppling:

    richard…..i agree about film. I teach at a film school and I find this a constant question. There is something in the medium itself that cuts us off…..much as I love a Bresson or Fassbinder….its not the same as theatre (to take the obvious comparison). This is a whole seperate topic, but one worth thinking about, as film began as a seaside attraction and its recreational flavor never left it. Its also, for certain, the medium most mediated by capital.

    20 February 2008, 5:18 pm

62. Louis Proyect:

    Art as Commodity:

    http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/art-as-commodity/

    20 February 2008, 8:33 pm

63. Brolga:

    Brilliant stuff. I totally relate to DeAnander’s sadness, rage, disgust, despair.

    21 February 2008, 5:06 am

64. Stan:

    … If saving our souls and healing the State serves as the ultimate use value of “Great Literature”, there is also exchange value to be considered. A book is the ultimate commodity as the proliferation of Barnes and Nobles in every major city would demonstrate, not to speak of amazon.com. Authors are under enormous pressure to differentiate their commodity from the competition, just as laxative manufacturers must.

    The marketplace demands novelty. When a young novelist is considered by the NY Times Book Review section, saying something “fresh” and “new” is about as important as it is in the clothing business. Nothing could be more superfluous than last year’s designer jeans or novels.

    …and there is the reason I can reject marxism as totalizing orthodoxy and still cherish its high utility as an interpretive instrument.

    21 February 2008, 7:33 am

65. Stan:

    …Only the wealthy can afford to spend more mental effort on fantasy and entertainment, and on fashions and trends from far off “cultural centres”, than on survival and local knowledge; we have been very wealthy a long time, thanks to extensive looting and liquidation, but pretty soon now it seems we will not be so wealthy any more.

    My head has been inhabited for the last few years by an annoying character who climbed aboard at some point during my travels to Haiti. Every time I say anything, or anyone else does, this critter asks how does this relate to those people you stayed with in the mountains? (Our children and grandchildren may end up like them.)

    21 February 2008, 7:39 am

66. Josiah:

    “My head has been inhabited for the last few years by an annoying character who climbed aboard at some point during my travels to Haiti. Every time I say anything, or anyone else does, this critter asks how does this relate to those people you stayed with in the mountains? (Our children and grandchildren may end up like them.)”

    I think couldn’t agree more with this, along with Deanander’s last post, on the deeper moral urgencies which underly these debates about art. The poverty I have seen in my life, especially in the last few years, which is a far larger instrument of silent mass murder than the direct military imperialism which (rightly?) gets more attention on the left, is seared into my mind forever. Seeing people living in scrap metal shacks amidst raw sewage, or for that matter the vast ghetto wastelands of the tri-state area, makes me question whether what I do is a sideshow indulgence or a potential contribution to dismantling the system that is making billions of people, now, live stunted lives in the massive periphery of this global system.

    21 February 2008, 9:00 am

67. Legume Sam:

    So you people want culchuh? I do have an MA in English. Let’s start with Richard’s comment:

    I felt that in the discussion of a movie, bringing in “nature” was sort of a conversation stopper.

    In bringing in “nature” I was hoping to compare experiences, not “film” or “Coltrane” or “nature” considered merely as cultural objects. When we consider “art as commodity,” we regard the artistic object in its reified form. Sure, we can talk about how things participate in a money system, thus commodification. What can anyone do about it? Another question is that of cultural experience; and this, I thought, cut to the heart of several questions readers of this blog might have about art.

    One of the many jokes of Aldous Huxley’s parodic utopia Brave New World is that the residents of the future exist in splendorous happiness, yet their notion of culture is a matter of banal sports such as “Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.” From Chapter 3:

    OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

    The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

    “Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” He interrupted himself.

    Huxley’s narrative is, to be sure, inverting our notions of culture here. Games in our day are “elaborate” for the Director (in this scene) because with a stick, a ball, and four bases feats of great skill can be achieved. In the Brave New World, what matters is the consumption-value of the gaming apparatus; beyond that, “Centrifugal Bumble-puppy” is a mere matter of catching the ball.

    As with sports, we admire art (high, as opposed to low) for (among other things) the great skill evident in its execution. A no-hitter in baseball is admired for at least some of the same reasons a Beethoven symphony is admired. A Coltrane CD contains music of enormous emotional latitude; moreover, ‘Trane attempted to play chords on the saxophone in much the same way one would play chords on a piano. The Spice Girls, on the other hand, flavor the banality of their music with musical technology.

    Do the residents of the Brave New World care that their sports have become “Centrifugal Bumble-puppy”? No. They are happy, and that is what matters to them, just as (today) the fans of the Spice Girls do not worry about whether or not the Spice Girls constitute High Art.

    Now, the experience of nature doesn’t point to a sophisticated human creator. Yet the natural world exudes a sophistication that the best artists can only hope to imitate. Meanwhile, as the technologies of global capitalist society become more and more complex, the natural world becomes simpler and simpler as wild species fall into extinction and as wilderness is replaced by urban landscaping. Meanwhile, the technologically-dominant mammalian species Homo Sapiens seems to direct most of its concerns to matters of what it calls “money,” a social artifact generated by institutions called “banks”.

    Does that help any?

    21 February 2008, 9:27 am

68. Legume Sam:

    So… in comparing the experience of art to the experience of nature, I was hoping to convey something of the sophistication required for a meaningful appreciation of either…

    21 February 2008, 3:29 pm

69. Becky:

    Here’s a video about No Country for Old Men that I think you will enjoy:

    http://www.ucbcomedy.com/videos/play/966

    21 February 2008, 5:31 pm

70. Anne X:

    All of this talk about entertainment reminds me of Body Worlds and other similar exhibits that feature preserved human bodies. How odd/sad is it that people will pay money to see fellow humans, their flesh removed and inner organs on display, posed as if they are playing soccer?

    21 February 2008, 8:20 pm

71. DeAnander:

    @Brolga — ironic — and here I was trying to argue against a literature of despair…

    @Sam to convey something of the sophistication required… whenever I read some colonialist narrative about “simple” indigenes my brain does two backflips. Those “simple” indigenes moved and lived in a biotic web of such texture and complexity… and despite a conspicuous absence of electron microscopes (which are now revealing to us “superior” technocrats the essential rightness of many indigenous belief systems about How Things Work), they were able to appreciate the polyphonic music of a functioning biotic system.

    It has more than once occurred to me that many artistic forms are like attempts to recreate the biotic world we have lost: the cathedral imitates the old growth forest, chorale and symphonic music are a simpler, less challenging woven/interlocking texture than the many interdependencies and symbiotic meshings of a living biotic system, but similar in their breathing, harmonious balance…

    22 February 2008, 2:21 am

72. DeAnander:

    @Josiah makes me question whether what I do is a sideshow indulgence

    I hear you loud and clear. Spent my adult life working in academia, was troubled throughout my career but the suspicion that basically I was building pyramids for Pharaoh while Rome burned — if I may mix my metaphors with wild abandon… eventually the dissonance of throwing long days of my best mental effort at projects utterly irrelevant to the welfare of anyone at all (other than ourselves whose salaries were paid by those projects, and I suppose some unquantifiable benefit in national and ethnic pride inflated by our “advanced research”) became unbearable, and I more-or-less quit. What next? reducing my carbon footprint and trying to figure out how best to promote sustainable technology and localisation, help people prepare for peak oil and soften the landing. Who knows if there is anything any of us can do that will help, but it would be less than human not to try.

    imho most of “civilisation” is a sideshow indulgence. There are two explanations of why we can afford such sideshows. One is that we are so much smarter and more efficient than “savages” that we accumulate — er, some would say we “create” — wealth, and this wealth funds the benefits and icing of civilisation. The other explanation is that civilisations loot their peripheries, and the positive balance of trade between looted and extorted raw materials (and slave labour) vs the “market value” of finished goods produced by the sophisticated artisans and manufactories (or in our day automated factories) in the core, is what “creates” the wealth; i.e. the wealth of civilisations is based on theft, expopriation, coercion, murder in the periphery. (If we recognise biotic liquidation as a form of theft and murder, even when no human-law property rights are involved, then that adds another layer of criminality.)

    Traditionally, core elites support the high-class sideshows: monumental construction, elaborate artistic forms and performances, elaborate religious rituals and hierophancies, gorgeously uniformed armies, flags banners and triumphal processions and displays, fireworks shows, museums, libraries, artists, sculptors, composers, theatrical troupes, etc.

    We have this idea that we can democratise the whole model, i.e. what Engels called the vulgarisation of privilege: that everyone should be entitled to frosting as well as bread, and that the State (the public) should foot the bill which once was footed by kings, cardinals, nobles. Hence private museums become public, private libraries become public, the old USSR builds a subway system as gorgeous as a cathedral, we have public funding for “the Arts”, and so on. The question that is begged (as with so many questions of resources and energy) is whether the State that foots the bill or the taxpayers who fund the state would be able to afford the frosting if their State were not looting its peripheries to keep “creating” wealth.

    I suspect that we can very well afford the arts, even at a sustainable (one-terron) consumption pattern; but we can’t afford grandiosity.

    22 February 2008, 2:40 am

73. DeAnander:

    Bach is not a famous white boy…..he is close to a divinity for me

    and this is exactly what I object to and have been objecting to all along… this apotheosis of “great” artists. I don’t believe that the historical happenstance of fame, or even an astonishing talent, makes anyone a “divinity” — whether it be Claudius Caesar, “a god in Colchester”, or Bach. suppose that Bach hadn’t had some breaks, a wealthy patron or two, etc., we might not today know who he was. if Bach had been born female, we might not today know who he was. an extraordinary talent, yes. (but also the (imho irresponsible) father of 20 children…)

    incidentally, at least one of Bach’s patrons was hardly a democratic, freedom-loving type….
    

    [Duke] Wilhelm Ernst was a strict Lutheran; during the training of his soldiers, he command to only can join to his service the men who could read and comment with him the contents of Lutheran lecture, be repeated in the winter around eight o’clock and in the summer at nine o’clock. This particular way of doctrine was totally supported by Johann Sebastian Bach.

    (from the Wikipedia entry on Wilhelm Ernst, and it sounds regrettably like a babelfish translation from the German)… later this same Duke had Bach imprisoned, as I recall, because Bach griped so much about not being selected for the job of Master of the Chapel in Saxe-Weimar. had it not been for hereditary aristos like Wilhelm, would Bach’s work have been recognised — and preserved — for us to enjoy? is it the good fortune of finding a Wilhelm or two that ensured his enduring fame? and most hauntingly: were there other Bachs or potential Bachs whose work was lost, or whose talent was never encouraged or developed at all? was their talent somehow less “divine”?

    selecting certain human beings on the basis of a fluke of talent combined with luck, opportunity, and the right historical moment and singling them out as “divine” — or infinitely more important and significant than all other human beings, to me is just another version of aristocracy — or American Idol; I don’t buy it. not that the work isn’t good, amazingly good of its kind, because it is. not that I’m not boggled by the way Bach’s brain worked, because I am. but it doesn’t make him into a plaster saint, at least not for me — just an extraordinary human being; and in fact I know a lot of extraordinary human beings with fascinating fluky talents. it’s just that not all of them fall within the category called “fine arts” as approved by a long historical process governed by the church, the aristocracy, and the state.

    my grandmother could knit a complicated fairisle pattern in multiple colours of yarn without referring to written instructions, doing all the counting and pattern shifting and permutations in her head — while at the same time reading a book and intermittently carrying on a conversation — often with a television making distracting noise in the same room. I have never known anyone else who could do this, though doubtless there are a smallish percentage of old women knitting all over the world who can. the multithreading, integer math, pattern recognition (many levels of nested structure) and retention, noise filtering, etc. are pretty mindboggling. are they all that different, neurochemically speaking, from the wiring that enables someone to carry all four voices of a fugue in his/her head while composing? is it a difference of kind, or a difference of degree? if fugues were something that women composed to sing together around the cookstove, while fairisle knitting was a fine art whose end product was worn by princes of the Church and produced only by specially trained guilds of men, perhaps we’d be remembering famous divinities who knitted extraordinary fairisle, and forgetting beautiful fugues composed by anonymous women in kitchens.

    if the thirst for beauty and the discipline to create it — or even a curious mental knack for patterns and fractals — constitute divinity, then there’s a hella lot of divinity running loose in the human race — not just a few rarefied Elect. imho the democratic impulse in Art maybe should not be about granting “the masses” access to the works of those few designated as Elect, but recognising the huge numbers of artists, the enormous variety of talents, among the masses. in other words Coltrane’s good, but he’s not God… “unless we all are, I think we all are.”

    22 February 2008, 3:16 am

74. Josiah:

    We seem to be straying quite far from the original topic, but that may be a good thing. Not because the reviews by Malooga and Lou Proyect weren’t thought-provoking (I enjoyed them both), but because the debate on the film as such seems to be running its course.

    @ Deanander, I think this is the main problem with European-style “welfare capitalism,” Keynesian market stimuli, and the superficially noble liberal goal of redistributing a portion of the accumulated capital within a state to the working class. Even at its most egalitarian, this social model is a mask, within a walled-off social space, for an inherently ugly arrangement outside that space. Because (and I think liberals really know this, deep down) the limited “hand-outs” of welfare capitalism, which are portioned out to the poor in a very modest way even in western Europe, cannot be generalized on a global scale, and will never benefit the 4 billion people making $1,500 a year in per capita income or less, a figure which conceals as much as it reveals (given the fact that most of them work partly outside the cash economy, and are more immediately affected than metropolitans by the destruction of life-supporting ecosystems). We can no more globalize “welfare capitalism” than we can, say, make every gazelle herd on a savannah a pride of lions some day. In both cases, the whole landscape would be stripped bare in no time flat, and everybody would starve.

    The real historical analogy for those things marked as ‘public goods’ or ‘indulgences’ within the imperial cores of today, as you suggest, is with the ‘populist’ redistributive mechanisms within the city-states of the ancient world, such as public feasting, nobles throwing gold coins from chariots, or monumental “public works” shrouded in priestly fetishes. But the crucial point for me is that, whereas simple robbery and clientelism could be (and are) used in the areas supplying slaves, food, timber and minerals, the combination of concentrated population and concentrated elite wealth in the city-states is always generative of class struggle. And here is where I respectfully part ways with orthodox Marxism, according to which the struggle to control the state and the means of production at the technologically ‘advanced’ core of global capitalism is seen as being the road to justice and the fullest self-realization of humanity.

    The truth is that, as we have seen in Russia and China, the revolutionary takeover of an imperial state apparatus generates, at best, a more involuted form of imperialism, in which the state turns most of the bloody tentacles of expansionism inward to contiguous or internal regions, and dominates the general population with even more draconian laws and even more obvious propoganda. And now, in the 21st century, the old bird of prey has burst from the Communist shell for good, and Russia and China have simply become corrupt and oligarchic state capitalist powers, looting their own countries’ resources and moving more aggressively than ever into the Central Asian/Caucasian and African peripheries, respectively, albeit not on a scale even close to what the U.S. and E.U. are doing everywhere, at this very moment. Which is why the U.S. and E.U. lecturing China on Africa is, sadly, like Hitler lecturing Stalin and Mao on human rights (I mean, look at the arms flowing into, and the resources flowing out of, the DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria…I know don’t need to go on for any of the people reading this thread).

    There is a post-Cold War lesson here, which is that “capitalism” and “communism” were never much like the abstract models provided by their most eloquent and cultured theoretical advocates, and were really just grand-scale epiphenoma of the deeper historical problem of empire, if not necessarily urbanization (keeping in mind that cities can have many different kinds of relationships with the land they are built on and surrounding them). None of which is terribly original for me to point out, especially on this blog. Although I’m not anarchist, Emma Goldman and other anarchists were saying all of this stuff well over a half-century ago. And I suspect others were saying it long before them. Recognizing that the conquest of the state and the centers of economic power is not going to change them (because they have to die in some other way) doesn’t produce any easy answers regarding how to deal with these predatory structures that are eating everything in sight. For me, it is where the really hard questions begin.

    Thanks to everyone for the food for thought.

    22 February 2008, 5:19 am

75. Louis Proyect:

    http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/harold-bloom-musings-or-a-reactionary-critic/

    22 February 2008, 10:21 am

76. Richard:

    Sam writes: “In bringing in “nature” I was hoping to compare experiences, not “film” or “Coltrane” or “nature” considered merely as cultural objects. When we consider “art as commodity,” we regard the artistic object in its reified form.”

    For the record, this was indeed how I understood your introduction of nature into the discussion. I was not understanding either in terms of commodities. I suppose I was wrong that it was a “conversation-stopper” since the conversation has gone on for many more comments! It just seemed to me that the introduction of nature shifted the discussion over to whether art (or Art, or whatever) is even worth doing or experiencing (particularly film) while the ecological disaster continues. This is an important discussion that interests me (and, to be fair, Malooga’s original review did spend some time on this idea, as it applies to film), but it seemed to short circuit or sidestep the discussion of art, as experience. And I think some of us were trying to argue against a reductive view of that experience, arguing instead that great art, no matter where you find it, is an experience of its own, which does indeed enrich our understanding of life, and can rarely be reduced to a simple take-home message. And we were trying to make some arguments about this movie in particular that resisted Malooga’s interesting, but in my view reductive and misleading take. I’d say that’s the main point I was trying to get across, and what I thought John Steppling was trying to get across. Counter to him, though, I don’t see someone like Bach, or whomever, as “a divinity”, but, perhaps, their art as an “access to the divine”, which doesn’t seek to negate all the points DeAnander made about the contingencies surrounding what art gets created or elevated or preserved.

    I realize that the discussion of the actual movie has run its course here, but if anyone wants to see more on it, here’s a new post at the film blog The House Next Door about this movie, and the writer’s problems with the what he sees as the critical elevation of form over content (a distinction that I find difficult to make, which was part what I was trying to say about art as experience):

    http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2008/02/no-country-for-ideology.html

    22 February 2008, 3:47 pm

77. Josiah:

    One more thing: I think part of the reason why intelligent people become a bit too devoted, sometimes, to the symbols and sacrificial idols of the Canon is that they are living in a culture which obliterates all continuity with the past. The following point, I think, gets at the historical continuity between the arbitrarily high-valued cults/Cultures of today and yesterday (and the equally arbitrarily low-valued “common” ones):

    “if fugues were something that women composed to sing together around the cookstove, while fairisle knitting was a fine art whose end product was worn by princes of the Church and produced only by specially trained guilds of men, perhaps we’d be remembering famous divinities who knitted extraordinary fairisle, and forgetting beautiful fugues composed by anonymous women in kitchens.”

    22 February 2008, 6:19 pm

78. john steppling:

    DeAnander….

    Im really at a loss to follow your reasoning regards the Bach comment. This is what, in turn, I have objected to all along. The point is not Bach’s biography, which in a sense of neccessity is a kitsch bio — but the music. His *divinity* (even if you dont like the word….which I dont really like either) is because of the MUSIC….not who his patrons were nor his parents nor even his politics. This returns us again to the notion of what art is. Proyect got into a tantrum (and a lot of self promoting it seems) about some of this, and he misses the point from another angle — art has no *use* value. Not in the sense we usually associate with that word and concept. To listen to Bach is what matters if we are to develop an inner life. Ive said elsewhere (than this blog) that an engagement with art creates an awakening in our inner lives….which allows one to better identify the barbarity around one ….its about awareness. I feel you make bach the enemey. His talent as a fluke? I dont understand at all I confess. But here is an idea, listen to the music. Because that is what matters. Artists pay a price for what they do. Its not american idol….that is you arguing in bad faith again. You confuse catagories all the time. The artwork is not aristocratic. Bach was not repsonsible for monarchy…..he wrote beautiful music. What of Coltrane? Another sort of divinity to my mind. Another fluke and lucky guy? famous black boy I guess? This line of logic leads you into a hostility to art. The artwork is what matters…..and if it doesnt, then just forget about culture and art and move foward. I respect that….but I have a problem with trying to marginalize art and make it mutually exclusive from sustained activism. I raised a son who is now 25 — and I’ll be a grandfather soon…..and i remember my son’s first recognition of what art really meant. He was 16, and he changed due to this encounter. He is a political organizer and worked in Venezuela for a while. His impression was that the progressive community there valued art and culture very highly….and that they knew the difference between kistch and entertainment, and the authentic work. Do you make such distinctions I wonder?

    22 February 2008, 7:25 pm

79. john steppling:

    quick add on.

    Bach’s talent was gigantic. Its special. So yes, in that sense he is special. Its a gift. This in no way mitigates the desire for equality. And explain to me if you can why would an appreciation and support of art and artists somehow take away from the struggle for a better world? All art is political, as Ive said, and its also spiritual, if it has any value. I feel you havent really answered that. People have always created. Since pre-historic times. Today we face a deep commodification of everything…..(and film becomes a special discussion because of this, I agree) but no matter how you package Bach or coltrane, you still have the music, which is what its about. One can critique the music industry but thats the not the same as Bach’s music. Not everyone can write such music. I was at a friends in norway, a violinist, and after dinner he played solo violin sonatas from Bach — magical. There was no commodity in sight. The artwork is not the problem, nor is the artist usually.

    22 February 2008, 7:32 pm

80. john steppling:

    Adorno:

    “The idea of a conservative artwork is inherently absurd. By emphatically seperating themselves from the empirical world, their other, they bear witness that that world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconsious schemata of that world’s transformation. Even for an artist like Mozart, who seems so unpolemical and who according to general agreement moves soley within the sphere of spirit, excepting the literary themes he chose for his greatest operas, the polemical element is central in the power by which the music sets itself at a distance that mutely condemns the impoverishment and falsity of that from which it distances itself.”

    22 February 2008, 8:22 pm

81. lara:

    McCarthy’s recent interview with Oprah reveals his own words, that he does not understand women, that no man does. He says it in a flippant way, as though, somehow, women were not human and he had no need to even try.

    What a crock! And he claims to be a writer!

    Women are human beings. They are human beings who can give life. McCarthy’s men kill women and rape their corpses, they hang babies, they blow up women, they torture them, they rape them, they beat them, and they engage in every other kind of bestial derangement. They do this is a moral vacuum. For some reason, we are expected to see this as literature. We are expected to find this illuminating. We are expected to find this edifying.

    It has been his obsession for more than a few decades. Why has he not gotten psychiatric help? Clearly, his obsession with the most revolting elements of masculinity is complete. Remember, this comes from a protected, and in his own word, lucky white man who has had every kind of help with his chosen path in life. Such obsession with male ugliness, and of the portrayal of the lot of women, must be pathological. He needs a mental health professional.

    He has said that “the notion that the species can be improved in some way … is a really dangerous idea”. What an arrogant fool of a man! Note the word “species”. He says he does not understand women and yet, says that the species cannot be improved. What an eliding of the truth. It is men that cannot be improved, for Gods’ sake. That is what he is saying. He does not understand women and therefore cannot have anything to say about their part in the “species”. His women, in fact, are too tortured to have a chance in the “species” because of all those psychopathic men.

    And yet the lie stands because men cannot handle the truth.

    Say it like it is, CorMac. Say it true and loud and clear. You know many men are ugly beyond belief. You make no excuses for them. They are beasts. For no apparent reason. Maybe it’s biological. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? Certainly not you. Yet, you have compassion for them, and no understanding for women. How can that be? How can that possibly be?

    I’ll tell you. It cannot be. If you are a writer in the twenty first, it cannot be. There is too much information available for you to have no understanding. How dare you write!

    This is not literature. It is fundamentalism. He makes no effort to understand or illuminate his vile men. He makes no effort to understand women. Why? In this day and age, after so much knowledge on the making of masculinity, after half a century of writing by both feminist men and feminist women on the subject, it defies belief that a supposedly erudite man could write such fundamentalist tripe. Perhaps, if he’d written in the nineteenth century, he could have claimed an excuse. But now, after such complex and erudite analysis of the male condition by a great number of both men and women, CorMac has no excuse.

    He is simply lazy. Bone lazy. Utterly bone wearyingly lazy.

    As are most men, post feminism, who can’t bear to look. They will not look. They will not read. They will not see.

    They can’t handle the truth.

    The few men who can - they are heroes. The rest are just bone lazy bastards. The vast bulk who hide under the disgraceful excuses of “men can’t understand women” or some such equivalent (and there are legion of equivalents) are bone lazy, arrogant, fundamentalist liars. They do know what their gender is doing to women. Their gender has done it for millenia. Murder, rape, genocide, gendercide, holocaust, name it what you will. There is no word for the sheer ugliness of it.

    How can they face it? They cannot. They can’t handle the truth. They deny it, or, as is the current rage, pass it off as high art. Is the killing of Jews high art? Is the killing of the maimed, the disabled, the old, the feeble, the dispossessed, high art? No, it is not. Never could be. But it’s different when women are the raped, the tortured, the murdered. Then, a man can say, see? How artfully he portrayed that rape, how well he described that sexual dismemberment, how artistically he depicted that necrophilia. Replace “woman” with “Jew” and see how you react.

    Ugghh!

    Why is the portrayal of vile crimes against women high art? I cannot comprehend it. To glamorise this thing is the refuge of the ethically moronic. In NCFOM, the hipocracy is total. See how they judge how far they can go. Those Cohen brothers did not show that psychopath blowing up the woman at the end.

    Ask yourself why not. And really listen to the answer. With some emotional intelligence, for God’s sake. Because it would have blown the whole film and shown it for what it was. An attempt to glamorise the inhuman masculine. Never mind the silly homily tacked on the end.

    McCarthy has made necrophilia, and every other form of bestial male violence more sympathetic. That is the end result of his work, his indecent work of never examining his own reasons for depicting this vileness. If he had bothered to examine his reasons, he would have found a sneeking, dirty thing that has ego written on it - male white writer’s ego - how can I outdo Hemingway? - oh yes, show a bit of necro, a bit of absolute male filth.

    Go where no literary man has gone before. That’ll get me noticed. if he had looked, he might have seen that it would cause more harm than good. The despicable has no analysis in his work. Very convenient. He can say to Oprah, with smug delight, oh I don’t understand women. He could add to that, I don’t really understand anything. But of course, he would not say that. He would never say that.

    All those poor men and boys, turning to evil for no apparent reason. That is the real evil in his work. There is no attempt at understanding at all. Why do men do such things? Why in such numbers? Are they helped along the path by every book, film, etc, that gives no explanation? Why don’t these male writers read a decent analysis of these filthy deeds held by both feminist men and feminist women? Why don’t they see the utter logic of that analysis?

    Why do they take refuge in that excuse of the infirm idiot - men don’t understand women and the species can’t be improved? It’s not the species, CorMac. Half the species would be OK if they were not being raped unto death. Women are not doing the unspeakable in vast numbers. Women are not raping, killing and torturing en masse. Women are not raping male corpses, festooning bushes with mutilated babies, blowing up men all over, and killing and killing and killing, ad nuaseum all over the planet. Have a look at the stats. Even a cursory look. Even after millenia of male violence against women, women in numbers, are not doing these thing. Men are.

    Is there something in this mystery worth exploring? Not to CorMac and any number of other male writers of male violence. No surree!

    Perhaps a time will come when women will be forced to defend themselves against this increasing male hatred of the feminine, to keep the species going, the very species CorMac is so keen to save from any form of improvement. Heaven forbid that he examine male violence against women in the light of species survival. Might be a big job. While writing about the endless bloodletting of southern males is easy - and, oh so popular!

    Men like CorMac do understand. Only too well. And remain utterly defended against the reality of their appalling male world. Their only excuse is to call it literature, or something equally unrealistic.

    Like so many men who make no effort to understand half the human race - the half that gave them birth - this man, McCarthy, writes of necrophilia, rape, torture, all involving specific atrocity against women, and then has the gaul, at age seventy something, to write smugly of the man as the protector of the child, and of the mother in sheerly negative terms. Give me a break!

    What a crock, old man.
    What a crock.
    Get help.
    And a cut rate for the Cohen Brothers.

    7 March 2008, 5:44 am

82. R Miller:

    Speaking as a woman who greatly enjoyed both the novel and the film of ‘No Country for Old Men’, all I can say to the poster and most of the commenters here is this: don’t read McCarthy’s books and don’t watch the Coen brothers’ films.

    Obviously both film and book offended you deeply by not being a) Marxist propaganda and/or b) feminist propaganda. In that case, why not stick to material written by people who share your views?

    MODERATOR: Very sly how you imply that critique using marxist, feminist, et al, insights is automatically censorial and-or propagandizing, while anything that reflects, repeats, reinforces capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, industrialism, etc etc, is morally neutral. It is only when one speaks from the POV of the underdogs that one shifts from real art criticism to polemic it seems.

    10 March 2008, 8:48 am

83. patrick:

    just watched no country for old men, it’s unassumingly unconventional yet (thankfully) never over-the-top. the moral angle was a bit mindboggling, but that can be a good thing… the Coen bros. deserve their Oscars; well done indeed.

    11 March 2008, 9:23 pm

84. Stan:

    I saw it last night, too. What I saw was gratuitous violence, shoehorned into a lame plot, punctuated by self-consciously pretentious attempts at being understatedly ‘plain-yet-deep.’ One of the stupidest movies I’ve seen in a while; and that’s saying something.

    “If you don’t be quiet, I’m gonna take you in the back and screw ya.”

    Wow. Heavy. So original.

    12 March 2008, 5:25 am

85. Charles:

    Wow. Kudos to Malooga, and to De for bringing this one over.

    ^^^

    Charles: Ditto

    12 March 2008, 11:42 am

86. Charles:

    One of the problems on the left is the reductionist reflex that demands art be *instructive*.

    ^^^^
    Notice that the debate over the didactic function of art is not confined to a left reductionist reflex advocating instruction. The main essay refers to Dr. Johnson ( The British literary critic Dr. Samuel (?)Johnson from , I don’t know, 1700 or so) had a standard of “to instruct and delight” for art. Dr. Johnson is not usually considered to be “on the left”.

    12 March 2008, 12:10 pm

87. Charles:

    …and there is the reason I can reject marxism as totalizing orthodoxy and still cherish its high utility as an interpretive instrument.

    ^^^^
    Philosophers have _interpreted_ the world in a number of ways; the thing is to change it.

    12 March 2008, 4:04 pm

88. micah pyre:

    This is an interesting discussion that I stumbled on indirectly, mainly by being re-directed to a more recent essay by Stan. I then got curious and nosed around. As one who finds Cormac McCarthy an interesting and talented storyteller with a unique gift for the written word, I find myself eager to defend John Steppling — especially against the bizarre attack by DeAnander, which makes no sense to me at all.

    DeAnander complains that “The Road” caused horror and she therefore won’t read it as she doesn’t want to encounter such horror. What a curious statement she makes. Ignore it and maybe it will go away? Don’t worry, be happy?

    “The Road” moved me toward being more outspoken on the path of America, encouraged me to get more active in discussing politics with friends, made me rethink what are America’s values as a culture.

    This is a bad thing?

    I’m baffled.

    I find John Steppling’s comments quite wise and even-handed. Can’t quite say the same for DeAnander’s short-tempered rebukes against Steppling. I think it would be better for DeAnander to acknowledge preferring to ignore certain forms of artistic expression, instead of feebly criticizing someone who appreciates that art.

    As to Proyect’s posts, I find the obsessive insistence that an artist state his/her politics to completely undermine any critical merit Proyect may have. Trying to blame Cormac McCarthy for America not being Marxist is a stretch — even when it’s suggested by an unapologetic Marxist like Proyect. Somehow, I find Proyect’s sentiments in this thread to resemble the work of a disinformation specialist.

    28 December 2008, 7:30 pm

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