entertainment and art - to be or not to be

Although it is usually the end of the eighteenth century that monopolizes the discussion of aesthetics in philosophy, it is a book from the beginning of the century – Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, etc. – that shaped the terms in which art was discussed by Enlightenment philosophes. In the same sense in which an allergen shapes a sneeze, it is also these terms that shaped the massive rejection under which we still live – that reaction we call modernism, romanticism, postmodernism, etc.

Shaftesbury did not directly talk about entertainment and art, because the concepts and their hostility one to the other had not crystallized in his time. But he does give us some notion about what art was about. Or, rather, he constructs two points of view by which to look at it.

From the first point of view, art is thoroughly social.  Shaftesbury writes of how the poet’s work is an “entertainment for himself and others.” The possibility that it could only be for himself is cast into doubt, however, by the whole structure of his theory of taste.

Our … endeavor, therefore, must appear this: to show that nothing is found charming or delightful in the polite world, nothing which is adopted as pleasure or entertainment of whatever kind can any way be accounted for, supported or established wiouth the pre-establishment or supposition a a certain taste.”

The separation between pleasures and entertainment is about Shaftesbury’s recognition that much of entertainment is about the “foils and contraries” that befall human actors, whether in poetry, or theater, or song, or visuall depiction. However, for Shaftesbury, the moments of degredation, pain, grief and defeat – of, in fact, ugliness, the lineaments of unhappiness - are moments in a larger scheme to depict, in full, the “beauties of the inward soul.”

This gives us our second point of view. Shaftesbury is not a puritan by any means, but he still harks after, or at least is haunted by, the old distinction between the sacred and the profane – which is now transferred to a the duality between outward show and inward beauty. If the artist is always working with the materials of outward show, he is always motivated by the impulse of inward beauty.

The model for inward beauty comes not from art: it comes from the beauty of the human form. And not any human form – rather, the paradigm is the beautiful woman. That beauty, Shaftesbury claims, is always a symbol of inward beauty. Subtract the latter, make the woman an idiot, and the outward beauty flees.

We know how this play of comparisons arises. We’ve seen this number dialed before, over and over again.  Bit by bit, entertainment – like the beauty of women – becomes a threat if it is not moralized, or held to some standard. But for Shaftesbury, entertainment is still, in the end, the kind of outward show that art does not transcend so much as use for a transcendence beyond art – into being a wholly fit member of society.

Shaftesbury’s aesthetics of taste made a good target for those who reject the surrender to taste as an ultimately servile gesture, a relic of the system of patronage. Those, that is, who were contemporary with or came after the French revolution.

It is at this point that the plot thickens; the divide, such as it is, between entertainment and art becomes a modern project. 

entertainment and art

It was in the late sixties, I think, that most American newspapers began hosting a “business” section. Of course, most of the readers of newspapers back then were laborers, but there was never a labor section. Now business sections are universal, and the last surviving labor unions are about to get a stake through their heart as the Supreme Court, that bastion of reaction, prongs them. Those Business sections were, literally, a sign of the Times.

I am not sure when I first noticed that newspapers were putting their movie, book and music reviews in a section called Arts and Entertainment. It is now a pretty standard section heading. It begs the question, or at least I am going to beg the question, of what is meant by that conjunction. What is supposed to be the difference between art on the one side and entertainment on the other?

In the seventeenth century, entertainment was a term that possessed a lot of semantic scope. It held onto its French roots in “tenir”, to hold, and meant hosting, or supporting, or amusing. In John Donne’s sermons, one can see examples of all these things. For instance, in interpreting the passage in Genesis in which Abraham feeds some strangers who turn out to be angels, Donne writes: … the angels of the Gospel come within their distance, but if you will not receive them, they can break open no doors, nor save you against your wil: the angel does, as he that sends him. Stand at the door and knock, if the door be open, he comes in, and sups with him; What gets he by that? This; he brings his dish with him; he  feeds his host, more than his host him. This is true hospitality, and entertaiment of angels, both when thou feedest Christ , in his poor members abroad, or when thouh feedest thine own soul at hom, with the company and conversation of ture and religious Christians at thy table, for these are angels.” “Entertainment” here is not only the provision of food and drink, but also of conversation – l’entretien. It is something more than providing the bare necessities.

On the other hand, Donne can also pluck amusement out of the word. In a Lent Sermon, Donne speaks of the function of the sermon and, in general, of the service. There’s an implicit self reference here, for Donne’s own sermons were pretty well wrought – were, in a word that would not have been used in his time, artistic. He speaks here of “Gods ablest Ministers, indued with the best parts, to be but as music, as a jest, as a song, as an entertainment.”

Now, a sermon is not a secular prose piece. In this respect, the binary is between the sacred and the profane, not art and entertainment. But Donne was, of course, well aware of the fact that poetry could straddle the divide between sacred and profane. Still, he does not insert, after “song”, as poetry. Entertainment, here, is something different from the entertainment of angels. It is already show business.

Is it possible, though, that all of art is show business? Or, less pejoratively, that entertainment is art and art entertainment? And that the journalistic conjunction caters to a popular misconception, an ill-made middle or high brow hierarchy?

This question is, I think, mixed up to an extent with the old division between the sacred and the profane. In particular, the exclusion of some from the Protestant and Catholic notion of the sacred.

An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to belong to the household of a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.

Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe’s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn’t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here’s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry." 

I’ve been thinking about these things since the death of David Bowie, wondering about how to characterize him: Entertainer? Artist? Or is there a difference? Does the and stand?

Bowie

“… over in Detroit Bowie’s followers were like something out of Fellini’s Satyricon: full tilt pleasure seekers devoid of anything resemlbing shame, limits, caution and moral scruples. I distinctly remember a local lesbian bike gang riding their bikes into the foyer of the concert hall and revving them loudly just prior to Bowie’s arrival onstage. This had not been pre-arranged.. Meanwhile, the toilets were literally crammed with people either having sex or necking pills. The whole building was like some epic porn film brought to twitching life. “ – Nick Kent, Apathy for the devil

The old guard, who were all in their early thirties when Bowie broke in the early seventies, hated him. Lester Bangs’s contempt for Bowie’s inauthenticity, as he saw it, was never surprised into reconsideration by anything Bowie ever did. Christgau, in a telling phrase, spoke of Bowie’s relationship to rock as “expedient”. In other words, there was always a distance, the distance of a man choosing. Bowie was always a changeling and never a convert. That put a huge bug up their asses. This was considered not the mark of higher artistry, by these guys, but the mark of a phoney. If you trawl through reviews of Bowie from the early seventies, you can come up with astonishing stuff – astonishingly stupid stuff. Martin Amis, for instance, reviewed a Bowie concert in 1973 by channeling his father, Kingsley Amis’s, voice and gags – it makes for painful reading, as though Amis were already the superannuated clubman he has since become. It is as if he listened to the concert through an ear trumpet.

Usually, when a singer dies, one goes through memory’s rolodex: I remembering hearing song x here, or song y there, or this concert, etc. The death of celebrities brings out our own narcissism in spades.

But Bowie was always a master of distances, and I’m not sure an album of fan experiences does him justice. What Kent saw, in Detroit, was a part of the same effect that repulsed the rock critics. In the underhistory of the 70s, where lesbian biker gangs are as important as Oil shocks, Bowie is onof the great monument – similar, in his mastery of the uses to which alienation could be put, to Foucault.  Foucault debated Noam Chomsky in 1971 on a Dutch talk show hosted by an anarchist. Afterwards, Chomsky said of Foucault, “ I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral.” This, I think, comments on a style of presentation – and in that sense, Foucault and Bowie were on the same wavelength.

Of course, it was a moment, a brief throb. Disorder is all too pitiably subject to order – a sort of reverse or negative entropy. Bowie moved on. The forces unleashed in that historic moment had their effect, but the larger forces that we contend with, now, every day, either confronted and defeated them or poisoned them through all the institutions at the disposal of the establishment. But I like to think about how he had this moment.

And now he’s  shockingly dead and all.

feelings, year 1

This week they are discussing feelings in Adam’s class. Feelings are represented by faces, drawn on the board. One face is labeled sick. Its eyes are closed and its tongue is hanging out. It sticks out from the scale of other feelings in as much as we probably think of being sick as a physiological rather than an emotional feeling. As always, though, emotional talk is fraught with a certain categorial precarity, since, after all, all emotional feelings, we also feel, are physiological states.

Another face shows a gaping mouth, and is labeled surprise. Another shows a frown and a lowering brow, and is labeled anger. Another is a smily face, and is labeled happy. Still another shows tears, and is labeled sad.

The faces are drawn by one of the teachers, who has a knack for caricature. You would say,at first glance, that the faces were boys. But in fact, there are no real clues to the sex of each face, save for the fact that the conventions of showing girls in childworld are absent. No flowing hair.

Adam seems to have taken the lesson here to mean that, just as one recites the alphabet, one rehearses the emotions exemplified in each face. When I came to pick him up yesterday, he decided to represent anger. He told me to “go away”. Taking him home, he continued to bear a frown and to use a lot of negatives, until I asked him if he was angry. Yes, he told me. Why, I asked. I’m mad for me, he replied.

Oh, the onto-genesis of the novelistic impulse! Or at least the thespian one. Adam soon stopped being mad when he got home. “Being” here is, of course, sous rature –playing is more like it. Although playing at some point became being. That point, that cursed point, is forever shifting, forever under disguise, forever a thing that one can’t grasp one’s whole life long, really. 

dickens and virginia woolf

In the twenties, according to V.S. Pritchett, it was fashionable to disparage Charles Dickens, at least among the modernist set. Two disparate writers from that period, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf, seem to bear Pritchett out. Waugh, famously, employed Dickens work as a tool of torture in Handful of Dust, when the hapless Tony Last is captured by an Amazonian eccentric and forced to read to him from Dickens’ collected works, an unhappy end if there ever was one. In Waugh’s one extended essay on Dickens, a review of the large Life of Dickens published by Edgar Johnson, he had a lot of fun shooting spitballs at the “disgusting hypocrite”. Dickens wishy washy liberalism and complete absense of a sense of original sin put him outside Waugh’s ultramontane disposition. No man is a hero to his letter readers – especially Dickens, whose hypocrisies can be tracked with cruel accuracy. Even in the 1870s, when the first collection of Dickens letters were published, an anonymous writer at the Spectator commented that Dickens’ vaunted radicalism never amounted to much, and certainly didn’t prevent him from supporting the South over the North in the American Civil war, nor from sympathizing ardently with Governer Eyre, the crown’s ruler in Jamaica, who put down a rebellion by randomly hanging black people. For his methods, John Stuart Mill tried ardently to have him imprisoned. He not only failed, but his outraged white constituents voted him out of office.

However, this is Dickens the public figure – and private man. Even Waugh admits that Dickens is a “mesmerist” as a writer – which had become, by the time,  a great cliché of Dickens criticism. It is rooted in some fact: Dickens fancied himself a mesmerist, and even attempted a mesmeric cure on one Madame de la Rue, an acquaintance from Genoa. After Dickens took to spending the night with her, giving her the benefit of his “visual ray”, Dickens’ wife made him break off his ‘cure’ – which Dickens held forever against her. He was a miserable husband. The list of things Dickens held against his wife could fill a three decker novel. Their domestic scene is not a pretty picture.

Virginia Woolf, who is, in most ways, a much more intelligent critic than Evelyn Waugh, was also uneasy with Dickens. Her family had extensive acquaintance with Thackeray, and this may have made set her tribally against Dickens – there was no love lost between the two Victorian novelists. However, one of the best essays about Dickens, Virginia Woolf’s reflections on David Copperfield, is a critical lodestone for me – it so exactly describes my own varied reaction to Dickens writing. She begins the essay with references to seasonal occurences, to the ripening of fruit and to sunshine, as if Dickens were not a writer but a phenomenon of the same sort – which is just what he seems to be, Woolf implies, when read in childhood. But can a Dickens novel survive a second reading? Or are his characters – for Woolf’s idea, ultimately, is that Dickens novels are crowds of characters, that he keeps going in his novels by “throwing another character on the pyre”  – “been attacked by the parching wind which blows about books and, without our reading them, remodelsm them and changes their features while we sleep?” Again, we note the confusion of culture and nature – the kind of thing Roland Barthes loved to disentangle. That parching wind and our sleep are definitely social phenomena, although they do take on the authoritative, irresistable shape of natural forces at play. The closed book does seem to sleep – or we seem to close ourselves up like a book when we sleep.  The parallel is inexhaustible, and rediscoveries aspects of both sleeping and books – or trivializes them.

The next two lines of the essay are often quoted as though they reflected Woolf’s opinion, rather than the opinion of the fashion of her time, to which she is responding: “The rumor about Dickens is to the effect that his sentiment is disgusting and his style commonplace; that in reading him every refinement must be hidden and every sensibility kept under glass; but that with these precaustions and reservations, he is of course Shakespearean; like Scott a born creator; like Balzac prodigious in his fecundity; but, rumor adds, it is strange that while one reads Shakespeare and one reads Scott, the precise moment for reading Dickens seldom comes our way.”

I think we would substitute Austin for Scott now, but with this qualification, what rumor has whispered into Woolf’s ear does not seem far fetched to me. It is against that rumor that Woolf makes – in an act of culture over nature – the choice to take up Dickens, to make this the precise moment for re-reading David Copperfield.

Woolf provides an interesting reading of the ‘rumor’ – Dickens, in her version, has pre-eminently the virtues of the male writer, and also the vices. He has humor, but curiously fumbles the emotional; he has description, but is curiously unable or unwilling to plumb the interior. He is, Woolf thinks, a genius when it comes to movement, but a failure when we need to slow down and reflect. She puts her finger on something that exactly reproduces my experience of Dickens: “Then, indeed, he fails grotesquely, and the pages in which he describes what, to our convention, are the peaks and pinnacles of human life, the explanation of Mrs. Strong, the despair of Mrs. Steerforth, or the anguish of Ham, are of an indescribable unreality – of that uncompfortable complexion which, if we heard Dickens talking so in real life, would either make us blush to the roots of our hair, or dash out of the room to conceal our laughter.”

I think that one can be embarrassed by Dickens in exactly this way. It is why one resists the re-reading. Remembering the almost sickly sweetness of Esther Summerson in Bleak House makes me wary of reading the novel one more time. And Esther is probably his most developed female figure. There are, of course, self suppressing, virtuous women in Balzac, but they show themselves capable of robbery and murder if their passions are lit. They have a sexual life, even if it is on hold, and one feels that they like to have it.

However, what is strange, to me, about Woolf’s assessment of Dickens is that she never comments on what must surely have struck her, especially in David Copperfield: the theme of extreme cruelty to children.

I’m re-reading David Copperfield. It is a striking novel. Like those bridges that are supposedly alluded to in London Bridge is falling down, at the beginning of it we find a sacrificed child. Dickens was a master of the story of cruelty to children, but I think David Copperfield’s betrayal by his mother and his beating and expulsion by the Murdstones is the culminating episode in the series. The equation of the family and the cult is seen all too often in the news. Cults often seem to develop around an initial separation of the child from the family and his or her subjection to extreme violence of one type or another. These are not separate moments, or need not be. In Copperfield’s case, Mr. Murdstone’s control and humiliation of the child, leading up to the scene of David being beaten with a cane and retaliating by biting Murdstone’s hand, is doublesided: it is also a process in which Mrs. Copperfield, now Murdstone’s bride, is completely dominated. Mrs. Copperfield is one of those unfortunate Dickens women. In a conversation with Steerforth – Copperfield’s schoolmate and hero, with whom he accepts a relationship much like that of his mother to Murdstone – there’s a perfect expression of all that is wrong, genderwise, with Dickens:  

 'Good night, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth. 'I'll take care of you.' 'You're very kind,' I gratefully returned. 'I am very much obliged to you.'

'You haven't got a sister, have you?' said Steerforth, yawning.

'No,' I answered.

'That's a pity,' said Steerforth. 'If you had had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.'           

Although Dickens is warning us about Steerforth’s character, through his mouth we get Dickens own compulsively presented heroine. Unlike, say, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens could never conceive of a woman with a real intellectual life,

Dickens is an artist of exaggeration, and this spirit even visits his restraint. The key to the first part of the book is David Copperfield’s feeling of betrayal by his mother – and the hatred that it generates. That hatred is not expressed in words, but instead, in a strained attempt to continue to love this woman.

But to continue with the cultic undertext: it is interesting that Copperfield’s expulsion from his house is accompanied by a comically treated fasting as the boy makes his way to London. Though he begins with a meal, he doesn’t eat it – the waiter does, keeping up a standard kind of Dickens waiter patter. In fact, he doesn’t eat until he reaches London, right before he is taken to Salem, the deserted school – which, as we will learn, is presided over by the sadistic Creakle – and fitted with a banner: TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES. This is the end of the initiatory period in Copperfield’s life.

This violence and its suppression create such a profound disequilibrium in the story that it becomes political – Copperfield’s sense of Murdstone and Creakle as tyrants tells us something very dirty about the formation of the political father, or the boss. The child and the “timid, bright woman” are brought together as exemplary victims – their vulnerability is their attraction. But, of course, children are not women – in that neurotic equation, the chance to overthrow the political father is lost.

It is this, I think, which makes Dickens sentimentality so disheartening. He comes so far, and then he falls so short. 

Tamir Rice and a justice that only knows victims

When I was four or five, my dad took some spare lumber and lathed me a toy rifle. I look back and can’t quite fix memory’s eye on the thing, but my hand remembers that the stock was comfortable and I do remember looking down the wooden barrel and shooting imaginary bullets. The bullets hit people, dogs, the house, passing cars, trees, birds. I went pow.

Later, my parents did not buy us kids lots of toy guns. They were noisy. We did get water pistols, and I remember a pistol cap gun with a holster. But in comparison with our friends in the suburbs of Atlanta, we were not well stocked with toy arms. We played with theirs.

And then stopped. At no point did my parents talk with us about the real possibility that, with a toy pistol in our toy holster, we might be mistaken by the cops for a real killa and given a split second to prove that wasn’t the case before we were beaded with pistol shot – the real stuff this time. No, that didn’t come up.

What does that show? It shows that the I is white who is telling you this stuff.

We are told, by a prosecutor who did his best to defend the policeman who, in a well run police department, would have flunked out of the force before he entered it – Officer Loehmann, the killer, scored a 46 out of 100 on the exam that was supposed to test his police potential – that Tamir Rice died due to a perfect storm. The radio dispatcher forgot to mention that he was a juvenile and the gun he brandished was most likely a toy. Or, at least, the officers on the scene did not know this. This is the foundation for the prosecutor’s non-prosecutorial case. And he was so big! Indeed, criminal growth spurts are the justification for shooting black teens in so many of the headline cases. Tamir was 5 foot 8, which is almost a crime in itself, him being black. Michael Brown was a giant, who was so powerful that the policeman shooting him in Ferguson decided that, as in a movie, he was getting more powerful with each bullet he received. And Trayvon Martin was not only criminally big, but was wearing a hoodie. I was wearing a hoodie yesterday, too, but luckily all my growth spurts have been in a white body, so I am innocent, on the I is white principle.

The perfect storm is a better metaphor than the non-prosecuting prosecutor, a gentleman named Timothy McGinty, knew. He was part of that storm, the storm we are within, the storm that allows 12 year olds to be shot in a split second when they reach for their toy weapons.

The Police Union is happy, of course. In actuality, the police union just put its members in further danger. I can read the stats. I know the number of policemen being killed each year is rising. And I know that the number the police are killing have friends, relatives, and spectators, who can get guns. If we don’t get justice in the courts – and the prosecutor made sure that the case would never come to court, a little favor for the boys – justice will be enacted in the streets, a mathematical, leveling justice that only knows victims.

How long have we been here? 

from ignorant aggression to aggressive ignorance

The latest political joke is that 30 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats in a recent survey by Public Policy Polling agreed that they would like to see Agrabah bombed. Agrabah, it turns out, is the capital city in Disney’s Aladdin. Nicely done, PPP – what better way to show how blind is the American imperial use of power, and how easily accepted. Dems are making mock of Republicans, but I’m sure that if the question had asked if they supported Obama droning Jafar of Agrabah, there would have been close to thirty percent, maybe more. Jafar was Aladdin’s nemesis in the movie.

There is the politics of ignorant aggression, and then there is the politics of aggressive ignorance. The latter is being pursued by the Governor and Legislator of Florida. Having staked out positions that climate change is a fraud, the governing principles of Florida are having a hard time coping with the fact that the sea level is indeed rising and South Florida has every chance of being the 21^st century Atlantis, as Elizabeth Kolbert reports in the current New Yorker. Florida, unlikely Louisiana, can’t really turn to the traditional levee and dike system, because under the swamps and cities and beaches of Southern Florida, there is limestone. Limestone is porous. You can put a levee on top of it, but the water will just flow under the levee, through the limestone. Kolbert reports that Miami Beach is becoming more and more like Venice, Italy, save for the fact that the inhabitants have cars, and wait for the periodic flood waters to abate to get around.

As for what the press laughingly calls the “adults”, the political elite in Florida”

“Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport. Appearing this past spring on “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to explain a statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.”

Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration, according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea-level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer [Kolbert’s interviewee, an environmental-studies researcher who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists]who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ‘climate change’ in the title.”

We are in the hands of the kind of bozos who used to populate the cartoon The Far Side. It isn’t pretty.