The Place of the Artist at the Aesthetic Turn (Part II)

Read Part I here.

“Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wanted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, and come they must,—when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which are kindled by their ray…They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

Psyche, Goddess of the Soul.

It all begins in the awareness that there is an impasse, even if so much contemporary artistic output—in visual art, literature, film, music, television—tries very hard to deny it whatsoever. Still, outside the dwindling club of really successful creative types, and their dwindling audiences, the overwhelming shallowness of contemporary media is something most people seem to accept, if only implicitly. Though there may be little agreement on why that is.

Before going any further, however, I’m tempted to simply say to any artist: “Go read Emerson, and be done with the rest.” For American artists especially—and Anglophone ones generally—there is no greater or more endlessly relevant classic in the canon of artistic liberation than “The American Scholar.” Read it, live with it a little, and the preoccupations of the moment seem to fall away, shedding and leaving only the core of a much deeper and more humbling thought: that there is such a thing as the identification of the Artistic Self with something beyond one’s mere personal self. This may stray too far into idealism for stubborn materialists. But God help us! A little mysticism is inevitable if we want to take seriously our Belief in Bigger Things. The ingrained twenty-first century instinct to cringe needs to be put aside for a while; all artists deserve to meditate for a while in that solitary place, sans space or time. Though believing in that place can be difficult enough: “The Personal is Political” has been aphrodisiac for an era whose greatest love is new theories of selfhood.

So, if you’ll allow me the indulgence—a few more brief passages which might make the last two centuries seem a mere mirage of progress. Here’s Emerson, on the state of the American mind, in the year 1837:

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,—but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,—some of them suicides. They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if a single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”

Substitute “young men and young women” for the sole masculine, and this would describe the tenor of our moment just as surely and just as miserably. Now again, with all his powers of foresight, here he is on the state of the American institution:

“Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.”

Yet, in case we might feel too disturbed and depressed by how familiar all of this is, consider what the great Sage of Concord has to say about that very Bloomian anxiety of belatedness:

“It is a mischievous notion that we are come too late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago.”

And here it bears remembering that even in The Anxiety of Influence, which treated the concept most influentially itself, Harold Bloom was clear enough to say that this anxiety manifests in the work itself—not necessarily in the artist, or the artist’s stance towards her precursors. But because of the Internet; because of widespread print and mass literacy; because of global capital; because of what-have-you, our relationship to our own precursors has probably never felt more stifling. As any thinking person today would likely agree, the constant availability of, and instant access to, works of past centuries, past eons, is exhausting. That sense of coming late into our own nature has produced in us a terrifying vertigo. 

Ironically (yet too true to that ineffable sprite-of-the-air, the human psyche), this exhaustion and anxiety show themselves most conspicuously in the general attempt to in fact shut out the influence of the past: to keep the flood-gates firmly closed, even as the water building up behind them threatens to bubble over and drown us. This may sound faintly ridiculous—after all, aren’t we relatively agreed that the creative industries have never been so obsessed with spending money on risk-averse sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots? Aren’t we awash in a rush for cultural ownership, as corporations hoover up every last brand and series, wringing out the final drops of all potentially monetizable IP (an era of “cultural strip-mining” as Justin Smith-Ruiu wrote not too long ago)? Certainly the obsession with recycling the past has never been more obvious, or more detrimental to the production of new things?

Perhaps. But the actual presence of the works of the past in our own artworks, as forms and as ideas, in that strange and only partially-conscious stream called influence—the real artistic use of tradition, any tradition—has dwindled to the infinitesimal. When the cultural production of past eras is handled in some way today, it tends to come out solely in aggressive anachronisms, as the overt “queering” of sexually-malleable dead authors, or the re-telling of traditional tales through the eyes of once-neglected points-of-view, Greek Myths being the most obvious victims (myths which are simply so central that even the re-writers unknowingly reproduce a foundational stance of Western Culture). So, for us, the only way to pass the old mythoi through the pipeline is via a too-simplistic re-viewing of their values, through the lens of our own temporary cultural fixations. This is tied to the fragile pretense that those fixations, though only recently articulated, are the only fixations, in the wide history of human thought, which are actually allowable for the enlightened contemporary person to seize on, without guilt.

That is: to care a bit too much for some form, process, or accomplishment in the arts of past eras, to the point of elevating them over the contemporary, is to come very close to wrongthink. One risks becoming that straw caricature of the most loathsome kind of conservative. Who, with all his antediluvian desires for past comforts and bygone privileges, actually wishes to return to the nightmare of history, all because this new post-historical world is much too liberated for him. Consider the amount of cultural production—involving billions of dollars for everything from blockbuster films to pop star public relations to propaganda for political campaigns—whose subtextual fixation is ultimately on either offending or placating this very stereotype: the perpetually vengeful, Dostoyevskian, subterranean man. And the fear which this fixation betrays, the anxiousness that we are only a few steps from sliding back into the horrors of history, ends up working perfectly in tandem with the needs of professionals in these creative industries, whose own precarity in the face of technological overhaul has risen to an unsustainable pitch and intensity. 

Yet the nightmare of history was lived and somehow survived, and it gave us all we have. The best of it—the best of our inheritance—comes from those past artists and artisans, their forms and models, and the traditions of which they were consciously part, in ways we rarely allow ourselves to be. To ignore our inheritance (whatever our inheritance is—not only Western) is functionally aesthetic suicide. Yet this is all we seem to do. The tradition of apprenticeship—years of imitation and study in craft at the feet of past masters—could be of the greatest importance in rescuing us. That it’s a deeply unpopular idea even lends a peculiar strength to those who would really take it seriously. Yet it is unpopular because its most difficult, most painful lesson is one few artists care to hear early on in their careers: that most of our feelings are simply not that interesting. 

Though it’s true that the gift of the best artists, in all mediums, is their ability to teach us different ways of seeing, this rarely comes from an exhaustive preoccupation with their own particular sorrows or joys. It takes the very highest caliber of artist to endow her own basic emotional experience with the stamp of a genuine universal pathos. Mostly, the genius of any Genius rests in the ability to shape thought and word, to play with the thin barrier between individual experience and the world outside it. We are ourselves the cursed beneficiaries of the Romantic era and its subsequents—including Blake and Emerson themselves, Goethe, German Idealism, British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, even Psychoanalysis. All helped further develop the idea that there are aspects of ourselves unavailable to our waking consciousness. And so for roughly two centuries our fixation has trained on newer (and narrower) theories of selfhood. The Orphic power of the artist, an ancient poetic Voice intimately related to religious ritual and the natural world, lives on today, but now does so mostly in this very narrow sense, of the catechized and individuated self.

Yet to risk an even greater blasphemy: contemporary human psychology is largely myth, too. The Unconscious is a myth, Selfhood is a myth, and all our thoughts are finally stories. That is: they are symbols, which always stand in the end for the mystery of Being itself. All aspects of the psyche are at bottom pure figures, are purely tropological. All of them are ultimately metonyms for a mystery beyond our ability to name or represent. 

This is precisely the way Borges put it in his great lecture, “The Riddle of Poetry”: 

“This, I think, is what Homer meant when he spoke to the Muse. And this is what the Hebrews, and what Milton, meant when they talked of the Holy Ghost, whose temple is the upright and pure heart of men. And, in our less beautiful mythology, we speak of the subliminal self of the subconscious. Of course, those words are rather uncouth, if you compare them with the Muses, or with the Holy Ghost. But still, we have to put up with the mythology of our time. For the words mean essentially the same thing.”

“We have to put up with the mythology of our time.” 

Taking that as something like the proper, balanced resignation of the contemporary artist, let’s see if the contention cannot be slowly exploded.

To be continued in Part III, coming later this week.