'Culture' is stuck but 'culture' isn't
Responding to Katherine Dee
My first reaction to this was to form a picket line somewhere around
’s house, and then I thought about it and realized that Dee is saying something interesting.Here’s where I disagree with Dee:
- It’s not accurate to say that culture just ‘evolves’ and we need to adapt to whatever happens. Culture gets pushed around by all kinds of forces, many of them inimical to creativity. In our era, the market is so predominant that we have come to believe (per Dee) that the market is culture and don’t recognize the extent to which culture, to retain meaning, needs to constantly fight against the push towards profitability and the least common denominator.
- It’s important to distinguish between culture and Culture. In addition to the capitalization, you can recognize ‘Culture’ by an upward tilt of the chin and a flaring of the nostrils every time the word is pronounced. Lower-case ‘culture,’ as Dee rightly notes, is everywhere — it’s what people talk about in the school cafeteria and what they’re doing when they veg in front of the television or scroll on their phones. Upper-case ‘Culture’ is an attempt to be better than oneself, to transcend. This does not necessarily mean being snooty or high-brow, but it’s recognized by an intensity and a certain concentration of energy — a concerted effort to say ‘this is the real me,’ ‘this is how I want to be remembered.’ A very good way to know when you’re dealing with Culture — and art — is through the framing, through a discrete sealing-off of the elevated work (e.g. the book-binding, the frame around the picture, the house lights going down at the start of the show, etc).
Where Dee is absolutely right, though, is that the means of productions are changing so drastically that that sort of discrete, cordoned-off work no longer necessarily speaks to the material reality of people’s lives. As Gilles Deleuze wrote in 1990, comparing the old way of being with the new, “The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”
Undulatory orbit doesn’t sound like the sexiest way of being, but, to be honest, it’s growing on me. The artistic avant garde for at least a half-century has been pushing in this direction — it’s in Malraux’s ‘museum without walls,’ in performance art that blurs the borders of life and art, in video loop installations in museums that are designed to drive the viewer slightly crazy. I had a vivid glimpse of what this ‘museum without walls’ would look like in a museum to the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov in Yerevan. Parajanov was a very noted filmmaker and I assumed that the museum would be a celebration of his movies. Instead, it was an almost endless series of artworks, spiraling all across his house and documenting, in artistic form, virtually anything that had happened to him. The first cigarette he smoked — that warranted a sculpture. So did his beloved car and his heart attack.
In the era of the discrete work of art, there was no real way to celebrate Parajanov’s achievement — the pieces had their true value as a totality, as an astonishingly full expression of Parajanov’s emotional life. The only way something like that would ever be preserved is if the artist happened to be famous for something else — in Parajanov’s case as a film director — and then somebody bothered to keep his house intact. But, in the internet era, that kind of commemoration opens up for just about anyone. It really is possible for people to be creating as they live, and preserving that creativity, and interacting with an audience at the same time. To really appreciate the potential of that involves a shift like what Dee is describing — to get away from ‘framing’ and to see Culture as endlessly unspooling.
But I would draw a line. Parajanov was not a hoarder, and his home museum was not a compendium of everything that had ever happened to him and every object that had crossed his way. He might have been in undulatory orbit, but he was also choosing and selecting, shaping the expression of his own life. In that subtle distinction is the difference between culture and Culture. Lower-case culture reacts, lets itself be pushed around, lives in the land of the hot-take and the think-piece. In upper-case Culture, the individual and their expression are primary. It’s not always so easy to identify the dividing line between those, but it’s crucial. That border demarcates where real freedom is to be found.
Why do we become angry at Don Delillo when his project is simple enough: in minimal word count to create the tragic crossroads in Oedipus Rex in modern eating holes? Seems as if in addition to serving up the believably deracinated modern, and doggedly because as you say he finds his own voice there, i mean 60s industrial modern, but that he also asks for our choruses of participation. He always delivers the tragic collapse, but by which time we are confused maybe by being written into the story as a chorus of pop songs and sarcasms . Maybe alot of us are under too much duress...as those of us who oppose medicalization of everything say we might be anxious, we think those feelings might be just a feeling. Our inner child was ourselves with toys when we were children, i guess some of us have success at feeling similarly fascinated, and others of us maybe like I am inured to disappointment.