Hipsters, Kitsch and the Specter of Mass Culture

∑ This blog entry is in part my response to the &Now Conference. It’s about Writing and the specter of kitsch, aestheticism, vulgarity and mass culture. It’s also prompted by the book Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde by Joan Hawkins, Daniel Tiffany’s essay Kitsching the Cantos and Lara Glenum’s and my &Now panel on the gurlesque and kitsch. As well as some other stuff, some of which I have discussed on this blog.

∑ In his book Highbrow Lowbrow, Lawrence W. Levine argues that until late 19th century, the mingling of high and low culture was common in the US. There was little “cultural stratification.” Opera would be sung in the music halls, which might also include a soliloquy from Hamlet (often as farce) etc.

∑ In the late 19th century, culture was hierarchized – Shakespeare became high art, while popular music was lowbrow. This was largely based on economics: it was more expensive to go to the theater or the opera than the dance hall. High art came to signify status and class standing.

∑ But also: “…the drive for political order was paralleled by a drive for cultural order, and the push to organize the economic sphere was paralleled by a push to organize the cultural sphere, that the quest for social authority (“the control of action through the giving of commands”) was parallelled by a quest for cultural authority (“the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value”)…”

∑ As Joan Hawkins notes, the historical avant-garde was largely about undoing this stratification. You get Cabaret Voltaire or Futurist cabarets encouraging people to talk and badmouth the performers; you have Breton and Jacques Vache ducking in and out of movies; you get people throwing stuff at the screen during the showing of Un Chien Andalou etc. This is in line with Huyssen’s idea that the historical avant-garde was all about trying to alter the relationship between high culture and mass culture.

∑ Tiffany notes that there is always the risk of a work of high art turning into kitsch, and proves this by reading Pound’s The Cantos (usually seen as the epitome of High Modernism) for its kitsch. The kitsch in the Cantos can be found in the deathiness and the imagery (Imagism turned very easily into Amygism – feminine, kitsch, the opposite of “hard” Imagism – which ties perfectly into Ron Silliman’s macho hard vs soft distinction). And thus Totalitarian Kitsch.

∑ An interesting study: the gurlesque and totalitarianism. I like that idea. Uhm… I guess Aaron Kunin touched on this in his essay in Action, Yes. I see a connection to the Slovenian Retrogardists.



Or "You Should Be President" by Imperiet (from the 80s, Sweden):



∑ Imagism was at first conceived as an antidote to the ornamentalism of Victorian writing, but it soon became another ornament, perhaps the biggest sign of ornamentalism. Thus kitsch. Thus contemporary poetry’s use of the demeaning term “hipster.” It’s all image, not hard cold facts. It’s all art/illusion: everything is art, everything is ornament. What a crime.

∑ Adorno argues that the High Modern move towards abstraction is a move away from the kitsch of the image (“mimetic enchantment”).

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Behind all these supposedly materialist attacks on the ideological illusions built into the cinematic apparatus, should we not rather see the opposite, an idealist’s fear of the ontological instability of the image, and of the materiality of affect and sensation?”

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves.”

∑ Shaviro: “But is it really lack that makes images so dangerous and disturbing? What these theorists fear is not the emptiness of the image, but its weird fullness; not its impotence as much as its power. Images have an excessive capacity to seduce and mislead, to affect the spectator unwarrantedly.”

∑ Shaviro: “The image is not a symptom of lack, but an uncanny, excessive residue of being that subsists when all should be lacking… Images are banally self-evident and self-contained, but their superficiality and obviousness is also a strange blankness, a resistance to the closure of definition, or to any imposition of meaning.”

∑ Saul Friedländer: “Kitsch is a debased form of myth, but nevertheless draws from the mythic substance.”

∑ For debased myth, see Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” with its vampires and trannie deities; see Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” with its debased Death and debased Jesus; see Anger’s “Invocation of my Demon Brother” (with Mick Jagger’s awesome soundtrack); see Aase Berg’s guinea pigs; see Antonin Artaud’s rampant bleeding daughters.

∑ Tiffany: Kitsch is “permeated by an atmosphere of death.”

∑ Hawkins: “The operative criterion here is affect: the ability of a film to thrill, frighten, gross out, arouse, or otherwise directly engage the spectator’s body. And it is this emphasis on affect that characterizes paracinema as a low cinematic culture. Paracinema catalogs are dominated by what [Carol] Clover terms “body genre” films, films that Linda Williams [Note: Hardcore: The Frenzy of the Visible is an interesting book about porn and the power of the image] Most of the titles are horror, porn, exploitation, horrific sci-fi, or thrillers; other non-body genre films – art films, Nixon’s infamous Checkers speech, sword-and-sandal spics, and so forth - tend to be collapsed into categories dictated by the body genres…/… Finally, the body genres directly address the spectator’s body. This last feature, Williams argues, most noticeably characterizes body genres as low cultural forms…”

∑ Paracinema; paraliteratures (Delaney); paramilitary; paraplegic; parasite. “Clement Greenberg identified kitsch as a parasite feeding upon the productions of the avant-garde” (Daniel Tiffany).

∑ Steven Shaviro: “Something has happened to the act of looking. Outbursts of violence… arouse, agitate and unsettle the spectator. Narcissistic gratification is interrupted, not through any recognition of loss or lack, but because I am drawn into a condition of excessive, undischargeable excitation. I am depositioned and dispossessed by the film’s incessant modulations of visibility, no less than by its concise articulations of action and movement.”

∑ At the &Now Conference, I talked to many Experimental Writers who all expressed a great deal of anxiety about the Internet: “The writing on the Internet is so bad,” they would say. This anxiety about standards being upheld. This anxiety is of course totally contrary from the power of the historical avant-garde, which Experimental Writing claims affinity to.

∑ At the panels at &Now, one frequent topic was how to remain experimental. The answer seemed always to be self-examination and the drive toward greater “complexity.” In one panel, one audience member pointed out that one of the characters in a story was a stereotype. The author replied that he hoped to “complicate” the character in the rest of the story.

∑ Complexity is the new Negative Capability.

∑ Negative Capability is the urge toward prestige. It’s also the urge to “transcend” ‘the body. To become complex, abstract, refined.

∑ But what happens when that prestige is totally marginalized, left without monetary support?

∑ No wonder Adorno’s simplistic “culture industry” model is so popular in experimental quarters.

Donald Revell's argument that Allen Ginsberg was locked in the cage of capitalism, while Revell is freed by his bodiless verse.

∑ I feel bad that this comes off as a criticism of the &Now Conference, which on the whole I greatly enjoyed. I loved the way the Html Giant moved like a foreign body through the proceedings. I loved talking to people. I loved Lara, Jordan’s and Joshko’s installation (“Meat Out of the Eater!). I loved the idea of ‘avatar performances” in 2nd Life (Sondheim etc).

∑ Nevertheless.

∑ So much of contemporary poetry criticism seems based on cultural prestige vs kitsch. What is Ron Silliman’s criticism but a constant charge of kitsch! Why aren’t Quietists good: they are tasteless, they are not modern, they are not “hard” and macho. Why is Surrealism is “soft” and feminine – it’s ornamental, image-based etc. As I showed in a recent entry on Jed Rasula’s critique of Bly: His charge is that Bly is kitsch. The reason why he’s kitsch? The Image (as opposed to Creeley’s infinitely more tasteful “syntactic” experiments). The best way to argue in poetry is to argue that you represent the most prestigious and to scare people that their taste is kitschy.

∑ Flarf: Like Gurlesque seems to embrace kitsch. But then there are moments like the incident when the “glittering asian gays,” when Mike McGee couldn’t handle the flarf rhetoric and had to argue that in fact what he was doing was subverting Yeats’ orientalism. Subversion = taste. Yeats = tasteless. You lost me there.

∑ One of the things that strike me when reading Levine’s description of the un-stratified world before high/low brow is that it reminds me of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, where TS Eliot and Ezra Pound mingle with Calypso singers, and Paul Revere’s horse bursts into the kitchen, and Einstein [though I wish it were Eisenstein] disguises himself as Robin Hood. Another thing it reminds me of is Godard’s Weekend, with its car-crashes and Charlotte Bronte and cannibals etc. The more I think of it, the more it reminds me of the 1960s! Surrealistic pillow!

∑ The MFA programs that took of in the 1970s came about largely as a response to the increased college population, spurred on by the GI Bill and the democratization of Higher Ed. We have to refine the rabble, in other words. And what was the pillar of MFA poetics: You have to earn the image. The image has to be controlled. Be made tasteful. Overtness is the enemy. Political statement is vulgar. Allusion to popular culture or political figures makes it impossible for your poem to be timeless, the ultimate goal. They ‘date’ the poem. These attitudes were still in place when I attended Iowa in the 90’s.

∑ It is interesting how both the MFA poetics and Language poetics are based on a rejection of the perceived “surrealist” “excesses” of the 1960s. You have Ron Silliman’s constant critique of “soft surrealism” of the 1960s; and you have Tony Hoagland’s attacks on “the excesses of the 1960s.” They are different sides of the same coin, both opposed to a sense that the 60s represents a moment of bad taste, of excess (for what is excess but an exceeding of norms of taste). A date which is dated. And everywhere, the specter of a mass culture tastelessness invading high art, ruining the standards!