This morn­ing John Latta quoted a bit out of Jed Rasula’s new Mod­ernism and Poetic Inspiration:

In lieu of its “voca­tion of dis­or­der,” Blan­chot won­ders what qual­i­fies as Roman­ti­cism: “Where it man­i­fests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” The answer: equiv­o­ca­tion. Or, to use a term the Roman­tics them­selves were fond of, the arabesque, the abil­ity to wrig­gle simul­ta­ne­ously toward con­trary poles. Although such wrig­gling can remain intran­si­tive, and the work uncom­pleted, “‘this supe­ri­or­ity of intel­li­gence over the power of exe­cu­tion’ is the very sign of authen­tic­ity” as Blan­chot puts it by way of Valéry. Exe­cu­tion is tac­itly the domain of the arti­san, so the artist asserts author­ity in a sov­er­eign ges­ture of dis­dain, as if the poet, con­ceiv­ing the mas­ter­piece, says to the reader, you do it, where doing amounts to a labo­ri­ous tem­po­ral extrac­tion of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen peck­ing at a sus­pi­ciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resist­ing com­ple­tion can also be deci­sive in its pre­var­i­ca­tion between avail­able means; ter­mi­nal inde­ci­sion is hard to dis­tin­guish from poly­va­lent cre­ative options.

John calls the above “another instance of Paul Valéry’s assert­ing form / invention’s supe­ri­or­ity (the par­tic­u­lar words hardly matter),” and “incredibly spark-throwing,” and a sug­ges­tion of “the mantra of the Lan­guage boys,” which strikes me as thrice true.

But there’s some­thing else in there, too, isn’t there? The kind of equiv­o­ca­tion Rasula describes isn’t just about resist­ing com­ple­tion, à la Kafka or Beck­ett or Lan­guage poetry. As I put it to John in an email, Rasula’s equiv­o­ca­tion also seems like a Trojan horse for the Andy Warhol/Factory kind of of art­mak­ing, whose directest and purest ter­mi­nus in writ­ing is Kenny Goldsmith’s uncre­ativ­ity. Once you insist that the idea mat­ters more than the exe­cu­tion, you’re not talk­ing about art, you’re talk­ing about outsourcing.

I’m not usu­ally one to insist on Aris­totelian ways of think­ing, but there seems some­thing impor­tant, even fun­da­men­tal, in hold­ing on to the def­i­n­i­tion of artist as maker. Like­wise for the idea of an art­work as a made thing. It doesn’t really matter to me what that “making” con­sists of—no one’s talk­ing about ex nihilo or whole cloth here, and pin­ning sea­weed on the wall seems like a game as fair as paint­ing Mt. Fuji on a grain of rice or writ­ing a novel entirely from sen­tences uttered by Donald Rums­feld. What does matter is matter: which is to say that art is dif­fer­ent from think­ing not in its made­ness (which is also a qual­ity of thought) but in its thing­ness, its essen­tial con­tact with non-​neuronal matter.

If I were more hip than I am, I might say that the divi­sion of labor between the artist and arti­san is unthink­able out­side cap­i­tal­ism, which deploys the same split to divide a pop­u­la­tion of col­lars into white and blue. I don’t think that last state­ment is exactly true–”unthinkable,” really?–but it’s close enough to indi­cate the prob­lem. The real equiv­o­ca­tors in Rasula’s schematic aren’t Valéry or Joyce, they’re Koons and Hirst, pur­vey­ors of the $100 mil­lion idea that some­one else can go worry about putting together, just like an iPhone or Subaru.

(And yes, I rec­og­nize that this ques­tion of idea and exe­cu­tion gets tricky in other arts, film and archi­tec­ture coming most directly to mind. But it’s not that tricky in writ­ing, is it? If I say to you that some­one should write a book with five chap­ters, each of which includes words that fea­ture only one vowel, would you salute me? Should you?)

Rasula’s right, I think, that this comes down to the legacy of Roman­ti­cism, one key chan­nel of which inher­i­tance is the century-​old battle between the person who sets out to make beau­ti­ful things and the person who sets out to make a beau­ti­ful life. That battle has taken sev­eral forms, of which Nietzsche’s wrestling with him­self over the ques­tion may be the high­est form.

But you see it too in the phe­nom­e­non of the dandy, which in our day has become the phe­nom­e­non of the hip­ster. In Stan­zas, Agam­ben saw the pro­gres­sion from artist to dandy as, well, progress (as well as return):

Rimbaud’s pro­gram­matic excla­ma­tion ‘I is another’ (je est un autre) must be taken lit­er­ally: the redemp­tion of objects is impos­si­ble except by virtue of becom­ing an object. As the work of art must destroy and alien­ate itself to become an absolute com­mod­ity, so the dandy-​artist must become a living corpse, con­stantly tend­ing toward an other, a crea­ture essen­tially non­hu­man and antihuman….What reac­tionary crit­ics of modern art forget when they reproach it with dehu­man­iza­tion is that during the great peri­ods of art, the artis­tic center of grav­ity has never been in the human sphere. What is new about modern poetry is that, con­fronted with a world that glo­ri­fies man so much the more it reduces him to an object, modern poetry unmasks the human­i­tar­ian ide­ol­ogy by making rig­or­ously its own the boutade that Balzac puts in George Brummell’s mouth: “Nothing less resem­bles man than man.” (50)

Which, okay. But I can’t be the only one to think that has­ten­ing the process of absolute com­mid­i­fi­ca­tion might not be the most proper or effec­tive way to protest absolute com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, as Agam­ben sug­gests a few pages on. (”The polemic of modern art is not directed against man, but against his ide­o­log­i­cal coun­ter­feit­ing; it is not anti­hu­man, but antihumanistic.”) To accept this logic is to accept that hip­ster­ism is the high­est form of anti-​capitalist critique.

A dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the ques­tion comes out in a talk I heard Jacques Rancière deliver at the U. of C. a few years ago, which he pub­lished in Crit­i­cal Inquiry last spring. (Email me if you want a copy.) It’s one of the most bril­liant pieces of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism I’ve come across in a while. Titled “Why Emma Bovary Had To Be Killed” the piece reads Madame Bovary as a strug­gle to the death between Flaubert and his most famous char­ac­ter. Though he does not, as far as I recall, use the word, Rancière describes Madame Bovary as the ulti­mate dandy, the person who ded­i­cates her efforts to the aes­theti­ciza­tion of her life. Mor­tally opposed to her is her cre­ator Flaubert, who under­stands that the task of a true artist is to make art like life, not the other way round:

This is the point: the temp­ta­tion of putting art in “real” life has to be sin­gled out in one char­ac­ter and sen­tenced to death in the figure of that char­ac­ter, the char­ac­ter of the bad artist or the mis­taken artist. Emma’s death is a lit­er­ary death. She is sen­tenced as a bad artist, who han­dles in the wrong way the equiv­a­lence of art and nonart. Art has to be set apart from the aes­theti­ciza­tion of life. It is not only a ques­tion of pre­serv­ing Art from vulgar people. Instead it will become more and more a ques­tion of preerv­ing it from refined people….Such is the war of Art versus aes­theti­cism, a war in which Flaubert is a fore­run­ner. In order to win that war, it does not suf­fice that the writer punish his char­ac­ters. He must also show the right way to achieve what they have missed, namely, the equiv­a­lence of art and life. The writer wants the equiv­a­lence to be enclosed in the book.

Obvi­ously I think Flaubert was on the side of the angels here, and I rec­og­nize that that may tar me as hope­lessly old-​fashioned. But I can’t shake the deep con­vic­tion that an artist who dis­dains making art has noth­ing left to offer the world
but a pose. And don’t we all know the French word for that guy?