Every Good Critic has.no.taste (Part I)

Sunday, January 16, 2011

[follows on from Part I]

...To explain: there are few things that I find less important (and thus, more absurdly over-valued) than people’s tastes.  In anything.  It doesn't matter whether it’s their taste in music, or in books, in décor or in lovers, in hairspray, or in spray-on spirituality.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with people talking about  their likes and dislikes.  It’s one of the things that human beings<em> do</em> after all.  And the thing to remember about human beings (as the late, great Cornelius Castoriadis used to say) is that human beings aren’t (<em>pace</em> Aristotle) rational animals -- they’re<em> mad </em>animals.

This being the case, one of the more obvious benefits of being completely and utterly insane is that it gives us the ability to live in, alongside, and <em>through </em> universes of meaning in which the naked Real (as opposed to symbolized reality) tends only to be manifest to us in those uncanny gaps in our capacity to make sense of things: in the disparity we sense between what we can taste, and touch, and master and the overflowing, volcanic power of life, in the universe of sub-atomic particles in every microscopic entity.

This is not to say, in some faux-sceptical pseudo-philosophical way that maybe our reality is not really real, but rather that our ability to encounter the real (as well as the space in which those encounters take place -- the 'world') is both shaped and suffused by things that will never be discovered as determinate entities by even the most subtle of scientific instruments.  Thus, we might discover the underlying causes of dreams and longings, by ‘evaluations’, or that love is CONCOMITANT with this particular chemical reaction in the brain.  But insofar as the world is, for us, made up of phenomena like love,  like war, we cannot but help be struck by the fact that our best glimpses of the reality beyond or underlying these phenomena do not seem in any way, to correlate with our sense of their importance, or even of their existence.

It is therefore our capacity for madness, our 'radical imagination' (in Castoriadis' phrase) that above all things is the distinctive, the defining.  Note that I do not here mean our ability to be ‘creative’ (in the sense of that which allows us to to compose masterpieces, or hallucinate the landscapes of unknown worlds).  Instead, I mean that which makes 'imagination' in the normal sense possible, but that which allows us to think and act at all.  The imagination in this more fundamental sense (Coleridge's 'primary imagination') is what allows us to to break with the filibuster drone of instinct, to tune our brain to a stunning variety of different keys that are at once affected by and give rise to different cultural matrices --  it's what allows us to live not only in a world of rocks and of quarks, but of affects, percepts, by things that do not exist (fictional characters, imagined communities, realities beyond everything we know as reality.)  And these are not just the fancies of poets and opium-eaters, but the condition of our ability to experience the most everyday thing, not as a series of discrete 'sense-events' that are 'synthesised' together by the mind, but (as Husserl loved to point out) that appear to us as unified: it is not this flash of colour, this burst of light: but this chair, this scene, this stunningly beautiful person who makes my heart stop and deprives me of consonants. 

What I’m talking about here as ‘imagination’ is thus very similar to what Sartre called the ‘negating’ power of consciousness that allows us to see the world of dolphins, and quarks, and oceans not only as it is, but as redolent with possibility/significance/ and the various meanings of the French word "sens" (sense/direction/meaning.)  It's a fact of being-human that allows us to encounter the world, always in the midst of our preoccupations, interests, habits, tendencies, the sediment of knowledge, of tradition, and of culture, as well as the surge of desire or of fear.  The whole world is (despite the Enlightenment's attack on 'occult properties')  still redolent with significance such that we do not only see (like an animal) edible things which we chow down whenever we can get them and inedible things from which we instinctively recoil or ignore, but instead a universe in which a distinction as nugatory as between the raw and the cooked can still  evoke for us a distinction between civilization and barbarism, history and pre-history; a universe in which an egg is not only and not always simply an egg, but a potential omlette or a potential quiche, a mnemonic of a time when we used to stay with our grandmother before her death, a symbol of creation, of the universe, of the joys of an annual secular chocolate gorging festival, an ancient celebration of the coming of Spring (fertility and flourishing) or  even  -- by the strange assimilations of pagan things into Medieval Catholicism -- the resurrection of the Incarnate God.

It’s a world marked, then, by its constituents (who are also its inhabitants) perpetually shifting  between the background and the foreground of billions of consicious minds who are themselves objects in the foreground and the background of other conscious minds, conscious processes.  Our mental life is what seems to set the foreground or the background, but it also can itself recede into the background or come forward -- in radiance -- as an object which we hold up to the light and turn about in the hands of our psyches until it coruscates.

I stop what I’m doing for a moment, interrupt the flow of my writing (bashing my fingers from word to sentence) and reflect on a memory.  The recollection then starts to accumulate other memories, flickers of fear for the future, and strange associations like meteors that have been captured and pulled into the atmosphere by the gravity of a heavier body.  Suddenly pieces of memory, compete with my immediate perceptions (this desk, the glow of computer screen),  my half-seen reflection in the mirror of on the other wall.  Then, in an instant, all of these thoughts are overwhelmed by the traffic noises outside the window, which are in turn overwhelmed by a sudden pain that seems to explode from a single point to the rest of my body, like the chain reaction that destroys the Death Star.  At this point, the consciousness of my body is principally the consciousness of pain, and the angsty adolescent would be right to say that here and now (words that are a scandal to philosophy) the world gives itself under the aspect of pain: a pain-coloured world, or a world contorted by pain like an origami bird that’s been crumpled one too many times.

Of all the myriad things in the world, I form the flux, the chaos into ‘objects’ (into little cosmions or microcosms of the larger world which is itself a microcosm) -- some objects are brought into the forefront of my consciousness by desire, or by longing, by reverence, gratitude and  nostalgia while others fade into an infinite background made homogenous by its vast indifference and resistance to our concerns.  (I am fond of mentioning Schopenhauer’s statement that our sense of the reality of something has much to do with the extent to which it resists manipulation by our will: this is why unrequited love is so vivid.)

But this power in human beings (the imagination) also gives us the ability to change the arrangement of background-to-foreground: to come up with new foregrounds and new backgrounds, new regions in which beings reveal themselves, even as they are concealed.  (I’m using Heideggerian language here, because I think that one of Heidegger’s most profound ideas has to do with thinking through the different ways in which  things conceal themselves, not despite the way in which they are revealed, but in and through their revelation.)

The mind, to use Castoriadis’s favourite quote from Freud, seems therefore less like an organ that gives us the ability to go and out and find food to further survival and reproduction as something that allows us to hallucinate a sandwich while we starve to death. 

If imagination allows me to turn over in my mind the infamous incident with the tiger, as if it has evolved to give me a chance to  come up with a strategy to avoid the same fate next time: the 'adaptive' aspect of this development is also seriously undermined by the fact that this turning over in my mind can give me a neurosis about tigers that will make me freeze every time I see one, or be overwhelmed by the pang of frustrated desire, or the unforgettable sound of the River-God’s laughter as the tiger leaps towards me: a prophecy fulfilled.  Spending an idle afternoon in the gardens of the Forbidden City, I see the miniature waterfall in front of me, but I can also, while seeing it, have before my mind the Fall of Constantinople, a childhood dream of flying and yet have all of these things interrupted by the smell of jasmine or woodsmoke just as a Russian monastery whose members are at evening prayer might be aroused by an invading Mongol army.

Anyway.    Talking about likes and dislikes is of course perfectly normal, and has doubtless been a mainstay of human interaction ever since the first cavemen stopped fighting his fellow over a mammoth carcass to grunt out: “nice stick, man – does yours dig as well as hit stuff!”, And, yet, I remain intransigently against taste. 

The problem is not only that I find it irritating the way that people will announce their discovery of a new vegetable in the portentous tones that they might have reserved for announcing their cure for cancer.  No, in the world of irritants, this is small pak-choi. 

Taste is irrelevant, not because it’s inherently subjective (as the enemies of criticism would hold), but insofar as it is <em>made</em> into an expression of subjectivity.

What I mean by this is that taste is utterly banal and uninteresting if it is nothing more (as it often is)  an expression about an object (music, art, film et cetera) the ultimate point of which is to rebound on the subject who pronounces the judgment thus displaying something about the judging person and her soul.    It’s not, of course, that I don't think that we can tell anything about someone from what they love and hate (on the contrary!): it’s just that in the age of freewheelin’ consumer capitalism, one of the main things in which we are most trained by our society is the ability to learn to express ourselves through our tastes which is, of course, a major reason to buy things and to keep buying things (subjectivity easily taking on the aspect of infinity).

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that in the age of the internet: of blogs, of twitter and so forth, our principal way of thinking about subjectivity, i.e. of thinking about how we might answer questions about who we are is inextricably bound up with shopping insofar as it's bound up with the question ‘what do you like?’/’what do you do?” which also means how much time and how much effort were you prepared to spend on x – whether it was a book, a film, a project, a vision of oneself and one’s life and how it might be.

While much of this seems perfectly innocuous, there is still, I think, a kind of frightening aspect to it all.

First, I can’t help feeling that this is to do with what I’ve elsewhere referred to as the secular Calvinism of our time.  What I mean by this is that while we tend to suggest that we believe in the ultimate equality of all human beings, we act constantly (and our whole society seems predicated on the importance of) as if life is a constant struggle to prove ourselves (to whom I often wonder) as members of the Elect as opposed to those who will be ‘passed over’ by the hands of the Gods.

After all, why would I bother spending all this time finding ways to express who I am through what I like, were it not for the fact that a) I had doubts as to my own reality far away from  ‘consumer’ modes of self-expression and b) I felt that the distinctions that I made between things, also helped to distinguish me from the bland mass of humanity who will never rise to the heights of…whatever mountain best serves as a metaphor for the potential future achievement that I see adumbrated in my ability to define my likes and dislikes.

In addition, something that continually shocks me about the way that people assert their tastes is the way in which virtually every person I’ve ever met seems to think of their tastes as having reached the golden mean.  In other words, people continually talk as if the world consists in two classes of people 1) stupidly pretentious snobby people, who insist on pretending to like esoteric nonsense for the sake of appearing posh/hip/or like members of a revolutionary avant-garde and 2) On  the other hand, sad, brain-dead people who consume obscene amounts of Orwellian prolefeed (let’s say reality T.V. shows) with all the discrimination and insight of a dung beetle.

What I find most scary about this (apart from its obvious role in the maintenance of a class system that is not any less of a class-system for the classes having become nebulous and complicated) is that everyone I know from any walk of life, social class, or kind of taste, seems to assert the fact that their particular taste occupies the mean: not too snobby, not too plebeian.  The irony is that while one person’s pretentious would-be elitist is another person’s uncultivated ignoramus, this fact won’t stop BOTH people from seeing themselves as the sane centre in the middle of the barbarian hordes of wankers (on the one hand) and yobs/bogans (and other nasty class-hatred-whipping-up insults) on the other.

So.  How do I reconcile these criticisms of taste with my sense of the enormous importance of criticism?

First, let me say, that I have long agreed with Kant, who in the third critique quotes the maxim “there is no accounting for taste” approvingly but who also says that the remarkable thing, is that on the one hand, everyone knows the truth of this platitude, but at the same time, anyone who is moved by the beauty of anything will find themselves compelled to argue that (in contradiction to their knowledge) their experience is precisely <em>not</em> an unaccountable or idiosyncratic one, but instead something that anyone who had eyes to see (who shared the same faculties) would see as they do.

(This is why sometimes, we can feel that at an aesthetic matter is so indubitable that it renders us inarticulate: “Just LISTEN to the damn thing…it’s FUCKING A-maaazing.  <em>How</em> do you not see/hear/ that?”)

And in fact, I’ve noticed that the people who tend to pull the shrugging ‘oh, well, taste is subjective’ line,  are almost always the people who lack passion about whatever it is they insist on not discussing.  Thus, most people who really care about or love art, or music, films (or even fashion or computer games)  will consider such things worthy of argument.

But the reason I approve of such arguments (the kind of arguments that are, after all, cutlivated into the basis of criticism) is because I think that such judgments actually have nothing to do with taste, but instead constitute situations where the truth of an aesthetic judgment is not held up out of a boorish refusal to see that there are other points of view, as much as a belief that there is such a thing as a truth of (rather than a truth about) a work of art itself.  After all, we only argue about something when we believe that there is, at least in some important respect, a right answer --  a truth that can and may not be entirely graspable, but that can be glanced at, at least  such that our glimpse can be travestied or distorted, or even betrayed.

At this level, I think that good criticism (of art, of music or whatever) has something in common with good philosophical and theological debate, both of which have nothing to do with the 'I'll name your beliefs and you name yours' game which makes people rightly think that argument about things on which people have different proclivities is a kind of social disorder. After all, both philosophy and theology have their raison d'etre in uncertainty (which is why religious fundamentalists tend to hate theology as either dangerous sophistry or feeble equivocating).  However, this doesn’t necessarily lead either philosophers or theologians to quietistic silence, mysticism or hand-waving.  On the contrary, the fact that truth may be ultimately elusive, has never stopped anyone but the most bloodlessly indifferent people from thinking that it shouldn’t be sought, or reaching Socrates' conclusion that the unexamined life wasn't worth living.

And the reason I would insist on talking about criticism in relation to truth is not to say that people must share my idiosyncratic philosophical ideas about how art works, but because they cannot help feeling that there is some stake in what they do.  In particular, I’d be tempted to say that criticism has something to do with what Badiou calls ‘fidelity to the event.’  For the good, let’s say, rock critic,  something happened in relation to their chosen 'object domain',  some pivotal experience of a great concert or a first beloved album, that they are, insofar as they are a critic, not simply prepared to dismiss as experiential flotsam that should be ultimately treated as experiential jetsam.  Instead, the critic is often motivated by a sense that they have at some stage seen a glimpse of something in music (or whatever) that they have a lifelong duty to seek out elsewhere, to think through the consequences of this event and its true meaning (I know this sounds all very Badiou, but he is much in my thoughts of late) to to slay the suitors who (as Deleuze says on an old Plato-Homer parallel) are the simulacra of the truth that they witnessed. 

In concluding here (rather hurriedly, I admit) I should say that when I’m talking about ‘criticism’ I’m not necessarily talking of high falutin’ interpretative criticism of the kind you might do if you were Paul Ricoeur. 

No, I mean everyday ‘this is a great album’ criticism, i.e., the very kind that can be (and is often) mistaken as no different from the usual  ways in which we express our subjectivity through aligning ourselves with products.  And indeed, the distinction is slim, i.e. genuine criticism can reside and flourish within the broader consumer metaphysic  of “I am what I buy – and then tell people about.”
Nonetheless, what I’m saying is that, at the heart of criticism, there is always something apart from our desire to express to others who we are.  Instead, there is a fascination with the object, with the thing that made us start writing, with music or art or literature (as a region in which certain beings, certain strange and shining creatures can appear to us in certain ways).  It involves an implicit belief (and most beliefs are implicit) that there is something revealed to us in music, intimated in art, given to us in the things that we most appreciate, but obscured in the things that we do not.  In this sense, a good critic is someone who lacks the glibness of the way we normally rack up tastes: she’s someone who wants to try and give voice to the strange language of the things that she’s witnessed, to act in fidelity to the truths that she has endured.