Four Flies on Turbulent Velvet

For me, a still closer analogy is conversation, with its fragmenting veerings of immediate impulse, its easy changes of tone and subject, its relaxed or fraught (but inevitable) drops into silence, its emphasis on voice....

- Cholly Kokonino

Whatever sort of "practice" I've been casting about for and failing to define or assemble, I know it would have one important quality: it would be very directly dialogic. Yes, there'd be all sorts of byzantine qualifications to jury-rig just the right degree of privacy and publicity, to prevent the twin dangers of cold contractual individualism and co-dependent absorption. Still, this is key: I need other people dialogically. I need them far more than a writer needs his audience.

- Turbulent Velvet

Yes. We need them as a writer needs fellow writers.

Stories, poems, essays, and memoirs begin in response to more-or-less imagined peers. We haven't found a specific "genre of conversation" because every genre is a conversation, established and maintained by the conversational impulse.

And whereas most novelists, for example, find distraction from that originary impulse in the growing work itself, other writers linger by the source.

I know by experience this sort of nature that cannot bear vehement and laborious premeditation. If it doesn't go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going. We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp, because of a certain harshness and roughness that labor imprints on productions in which it has a large part. But besides this, the anxiety to do well, and the tension of straining too intently on one's work, put the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent; as happens with water, which because of the very pressure of its violence and abundance cannot find a way out of an open bottle-neck.

It is no less peculiar to the kind of temperament I am speaking of, that it wants to be stimulated: not shaken and stung by such strong passions as Cassius' anger (for that emotion would be too violent); not shocked; but roused and warmed up by external, present, and accidental stimuli. If it goes along all by itself, it does nothing but drag and languish. Agitation is its very life and grace.

I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself. Thus its speech is better than its writings, if there can be choice where there is no value.

- Michel de Montaigne

But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I am looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more than if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised a further degree.

The ideas in succession and the signs for them proceed side by side and the mental acts entailed by both converge. Speech then is not at all an impediment; it is not, as one might say, a brake on the mind but rather a second wheel running along parallel on the same axle. It is a quite different matter when the mind, before any utterance of speech, has completed its thought. For then it is left with the mere expression of that thought, and this business, far from exciting the mind, has, on the contrary, only a relaxing effect.

* * *

For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

- Heinrich von Kleist

So if, like Montaigne, we find discussion "sweeter than any other action of our life," why bother to write? Why do some of us feel this impulse to rush ephemeral life, leaking and splashing from our cupped hands, into some more public and permanent form?

And why into this one? After a century of popular musics, motion pictures, talk shows, and improv comedy taped before a studio audience, why continue to transcribe or mimic half-remembered uncertainly-improved vivacity like poor old-timey storytellers, playwrights, philosophers, and critics had to?

Maybe we're talking talk a bit too up? Maybe talk has its own problems? I can't speak for Velvet or Montaigne, but the translator of the quoted essay, David Constantine, writes that Kleist "felt himself to be at odds, he felt embarrassed and uncomfortable, he was not understood. He was known as somebody who muttered to himself at the dinner table in company. People supposed, because of his difficulties in communication, that he must have some speech impediment. Ordinary dealings, ordinary efforts at communication, were bad enough; but to utter the truth of the heart, which he longed to do, this was a nightmare of impossibility."

My own delight in vigorous conversation, although sincere, isn't as reliable or benign as I tend to make it sound. It's true that I began publishing when an editor said I should "write that down and send it to the magazine." But I began writing shortly before, when I lost trust in the conversational sufficiency of lovers, friends, or jobmates. Or myself, for that matter.

Even when live discussion is available, sweetness may be lacking. After bouncing like Daffy, I deflate like Porkypine; I frequently absent myself from even the pleasantest parties. Aggressive engagement genuinely charms me, but even the hint of a slight or a dismissal makes me a sullen thin-skinned thin-lipped bore. And my own pleasure hardly guarantees pleasure for all. As Kleist notes elsewhere in his essay, "the faster speaker will always have an advantage"; what I consider a rewarding tussle between equals, others may consider the posturing of a loudmouthed bully.

Writing helps me suspend disbelief in persistent community. Writing helps me prolong the hope of shared pleasure and cooperative knowledge. If the intoxication's weaker, so is the hangover.

If T. V. and I are right that weblogging can approximate, more closely than any other form, our ideal of written conversation, then we can expect that weblogging will expose, more painfully than any other form, the costs and contradictions of that ideal.

But so long as we just keep reminding ourselves it doesn't matter, I guess it'll be OK. As the poet sang, or, more precisely, as the poet painted backwards in varnish on a hand-hammered and polished copper plate, relief-etched in acid, pressed in multiple pigments, hand-painted, and then sold a few copies of over the next three decades:

Introducing guest blogger William Cornwallis

In the history of discursive prose, William Cornwallis won a minuscule place as the first English imitator of Montaigne. Montaigne clearly made an impact on the lad:

I am determined to speake of bookes next, to whome, if you would not say I were too bookish, I should give the first place of all things heere. [Some brisk praise of Plato and Tacitus follows.]

For profitable Recreation that Noble French Knight, the Lord de Montaigne, is most excellent, whom though I have not been so much beholding to the French as to se in his Originall; yet divers of his peeces I have seen translated — they that understand both languages say very wel done — & I am able to say (if you will take the word of Ignorance) translated into a stile admitting as few Idle words as our language will endure. It is well fitted in this new garment, and Montaigne speaks now good English. It is done by a fellow less beholding to nature for his fortune than witte, yet lesser for his face then fortune. The truth is, he lookes more like a good-fellowe then a wise-man, and yet hee is wise beyond either his fortune or education. But his Authour speakes nobly, honestly, and wisely, with little method but with much judgement. Learned he was and often showes it, but with such a happinesse as his owne following is not disgraced by his owne reading. Hee speaks freely and yet wisely, censures and determines many things Judically, and yet forceth you not to attention with a "hem" and a spitting Exordium. In a word — hee hath made Morrall Philosophie speake couragiously, and in steede of her gowne, given her an Armour. He hath put Pedanticall Schollerisme out of countenance, and made manifest that learning mingled with Nobilitie shines most clearly.

I haave done with bookes, and now I will sit in judgement upon all those that my memory can readily produce, and it is no presumption. [...]

- From "Essay. 12. Of Censuring"

Considered as proto-blogger, however, Cornwallis holds a number of advantages over either Montaigne or Francis Bacon: he was twenty years old and not particularly talented, intelligent, or knowledgeable. The distinction wasn't lost on him:

I holde neither Plutarche's nor none of those auncient short manner of writings nor Montaigne's nor such of this latter time to bee rightly tearmed Essayes; for though they be short, yet they are strong and able to endure the sharpest tryall. But mine are Essayes, who am but newly bound Prentise to the inquisition of knowledge and use these papers as a Painter's boy a board, that is trying to bring his hand and his fancie acquainted. It is a maner of writing wel befitting undigested motions, or a head not knowing his strength like a circumspect runner trying for a starte, or providence that tastes before she buyes. For it is easier to thinke well then to do well, and no triall to have handsome dapper conceites runne invisibly in a braine but to put them out and then looke upon them. If they proove nothing but wordes, yet they breake not promise with the world, for they say, "But an Essay," like a Scrivenour trying his Pen before he ingrosseth his worke. Nor, to speake plainely, are they more to blame then many other that promise more; for the most that I have yet touched have millions of wordes to the bringing forth one reason; and when a reason is gotten, there is such borrowing it one of another that in a multitude of Bookes, still that conceit, or some issued out of that, appeares so belaboured and worne, as in the ende it is good for nothing but for a Proverbe. When I thinke of the abilities of man, I promise my selfe much out of my reading, but it prooves not so. Time goeth, and I turne leaves; yet still finde my selfe in the state of ignorance; wherefore, I have thought better of honesty then of knowledge. What I may know, I will conuert to that use; and what I write, I meane so, for I will chuse rather to be an honest man then a good Logitian. There was never Art yet that laid so fast hold on me that she might justly call me her servant. I never knew them but superficially, nor, indeed, wil not though I might, for they swallow their subject and make him as Quid saide of himselfe.

Quicquid conabar dicere versus erat.

I would earne none of these so dearly as to ty up the minde to thinke onely of one thing; her best power by this meanes is taken from her, for so her circuit is limited to a distance, which should walke universally. Moreover, there growes pride and a selfe opinion out of this, which devours wisdome.

- From "Essay. 45. Of Essaies and Bookes."

His contemporaries took note as well. Cornwallis's one twentieth-century editor — Don Cameron Allen, understandably sour — retrieved two particularly telling reactions. The first, occasioned by a Parliament speech made by Cornwallis in 1604, was written by a mutual acquaintance to John Donne:

Sir William Cornwally hath taken upon him to answer the Objections against the Union, but they are done so lamely; and, although it seem scarce possible, so much worse then his Book, as (if he were not a kind friend of yours) I would expresse that wonder which I have in my heart, how he keeps himself from the Coat with long sleevs. It is incredible to think, if it were not true, that such simplicity of conceit could not be joyned in him, with so impudent utterance.

The second, answering an inquiry from would-be patron Sir Henry Wotton, was written by Cornwallis's father:

My good Lo: I thanke yow much for soe good a testimony of your love to myne unthrifty and unfortunate sonne. Hee hath spent mee in yt Courte above 5000 £i. And now haveinge geven him 200 £i a yeare more wherewith to live, he turnes his backe to his fortunes. Of all sorts of people I most dispaire of those of his sorte, that are Philosophers in their wordes and fooles in their workes. To God Almightie his mercifull and gracious providence I must leave him.

With the aid of providence William Cornwallis died dirt poor in 1614, an inspiration to us all. But let us return to 1600, where we find him launching a familiar scene, albeit without benefit of cafes or wireless access points:

Essay. 22.
Of Alehouses.

I write this in an Alehouse, into which I am driven by night, which would not give me leave to finde out an honester harbour. I am without any company but Inke & Paper, & them I use in stead of talking to my selfe. My Hoste hath already given me his knowledge, but I am little bettered; I am now trying whether my selfe be his better in discretion. The first note here is to see how honestly every place speakes, & how ill euery man lives. Not a Poste nor a painted cloth in the house but cryes out, "Feare God," and yet the Parson of the Town scarce keeps this Instruction. It is a straunge thing how men bely themselves; every one speaks well & means naughtily. They cry out if man with man breake his word, & yet no Body keepes promise with vertue. But why should these Inferiours be blamed, since the noblest professions are become base? Their instructions rest in the Example of higher fortunes, and they are blinde and lead men into sensualitie. Me thinks a drunken Cobler and a meere hawking Gentleman ranke equally; both end their pursuites with pleasing their senses. This, the eye; the other, the Taste. What differs scraping misery from a false Cheatour? The directour of both is Covetousnesse and the end Gaine. Lastly, courting of a Mistresse & buying of a Whore are somewhat like; the end of both is Luxury. Perhaps the one speaks more finely, but they both meane plainly. I haue been thus seeking differences; and to distinguish of places, I am faine to fly to the signe of an Ale-house and to the stately comming in of greater houses. For Men, Titles and Clothes, not their lives and Actions, helpe me. So were they all naked and banished from the Herald's books, they are without any evidence of preheminence, and their soules cannot defend them from Community.

No Better than We Should Be, 5

And on a bright fall Saturday there we all were, sipping coffee, bitching under our collective breath, and ready to be indoctrinated in the company's much-vaunted QCEL managerial philosophy — Quality, Creativity, Ethics and Leadership.... Several hundred phuds, most in the engineering and science fields and some with international reputations, marched through "creativity" sessions in which a trainer with a master's degree in creativity (no shit) inculcated them in the beauty of "convergent and divergent thinking." Or in which they were asked to work in teams to create that "best" paper airplane (i.e., Quality through teamwork, teamwork through Leadership). Or in which they were instructed in the importance of sound (business) ethics — without being asked to consider (e.g.) the ethical impact of divorcing ethics from more bracing issues of morality or politics.

- Joe Amato, "Technical Ex-Communication"

Most people would probably agree that ethical judgments should take actions into account, and few witnesses mistake the actions of writing and reading. Mixing them sacrifices any chance to distinguish good-guy contextual "ethics" from bad-guy universalizing "morality": an artwork can be condemned as equally immoral in deed and in effect, but an artwork can only be referred to as unethical in its making. To say that an act of embezzling is unethical is to say "In these circumstances, you shouldn't have embezzled"; if after seeing a movie, I unethically embezzle, the shame is wholly mine. To say that a movie is unethical is not to say "I shouldn't have watched that movie" but "You shouldn't have made or distributed that movie." And it's hard to picture a good humble Derridean saying such a thing.

So why have we seen such consistent fusing of the two roles?

It could that a mere reader, listener, or viewer who sought to promote mere reading or listening or viewing as a powerfully "ethical" practice might sound a bit swell-headed. Replacing the finished artifact with a personal name allows for a narrative of continuous directed action — "Ethical Joyce" and "Ethical James" rather than "Ethical Chants de Maldoror" or "Ethical 'Rape of the Lock.'" And replacing the audience with the artist downplays the none-too-heroic security of transient consumption in favor of drive and risk.

Despite its suspicious convenience, though, I doubt this superimposition was instigated by the ethical turn. It's more likely a matter of habit. Purely formal analysis is generally confined to the workshop; insofar as criticism is a conversation held outside the realm of practice, it includes ethical suppositions, judgments, and re-enactments, and "ethical criticism" so defined would include most of my own scroungy corpus, including the dump around us. ("Bless my soul! I've been writing ethical criticism for over forty years without knowing it, and I'm ever so grateful to you for teaching me that.")

This doesn't mean that artists ignore form or that our critical inventions are always supported by evidence. As we've mentioned before, very few writers or directors or musicians under oath would describe anything resembling the intentions we ascribe to "the author." No, it merely means that justification depends on the vocabulary of intent. I am (it seems to me) fully capable of feeling satisfaction, delight, sorrow, or disgust as self-sufficient experiences. But when my reactions are challenged by a skeptic, I grasp for and wield the intentions and effects of imagined creators, the intentions and effects of an imagined audience, my own intended effects....

* * *

Such analyses (except, of course, done much, much better) would find their proper home in an ethics of literary criticism.

In the stack of books and journals that fed this essay, my most pleasant surprise was "Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections" by philosopher-musician Garry Hagberg. Hagberg describes his experience of behaviors encouraged and discouraged within collaborative jazz performance, and then goes on to acknowledge some widely held ethical guidelines which do not apply in this particular sphere.

Pieces similar to Hagberg's could be written about any collaborative venture: migrant farming, garbage collection, a political campaign, whale hunting, a meal, a ballgame, a fuck, an execution. Each area of human endeavor holds characteristic blind spots and expectations. Studying its ethics isn't a matter of proving how much better it is than alternative endeavors but of understanding how it works.

Collaborative jazz performance is one fairly clearly delineated subcategory of artistic production. Is there anything that can be said about the ethics of artistic consumption, or of literature, in general?

As a self-described aesthete, I must suppose so. But after setting my blur-filter to maximum, I see only a message of gray relativism. Social context swamps all:

• Regarding apparently uncontroversial graphic elements, "the agreement is close to null.... there was no vast agreement among the participants as to which features of the stimuli were critical for the aesthetic evaluation of the pictures. Furthermore, if participants used the same cue for their judgment, they still may have used it in the opposite direction."
• Art is prized by authority figures for the apparent direction of its effects, by consumers for the intensity of its effects, possibly including anodyne or bigotry-confirming effects. I have relations who watched "All in the Family" for Archie's homely wisdom, and I have heard Al Pacino's Scarface taken as a model of decorum.
• Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid" teaches that discarding family, friends, and body shape in search of romance will lead to suffering, isolation, and suicide, but all the good parents I've met prefer their little girls to learn a more destructive but less painful lesson.
• Con artists, professional gamblers, and propagandists rely just as much on keen social insight as that nice Mr. James did. Empathy is inherent to human experience but ethically neutral; it only seems otherwise in a culture like our own, that sets such contradictory store on sentimentality and selfishness.
• A more ancient justification for narrative art — starting from Homeric epic and heroic sagas, through chivalric romance and pre-Sterne comedy, to vigilante thrillers, zombie stories, and military science fiction — is to repress empathy, and in particular to inspire otherwise sensible kids to go to war. Our own armed forces encourage the use of violent video games in the ethical hope of counteracting a self-destructive aversion to killing. We may of course quarrel with them on this matter, but if we stray too far from the ethical givens of the military our arguments will be ignored.
• The detachability of artifacts from their original context is in itself important. We may believe it wrong to have created the Gettysburg battlefield or a mansion for Henry Clay Frick while still approving their preservation.
• Even the hedonic reaction might be felt as attractive (Montaigne) or aversive (Pascal).

And so I immediately felt sympathetic to Derrida's appropriation of Levinas. No aesthete could hear a hail-alterity-well-met without thinking of our own oh-so-flexible oh-so-fascinatingly-varied pseudo-relations to artifacts.

But recognition is not identity — wasn't that the point? — and artifacts are not friends, family, tribe, or strangers: I may pointedly ignore a book for years at a time, lend it out, or hurl it across the room without damaging our relationship in the least. A proven utility of representation is to distance oneself from the thing represented. Last year around this time, the Panglossian researchers at OnFiction summarized and spun some other relevant results:

Djikic et al. (2009a) asked people to read either a Chekhov short story, or a version of the story in a non-fiction format, which was the same length, the same reading difficulty, and just as interesting. Readers of Chekhov's story (as compared with the version in non-fiction format) experienced changes in personality. These changes were small, and in different directions, particular to each reader. In a companion study, Djikic et al. (2009b) found that people who routinely avoid emotions in ordinary life experienced larger emotion changes as a result of reading the Chekhov story than those who did not usually avoid their emotions. We interpret these studies as indicating that fiction can be an occasion for transforming the self, albeit in small ways, and can also be a way of reaching those who tend to cut themselves off from their emotions.

Alternatively, it can be a way to help us continue cutting ourselves off from our emotions: I might prefer reading fiction and poetry and watching films to reading newspapers and watching TV because the former applies a cool damp cloth along my forehead while the latter makes me flush and sputter. It's been posited that sleep evolved as a way to keep mammals out of trouble, and art may anti-serve similar non-ends. The primal proponent of aestheticism in the Victorian imagination was "Mr. Rose," a bugaboo of harmlessness.

To cite a social practice treated with similar piety by practitioners, it's been shown that pet owning can teach responsibility, provide a safe route for caring impulses, and reduce loneliness. Nevertheless, maintaining six yapping dogs or twenty yowling cats has proven no guarantor of fairness, empathy, or even politeness towards members of our own species.

Open reply to a closed comment

I can be mediocre at greater length, if that'll put you at ease:

My tastes and preferred critical vocabulary overlap D'Agata's more than Deresewicz's, but taste is cheap (just look at my wardrobe) and vocabulary can be misused (just ask my editors). The, let's say, idiosyncratic D'Agata usage which bugs Deresewicz most is essay; the one which bugs me is lyric.

By the late 1970s I'd developed my own sturdy notion of "discursive lyric" from Lester Bangs and Thomas Nashe and to the amusement of my college professors. That notion describes a mode rather than defining a genre: a preoccupation with sound and structure reveals itself more or less blatantly in a subset of essays, but the impulse isn't associated with particular materials, markets, or audiences.

However that formal impulse manifests, facts are no more its enemy than words are. Like words, they inspire; they supply convenient handholds; they're a garden full of carrots and a briar patch full of paths. Fudging the facts amounts to faking the funk. When Bangs and Nashe make shit up, they make sure you know it. The sound of someone making shit up is a powerful structural device in itself, and they deploy it as such.

To quote a translation of Rancière paraphrasing Hegel which, ten hours after writing the above paragraph, I read at a bar between a library and a movie, "Art lives so long as it expresses a thought unclear to itself in a matter that resists it." Later in Dissensus, Rancière compares the stone-by-stone sentence building of Flaubert to the speaking stones of early archaeologists and geologists, and cites attacks on Flaubert's art-for-art's-sake art as degradation by the ignoble real.

Around and after Flaubert, we could easily multiply examples of artists, musicians, and writers who've borrowed the antiseptically desocialized terms of science or engineering to justify their practice. Words and colors and textures become fact-objects in themselves, and the job set the artist-scientist is to pattern those givens rather than to elevate the spirits of the powerful or keep the proles in their place.

The essays of Montaigne established an early limiting case for aestheticism/scientism by wrenching discourse itself — the medium of the sermon and the political speech — from its seemingly innate goal of persuasion.

To claim that lyric discursive prose forces you to ignore the enticingly resistant real in favor of off-the-Walmart-shelf whatevers is like claiming that lyric verse restricts you to vaguely maudlin epiphanies. Your craft has drifted out of the never-terribly-reliable lyric impulse and into discourse's powerful home current — in this case, aiming to persuade us that an overstretched careerist is actually an irresistible su-per-ge-nius who has it... all... under... control...