Sunday, September 25, 2005
(10:04 PM) | Brad:
An Edited Re-Post From a Dying Blog
Not long ago, I finally got around to reading Curtis White's The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves. I don't know if this book was released in Britain while I was there, and I probably would have never known of it at all if I'd not seen it on an errant shelf of a nearby Barnes & Noble. For reasons obvious to a lot of regular readers here, the title sang to me like some doe-eyed, honey-lipped, callipygian muse. (BTW ... I seem to recall somebody interested in tracking down all the books for which Zizek has provided a blurb. Add White's to the list.)Rarely have I wanted to like a book so much, agreed with a it so often, and yet irritated by it all the same. On the surface, White comes off as a classic elitist -- one bound and determined to make you feel like shit for liking sitcoms, sometimes listening to Terry Gross' Fresh Air with vague interest, and even once saying and truly believing 'Man, Charlie Rose has a nice job.' But, below the surface, which is to say if you actually read the book rather than just glancing through it quickly while trying to find a way to politely ignore and elude your wife, who is insisting that we need to go somewhere and buy a compass so we can maximize the Feng Shui potential of our apartment, White's goal is to say something very different. Namely, that we are being murdered.
He argues that the imagination, in all its disruptive glory, is being stifled by our faux-celebration of it. We have, in a sense, lowered the bar so far for the imagination that anything creative is artistic -- unleash your inner artist, so goes the cliche! Even those things that are artistic, and not simply 'beautiful', that have revolutionary tendencies, those things that upset the way we want and need to look at the world, be they our theologies, our poetry, and even sometimes our philosophies, that force a new way of seeing are too quickly and subtly consumed and presented as a form of intelligent entertainment: as 'high' culture that a high-brow well-intentioned, intelligent liberal enjoys because it, too, is well-intentioned and intelligent. Such is the tautology at the heart of our deep satisfaction and need for ever more innovation. This is, by far the best part of White's book, when he cuts through all the nonsense about 'the culture wars', and exposes it as a cover for a far more deadly malaise that was already the victor before either Right and Left decided there was something worth fighting for.
If he accomplishes nothing at all, White is to be praised for having reminded me of Wallace Stevens' classic collection of essays, The Necessary Angel:Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by quoting one of the greatest things he ever penned:
In speaking of the pressure of reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive. . . . A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree, with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow.
It's frightening stuff, this murder of the imagination.
The Western world, White declares, desperately needs a new aesthetic vision. Surely. There are vanguard voices of political dissident, thankfully; but, unfortunately, so many of them have long ago dismissed aesthetics as an ideological tool of suppression. (They may be partly right, but whatever they have won by attacking aesthetics they have lost by being victorious, for political dissent requires the imaginative heart of aesthetics. Can we still believe that political revolution is as natural as the currents and the tide?) The Western world needs more books like The Necessary Angel; it even needs the rigorous, provocative boredom of something like Adorno's of Aesthetic Theory.
Sadly, the manner in which White makes his point, no matter how good a point, undercuts just how compelling it might actually have been. In the end, he is not 'imaginative' enough in his critique. In playing for easy laughs, that are neither especially easy nor funny; in discursive rants and rambles that hint more at his own creativity (that word again!); and in being so affectively aggressive, like a two-hundred page blog post, the great potential of White's book is too easily lost in what is too readily seen as a tiresome schtick. (Pot. Kettle. Black - yes, I know!)
In the end, the tight-rope of aesthetics is certainly a difficult one, and typically results in an utterly exhausted irony. Kudos to White for trying, though. If he didn't kick open the door with necessary, lasting force, we can take solace in the fact that he made some noise trying, and let the bastards know we're still around. White acknowledges as much by citing a classic I. F. Stone soundbite in his final pages:
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing -- for the sheer fun and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.
