for jonathan franzen, according to charles baxter, freedom’s just another word for everything lost.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
What has happened, I think, is that the public sphere is regarded here as a total loss, so that all the big problems are imagined as unsolvable, The result is a particular kind of despair, the sort that arises from rage with no outlet, the core emotion of a large proportion of educated readers during the George W. Bush administration. Corrupted by ruinous quantities of money and the cynical application of power, the public world depicted here seems incapable of saving anything of value. At every point when a citizen tries to enter that world, he encounters active lying and the operations of expedient logic, and, in the novel’s view, he becomes a collaborator. Franzen is not a conservative, but he is a conservationist, and his novel watches, helplessly, ragingly, as cherished habitats, cherished beings, begin to disappear.
the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.
Christopher Lasch.
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.
But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?
There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.
Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.
Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.
But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?
George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?
Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?
These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.
Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.
Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.
So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?
Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?
sam durant’s smithson-ian mirrors and dirt made from rock.
Sam Durant, Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock), 1998.
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody’s own vacancy. The museum undermines one’s confidence in sense-data and erodes the impression of textures upon which our sensations exist. Memories of ‘excitement’ seem to promise something, but nothing is always the result. Those with exhausted memories will know the astonishment.” – Robert Smithson
…the information tends to obliterate itself so that there is obviously information there, but the information is so overwhelming in terms of its physicality that it tends to lose itself. – Robert Smithson
…you have essentially a gathering taking place out of the scattering.…I’m consolidating the scattering and heightening the loss of focus. – Robert Smithson
The sites are receding into the nonsites and the nonsites are receding back to the sites. – Robert Smithson
In Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock), Sam Durant borrows directly from Robert Smithson’s famous Yucatan Mirror Displacements and Partially Buried Woodshed to explore the meaning of the 1960s counterculture.
Two mirrors on the floor are covered, partially, in piles of dirt. Two audio speakers below each mirror amplify looping recordings: in one channel, Mick Jagger pleads with the audience at the violent Altamont concert to be cool and not push each other around; in the other, Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) announces in a chipper voice that he and his Hog Farm will serve breakfast in bed for 400,000 at Woodstock.
On one level, the art is an elaboration of “Smithsonian” theme of entropy. The mirrors, which Smithson photographed in various natural landscapes in the Yucatan and elsewhere, suggest the ways that the counterculture remains with us, albeit refracted from the past (one crucial difference in the use of mirrors is that Smithson photographed his, then obliterated them, whereas Durant preserves them for us in a museum). But the dirt proposes that this reflective memory continues to grow only more murky with time. The memory of the counterculture is covered with debris, time, rot. It is composting, partially buried (though partially visible as well), and, most of all, obstructed.
Standing before Durant’s piece, however, the references to Smithson began to fade into the visual background. It was the sound of Jagger and Gravy’s voices, in a kind of relentless duet, that took over.
One would think that the two voices, their tones rising and sinking, blending and diverging, would create a sense of infinite regress, countercultural despair and hope so conflated that they became entropic, at least according to Smithson’s notion of the term.
But instead, something else quite unexpected happened. Rather than spiraling into a jetty of confusion and chaos, the two voices looped into tighter and tighter counterpoint. They did not grow senseless, but rather made increasing sense. A listener began to understood that the counterculture, at least in memory, is poised forever between these two events (in reality, as historian Michael Frisch has explained, they were less dichotomous than we think).
Innocence and guilt, sustenance and panic, heaven and disaster, communality and duplicity—hearing Jagger and Gravy’s repeating voices, these binaries became arpeggios of climbing and falling tones, scales of suspended judgment, two limits in a span across divides, two speakers swirling together, ascending and descending, under the mirror and dirt, but still yet over the speakers.
Contrary to Smithson’s critical opinion of the museum, I left the installation full of sense-data, texture, and memory, even excitement. Instead of partially buried or revealed images, I had voices in my head.
The past, sonically, was not scattered and lost, but consolidated and reverberating. Utopia became not no-place, dystopia not its opposite, but both became suspended in this-place. It wasn’t entropic so much as elastic: bands echoing, entwined, plucked from the air.
Durant’s sculpture created a kind of countercultural memory music. The mirrors and dirt were made from rock.
Art critics are generally poets who have betrayed their art, and instead have tried to turn art into a matter of reasoned discourse, and, occasionally, when their “truth” breaks down, they resort to a poetic quote.
— Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum, September 1968
Pansori Brecht Sacheon-Ga by the Pansori Project ZA featured a Korean group using a modernized form of the traditional Korean storytelling style known as pansori to present Bertolt Brecht’s A Good Woman of Szechwan, a European modernist play set in the traditional East.
The oscillations between old and new, east and west, were so dizzying, the hybridities so intense, that they generated a powerful forward motion, a forceful message about the baffling suffering produced by global economic pressures whose origins seem invisible, but whose effects always strike close to home.
Jaram Lee, a successful singer in South Korea, took on the central role as sorikkun or singer and narrator. Along with the wild accompaniment of the musicians—drummers and a bassist—and the playful gestures of three dancers, her virtuosic vocal style criss-crossed between Brecht’s famous effort to intensify the artifice of theater and pansori’s own magically-jarring movements between direct address and character acting.
Vast distances proved surmountable—even advantageous—when it came to the distancing effect.
History, certainly, is important. Knowing where you come from and why is essential, and thanking and giving reference to those who came before, who plowed the way to where we are now is vital. But those artists at the club last night were there in flesh and blood for that one night, playing and creating music that will never be heard in that particular way again, and for that they deserve the credit of their night, not an explanation of how and why they got there.
On the surface, Emily Johnson writes of attending a burning hot jazz show at a club in Harlem, but the deeper issue she writes about is the challenge of historicizing artistic experience.
How do we not only represent the aspects of art that are obviously lasting—origins, lineages, linkages, appropriations, and contexts—but also the effervescent explosions of art that “will never be heard in that particular way again”?
It’s easy to assume that the impermanent is unimportant, but when it comes to art, the ephemeral can sometimes, in fact, be sheer power flashing forth, history in-the-making.
Writing about performance…has to match the courage of the performance makers, has to be a forum other than the forum of performance itself, to help give current and future context to something that is constantly evolving.
emily johnson, thank you bar @ the columbia college dance center, 10/8/10.
Emily Johnson
Performance…is an experience that bridges history—it is experienced, and it lingers, and it finds a place of meaning in our daily lives. — Emily Johnson
There is dislocation in Emily Johnson’s dance performance Thank You Bar, but there is no disarray; there is displacement, but there is no rupture. Things are fragmented, but thereby, miraculously, they emerge in a greater whole. The world is broken open, but precisely to understand that it is not broken. History accumulates, but you become distinctly aware that you are experiencing something new.
By the end of the event, you arrive home, and in arriving home, you also learn about what home is: it’s a familiar place rendered strange, a strange place made familiar; it’s a persistent reminder of something you have forgotten but whose impossible recovery is itself inscrutably comforting. It’s a rustle of leaves.
Johnson achieves a mood of anti-melancholic nostalgia. Thank You Bar is inspired by her own meditations on her efforts to feel at home in the world, to measure the connectedness between her childhood roots in rural Alaska, her current home in Minneapolis, and her traveling life as a touring artist. It is dedicated to registering the impossibility of ever completing this connection. Thank You Bar aches with longing. But it also offers a discovery: that it is precisely in incompleteness, in the impossibility of unifying the experience of movement, that home can be felt most potently.
The displacements are many in Thank You Bar. One enters the performance space to discover that the audience has been moved from the traditional seats in the house to the stage itself. There we sit arranged in a semi-circle around a set of amplifiers, microphones, pedals, instruments, and other musical equipment.
The musicians begin the performance. They walk in, play a fragment of the composition, then walk off stage. Yet they remain, relocated to repeating digital loops of the sounds they have made. The loops grow with each trip they make to their gear until a thick texture of ambient noise develops. A scratched acoustic guitar, a celestial falsetto hum, a jolt of electrified static, a scrap of country-music pedal steel guitar. They linger, slowly gathering steam and dust.
A video appears. On the screen, we are taken outside the theater, onto the street. Johnson drags in an imaginary tree, one that was cut down to make the building that is now the Columbia College Dance Center, which was itself once the Paramount Pictures Film Exchange warehouse. Layers upon layers begin to accumulate. Invisible sediment. Old facts yield new insights. We are among reassembled dislocations.
A voice in the video begins to tell us this story, but it is not Emily Johnson’s voice in the video. It is Emily Johnson’s voice on a tape recorder taped to her chest in the video, which has itself taken us from the theater’s actual stage to the screen above us.
Suddenly, from behind the audience, in from the door to the lobby, Johnson steps forward. The screen is gone. She walks on heavy stilts (once trees themselves). Flashlights are taped on to the bottom of each stilt to light her path. The footlights are headlights.
Johnson steps down from the stilts, rolls forward, rolls back, rolls forward, rolls back—displacement, replacement, sameness, change, repetition, alteration, recovery, discovery. We begin to follow her on a treadmill of movement: things and gestures that are here, now gone, now here again, half-forgotten, then suddenly present, remembered. “I’m so lonesome I could cry,” she sings in the dark, lying on the ground behind us.
Before us, musicians and Johnson then create community, which displaces this loneliness. She welcomes us to the “Thank You Bar,” which is the English translation of Que-Ana Bar, Yup’ik for thank you. This was the name of Johnson’s grandmother’s house and bar in rural Alaska, where she grew up. It’s a real place.
But it’s also a place now dislocated by other contacts, newfound connections, future histories. Johnson wheels out an imaginary igloo. She offers each audience member a paper box illuminated by a small light. We share in what Johnson calls an “igloo myth.” For though there were no igloos in her childhood, she is always asked whether there were. So fake igloos are also part of the real past of the Que-Ana Bar. Paper igloos cubes filled with light. The dislocating point of sharing.
Johnson talks to us through a distorted walkie-talkie; she tells a childhood story of being called an Indian and dances the act of not knowing how to respond, her breath itself swallowed up in memory. She turns us around on our chairs to the other side of the dance floor — “This is the deep end” a sign reads. She shines flashlights of all sizes and shapes into the dark air, searchlights, beams that become bridges across the dark, dissipating into the ether yet casting lines into unknown spaces.
Johnson shines a light upward. We follow it. “Pigeons live in this vent” a sign explains.
Johnson stands on a pedestal. She slaps name tags in rapid succession on her heart—the names of each audience member in attendance. She becomes each of us for a moment, as we become her. We lose ourselves for a moment. We discover new selves. Hello my name is….
Suddenly, a technician has become a dancer, in duet with Johnson. Suddenly, Johnson sings in quiet three-part harmony with the musicians. Suddenly, the musicians become the dancers. They spin in circles, hanging on to each other and Johnson with the tips of their fingers. They slip under each other’s arms, making a home of the dance floor by spinning off it.
Johnson gathers us around a small inflatable pool, fills it with dried leaves, climbs in with a flashlight, sinks in to her shoulders as she tells the story of a boy who tried to dissect a blackfish. He couldn’t. Its insides turned to thick black goop when he cut it open. He ate five in frustration, trying to get inside them by getting them inside him. He vomited the goop back out. Johnson’s flashlight crinkled in the leaves, shone out into the darkness.
You can’t get to the bottom of things, I think, when those are the things that are at the bottom of things.
Emily Johnson, Research for Thank You Bar @ the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Residency.
the goodman theatre tends its own (miniature) garden.
Candide @ the Goodman Theatre.
Like the recent production of The Comedy of Errors at the Court Theatre, the Goodman Theatre’s current revised revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide revels in a casual amateurism, expertly delivered.
As Voltaire’s optimistic title character explores this farcical “best of all possible words,” director Mary Zimmerman offers us dinky, summer-camp props in place of fully-staged spectacle: small boats on sticks and handheld waves portray epic journeys, painted canon balls on poles convey bloody wars, and little red sheep dolls from the land of the Incas are the play’s greatest treasure.
The reduction in scale results in an enlargement of theatrical magic: the storytelling grows more evocative precisely by leaving more to the imagination. The sense of clever innovation reinforces the seriousness of Voltaire’s farce, which undercuts grandiose hopefulness without giving up all hope.
