Picking up from part two…
15.
To review: what’s at issue are the criteria (or the lack of them) by which Art and/or Content can be judged valuable at a time when it’s produced and promulgated at exponentially higher volumes and speeds than ever before, when new media and genres are shooting up scarcely after yesterday’s crazes have taken root as (apparently) permanent features of the cultural landscape, and when High Culture and Folk Culture have both been sublated into Mass Culture.
While algorithm-populated feeds and recommendations have laid bare the reality that all of us like what aleatory personal circumstance has conditioned us to like, there remains pressure to espouse and defend our own tastes (and how we use our time) either in terms of some nominally impersonal metric of value or in the language of authenticity (sharing, with candor and eloquence, our stories of how a given quantum of Content affected us on a sui generis personal level as it intersected with a particular chapter in our lives). Our likes and dislikes, our wills and won’ts, are integral to our personal and social identities—and identity work is increasingly conducted in cyberspace.
One last note from Moeller & D’Ambrosio:
“The other thing about me is that I give zero-fucks about anything, yet I have a strong opinion about everything.” says Hannah in season 6, episode 1, of Girls. Her frank statement sums up nicely the functioning of participatory democracy under conditions of profilicity and pervasive second-order observation. So many social spheres have become “democratic,” inviting votes, comments, critiques, reviews, and ratings by almost anyone and of almost anything. Everything is reviewed…In profilicity, you need to be opinionated.
Originally, Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century, and especially Immanuel Kant, envisioned a future society where human reason would rule. Every intellectually “mature” person would make use of their critical capacity, judging and deciding for themselves. If only provided with a public forum for exchanging ideas and views, rational individuals would collectively figure out what is good and right, better and best, and thus a truly democratic and free society would emerge…Alas, it turned out the real internet world in the twenty-first century was not as much populated by Kants as by Hannahs from Girls.
In a highly diversified society, there is neither an overarching ethos nor a foundational rationality. The radical multiplicity of perspectives generated by all-pervasive second-order observation makes it possible to judge almost anything from almost any perspective. No ultimately valid review can be found. Given the temporal characteristics of the information feed in mass and social media communication, critical participation must happen instantly and perpetually…The point of rating, ranking, and reviewing is not to judge something based on the depths of universal reason. The point is to confirm a perspective and make it count by contributing it to the data feed.
Critical judgments and opinions contribute to a profile. They, too, can be considered as prolific memes meant to be spread as widely as possible. As memes, they are made in consideration of the general peer. Publicly generated and displayed ratings and rankings are products of second-order observation par excellence. They manifest “public reason” and the “right to express one’s own individual opinion” in times of profilicity…Liking and not liking is in turn liked and not liked. My ratings and opinions are not only evaluations of something but at the same time also self-presentations. When presenting an evaluation to the general peer, I simultaneously evaluate and am evaluated.
It is one thing to glance at the Nielsen ratings or Billboard chart and see what’s selling merely in numerical terms, or to read a single professional reviewer’s impression of a book, film, or video game in a late twentieth-century magazine. It’s another thing entirely to be able to examine, with a few keystrokes, taps, and clicks, what kinds of people are buying, watching, and using, and to read or hear hundreds of them explaining why they like or dislike it—in effect volunteering to tell us something about who they all are—and then proceeding to get a sense of how many and what kinds of people respond positively and negatively to their disclosures. Patterns typically emerge.
Speaking personally, the 2010s were the first time I decided I didn’t like a popular video game I’d never played or even seen much footage of (Undertale) because I found its fans obnoxious, despite having never (knowingly) dallied with any of them IRL. When I’d “meet” a new person online and discover Sans and Papyrus fan art on their Tumblr or Twitter or whatever feed, I found myself regarding it as a red flag. This is probably a person I wouldn’t get along with if we got to know each other, so it’d be best not to engage with them.
It was new to me then—but we’re all doing this now. The medium is still the message, and the messages communicated through posts, likes, shares, and uploads on digital platforms frequently boil down to something lot like what pheromones mean to ants and bees. Which team are you on?
Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the conditions of profilicity have merged the personal, the public, and the political in ways that we’re still grappling with and trying to figure out.1 A salient effect of the movement from a unidirectional mass media environment where only a tiny fraction of the population was able to speak “on the air” to one where everyone has the opportunity to be seen and heard on digital platforms that have millions of eyeballs glued to them every minute of every day has been what Ezra Klein, in the wake of the GamerGate fiasco, called “the politicization of absolutely everything.” The sphere of passive leisure has transformed into an ideological (or tribal) battleground.
This state of affairs is not without its benefits. It has provided us a handy tool for fending off skeptics and haters of our preferred flavors of Content: making it political (if it was not already explicitly so).
Thanks to the internet, not only can a college-aged English major superfan of books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey (yes I know this is anachronistic) stand up to the hoity-toity whitehaired professors and pretentious lit bros in her English department with all the confidence that comes with knowing and feeling that the numbers are on her side (after all, she sees only a couple dozen of these guys IRL while her device feeds her hundreds of takes from as many of her likeminded peers across the world every day), but can moreover employ political discourse to speak on behalf of her literary preferences. I suppose you can imagine how it would sound; if you need your imagination stoked, here’s a piece about how Kim Kardashian is a feminist icon.2
If the professor still tells her that Twilight and Fifty Shades are artless, lowest-common-denominator tripe undeserving of emulation or serious study, then the student can say the issue isn’t that her own tastes are undeveloped, but that the old man clings to retrograde politics.
Perhaps she might consider seeking a doctorate and replacing him when he retires.
16.
Poptimism “contends that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2,” explained one Chris Richards in 2015. “But in practice, the poptimist dogma has been misread and misused. Deployed reflexively, it becomes worshipful of fame. It treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs. It grants immunity to a lot of dim music. Worst of all, it asks everyone to agree on the winners and then cheer louder.”
As Freddie deBoer has said (over and over again), poptimism must be viewed as a facet of the so-called Great Awokening. The narrative that a well-positioned fraternity straight white male rock-snob tastemakers were promoting music that appealed only to other college-educated straight white males from affluent backgrounds while illegitimating the performers and tunes that women, people of color, residents of poor urban neighborhoods, etc. listened to and found meaningful couldn’t but flourish in the social [media] climate of the 2010s. It should surprise nobody that the roles of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Carly Rae Jepsen, Beyoncé, Rhianna, Ariana Grande, etc. as public-facing avatars3 of American capitalism and cultural imperialism was absolutely beside the point; after all, the genius of post-Occupy emotivist “wokeism” was in how effectively it dismissed as immaterial those material facts which traditionally entered into left-wing politics.
But I’m getting off track.
One of the best gags of the first season of Harley Quinn involved the Joker ostentatiously holding up a copy of Infinite Jest.
I won’t speak poorly of Harley Quinn; I enjoyed most of its first season, though it lost my interest as it took itself more and more seriously throughout the second season. I don’t think I traduce it by labeling it “woke,” and I doubt the cast and crew would take offense to that descriptor.
In the first season, the writers transparently treat the world of supervillainy as a proxy for a “boys’ club” in the upper echelons of the Hollywood or Brooklyn departments of the culture industry. Harley Quinn is cast as the ambitious, talented woman who’s tired of riding the coattails of her famous but abusive ex-boyfriend, and determined to make her own name for herself and force the industry to give her the respect she deserves. The more she succeeds, the more the Joker feels his manhood threatened.
In the scene where he speaks to Quinn via viewscreen with a copy Infinite Jest in his hand (pretending to have read it), we are to understand that Joker means to impress and/or intimidate her. But if this were all, he could have been shown holding any other slab of a male-authored novel: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, or whatever else. But none of these books compare with Infinite Jest’s reputation as “lit bro” fiction par excellence. During the early aughts, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect the kind of college-educated straight white male boho literatus who lived in New York and confidently wore his taste in indie bands and craft beer brands you’d never heard of as a badge of authenticity and enlightenment to have a positive opinion of Infinite Jest.
This isn’t the place to get into the novel’s merits and problems; it is undeniably a work of genius and has a lot to say, but if there existed a video game amalgamation of Dark Souls, Battletoads, and Romancing SaGa III, then Infinite Jest would be its literary analogue. Its gratuitous difficulty is purposive, but it is nevertheless gratuitously difficult. I’d read it during my arrogant early twenties (though I doubt I would have had the patience for it then), I’m certain I would have looked down my nose at anyone who hadn’t read it and still had the gall to call themselves literate.
This scene in Harley Quinn is very much in the spirit of poptimism: it says fuck you and your douche-bro snobbism. The Joker is a douche and David Foster Wallace is a douche, and we’ve all had it up to here with elitist douches. It would have been too on the nose to have Quinn proudly reply to the Joker that she just finished reading a snappy 250-page YA fantasy novel by a reputable queer female author and she loved it and it doesn’t make her any less cultured or intellectually serious than a DFW bro—but we can envision how Twitter’s jubilant response would have looked when the episode aired in early 2020.
What I want to take away from all of this is that you don’t need to read the virtual room for any length of time to notice that we’ve become tremendously hostile towards value judgements that seem to smack of elitism.4
Again, there is no mystery here. The economic middle has imploded and the upper classes have pulled far ahead of the lower. A young person can do everything expected of them—get good grades in high school, go to college, get a job that aligns with their interests and aptitudes—and find that the standard milestones of previous generations (homeownership, marriage, parenthood) somehow or other remain consistently beyond their horizon. We scroll Instagram and Twitter and become hyperconscious of how well so many people who aren’t us appear to be doing. We all seem to feel underrepresented and voiceless in spite of the new array of communication tools at our disposal. Anyone held up as a public exemplar of success is prone to having their background and personal connections scrutinized for indicators that they don’t owe their position to the workings of an impartial meritocracy because why do they get glamor and overseas vacations and don’t have to worry about the soaring costs of healthcare while we’re anonymous and pointless and always swimming against the current? Every public institution is a fucking mess, the workplace is where satisfaction and aspiration go to die, and we’ve all become so tired all the time and who are you to judge us if we want to just turn our brains off and have fun for god’s sake? I’m up to my neck in student loans, I’m putting in 45 hours a week at a job that’s destroying my faith in humanity (and only getting paid for 40), I can’t find an antidepressant that works for me, the world is falling apart, and you’re telling me that if I’m not trying to untangle William Faulkner’s prose, slogging through Thucydides’ tedious catalogue of minor engagements, listening to discordant avant-garde noise rock with twenty-minute tracks, or watching slow-paced and depressing black-and-white foreign films during my precious few minutes of serenity and alertness then I must be some kind of mental midget? Fuck you, buddy.
When someone like one GM Baker, who champions what he calls “serious popular fiction,” writes (in his recent ranking of Lewis’ Narnia books)…
But I would…argue that there are indeed higher pleasures, that there are pleasure centers in the brain that take more reaching but deliver greater rewards when you do reach them. But getting to them does require educating our taste, and if our parents and teachers didn’t give us that training when we were young, it will require a more laborious retraining now [that] we are older. Is it worth it? Well, the pleasures are there to be had if we want them. The more correctly attuned our taste becomes, the more virtues we discover in art.
…I can almost hear members of the 2010s Twitterati saying “ok Boomer” and calling him a snobby straight white male cultural elitist. “I had excellent parents who did a great job raising me and guess what? Shakespeare and Dickens are boring and irrelevant,” someone with a bluetick tweets. “Hot take, old white man says if you don’t like art by dead white men then your taste isn’t correct,” another chimes in. Each of them gets a thousands likes, and the handful of people who take exception to their pronouncements all get ratio’d.
Perhaps I’m still traumatized from all the time I sank into 2010s Twitter.5
This isn’t a moment where one glances at the general peer—or tests the vibe in the room—and thinks they can expect a warm response to the declaration that Watchmen is more worth one’s time to read than webtoons, that The Wall is a richer and more interesting record than Cowboy Carter, or that the time invested in reading something like Infinite Jest yields a more valuable payoff than watching Drag Race for an equivalent number of hours. The old notion that the best and most valuable cultural productions were those that spoke exclusively to the educated and cultivated classes has become deeply unpopular and practically indefensible.6
Whether you see this as the catastrophic collapse of art & culture or as the democratic liberation of art & culture depends on your point of view.
17.
Let’s circle way back to Leo Tolstoy and his book What Is Art? If you’re only familiar with Tolstoy as the author of the world-renowned meganovel classics War and Peace and Anna Karenina, his answer to his own question may surprise you. If you already knew that Tolstoy, later in life, disavowed his greatest works as useless wank, gave away his money and copyrights, and became a radical Christian anarchist, then possibly not.
First—let’s get Tolstoy’s answer to the Big Question:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Later on:
There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint, on reading, hearing, or seeing another man’s work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art.
Art, then, is “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.” Art is fundamentally an act of communication.
As far as Tolstoy is concerned, something like Infinite Jest does not qualify as art, or at least not as Good Art; it is false art. Art cannot effectively unite people and promote their common progress if only a vanishing fraction of the populace is capable of understanding and relating to it—and any specimen of the literary, musical, or visual arts incapable of emotionally moving the laboring masses is not true art.
Tolstoy believes that sometime around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there occurred a cleavage between the real art of the people and “genteel art.” The simple, good-hearted peasants and artisans, living “naturally” and religiously, with their feelings unperverted by gross sensuality or by the revival of “barbaric” and retrograde Classical literature that became trendy among the wealthy, went on making and partaking in true art. The upper classes, indulging themselves with “fashionable” productions made exclusively for them, and which only they had the idle leisure and “perverted” tastes to contemplate and appreciate, promulgated the myth that they were the sole possessors of Art. The commoners had their quaint little stories, songs, and amusements, yes, but these were not capital-a Art. (Perhaps some dauphin somewhere, sometime, called their tales and diversions “slop?”)
And the consequence of this absence of true art showed itself, inevitably, in the corruption of that class which nourished itself on the false art. All the confused, unintelligible theories of art, all the false and contradictory judgments on art, and particularly the self-confident stagnation of our art in its false path, all arise from the assertion, which has come into common use and is accepted as an unquestioned truth, but is yet amazingly and palpably false, the assertion, namely, that the art of our upper classes is the whole of art, the true, the only, the universal art.
Tolstoy brings up the once-popular idea that the problem is one of social organization, and it is a problem that can be fixed. Through technological advancement, a universal and improved education system, and perhaps some socialistic redistribution of wealth, the ignorant and culturally stunted masses can enjoy more of the means and the opportunity to cultivate good taste and the right sensibility, and can join with their betters in appreciating opera, modern art, difficult and obscure poetry, and so on.
He doesn’t buy it:
But even were we to admit the inadmissible, and say that means may be found by which art (that art which among us is considered to be art) may be accessible to the whole people, another consideration presents itself showing that fashionable art cannot be the whole of art, viz. the fact that it is completely unintelligible to the people. Formerly men wrote poems in Latin, but now their artistic productions are as unintelligible to the common folk as if they were written in Sanskrit. The usual reply to this is, that if the people do not now understand this art of ours, it only proves that they are undeveloped, and that this has been so at each fresh step forward made by art. First it was not understood, but afterwards people got accustomed to it.
“It will be the same with our present art; it will be understood when everybody is as well educated as are we—the people of the upper classes—who produce this art,” say the defenders of our art. But…we know that the majority of the productions of the art of the upper classes, such as various odes, poems, dramas, cantatas, pastorals, pictures, etc., which delighted the people of the upper classes when they were produced, never were afterwards either understood or valued by the great masses of mankind, but have remained, what they were at first, a mere pastime for rich people of their time, for whom alone they ever were of any importance…For the great majority of working people, our art, besides being inaccessible on account of its costliness, is strange in its very nature, transmitting as it does the feelings of people far removed from those conditions of laborious life which are natural to the great body of humanity. That which is enjoyment to a man of the rich classes, is incomprehensible, as a pleasure, to a working man, and evokes in him either no feeling at all, or only a feeling quite contrary to that which it evokes in an idle and satiated man.
This must be music to the ears of anyone who wants to slash the hell out of high school and university English programs and purge them of dead white male authors. And why not? Who were Dryden and Pope addressing themselves to but the elite of their day? Did Dante and Milton suppose the people attending mass in the Italian and English countrysides would have been particularly stimulated listening to (because certainly most were illiterate) the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost?
Who but hoity-toity middle- and upper-class men with intellectual pretensions (or were enrolled in a university English program) were ever really interested in what TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce had to say and how they said it?
War and Peace? Tolstoy himself confessed that he and the members of his old literary circles only “wanted to obtain as much money and praise as possible,” and that their belletristic endeavors were only a means to “maintain the conviction that we were very important people.”
We could do a roll call of famed Renaissance and Academic artists, and of classical composers like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Strauss (all of whom Tolstoy calls out as “good-for-nothing imitators”) and put the same questions to them as we do to the literary canon.
We believe there is value in cultural continuity—but so much of the material which constitutes the “tradition” we wish to perpetuate belonged to a pocket-culture composed of the wealthy, and was utterly obscure to the great majority of people in its own day. What do cultural artifacts produced to please the nobility, bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia of centuries past have to say to the twenty-first century, or to the 60 percent of the [American] population without a college education? Why should students be force-fed culture that is strange and without any immediate interest to them?
(I’m not posing these as rhetorical questions. I am interested in hearing answers.)
Later on, Tolstoy waxes millenarian—even somewhat like a McLuhanite—in describing the art of the future:
However people of our upper classes (feeling that their ascendency can only be maintained as long as they separate themselves—the rich and learned—from the labourers, the poor, and the unlearned) may seek to devise new conceptions of life by which their privileges may be perpetuated,—now the ideal of returning to antiquity, now mysticism, now Hellenism, now the cult of the superior person (overman-ism),7—they have, willingly or unwillingly, to admit the truth which is elucidating itself from all sides, voluntarily and involuntarily, namely, that our welfare lies only in the unification and the brotherhood of man.
Unconsciously this truth is confirmed by the construction of means of communication,—telegraphs, telephones, the press, and the ever-increasing attainability of material well-being for everyone,—and consciously it is affirmed by the destruction of superstitions which divide men, by the diffusion of the truths of knowledge, and by the expression of the ideal of the brotherhood of man in the best works of art of our time…
Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will be chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind, will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, as is the case to-day, but in transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious perception of our times. Only those productions will be considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men. Only such art will be chosen, tolerated, approved, and diffused…
And the artists producing art will also not be, as now, merely a few people selected from a small section of the nation, members of the upper classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all those gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of, and are inclined towards, artistic activity.
Artistic activity will then be accessible to all men. It will become accessible to the whole people, because, in the first place, in the art of the future, not only will that complex technique, which deforms the productions of the art of to-day and requires so great an effort and expenditure of time, not be demanded, but, on the contrary, the demand will be for clearness, simplicity, and brevity…
Setting aside for a moment the part about “the highest religious perception of our times,” it very much sounds to me like Tolstoy is talking about Content.
For the worthiest themes of art, Tolstoy nominates (in addition to religious perception) “the simple feelings of common life, accessible to everyone without exception—such as the feeling of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquility, etc.” Wonderful—that’s basically all I see when I peer over my wife’s shoulder and watch her scrolling down Facebook, checking the Philadelphia subreddit, or reading some slice-of-life webtoon.
Can any Content be slop if it effectively communicates “the simple feelings of common life?”
In what cultural productions are clearness, simplicity, and brevity most visible and valued but in those made to be promulgated on social media? And where else can the inspired amateur submit their feelings and ideas for exhibition without first pleasing some manner of gatekeeper representing “the rich and learned?”
Why should Infinite Jest be republished if all its main ideas—the hazards of irony poisoning and instant gratification, addiction and isolation as common facts of modern life, the wonder and fascination of tennis, and so on—can be articulated in a series of memes or TikTok shorts and be understood by everyone instead of those few with the education and the fortitude to confront a thousand pages of Wallace’s turgid prose?
Should we pretend that poring over and analyzing Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” elicits more sympathy and emotion from most readers than from watching the three-minute “double rainbow” video? Why shouldn’t we value the simplicity and spontaneous passion of the YouTuber over the poet’s meticulous and sensuously constructions in typeface?
Do we think we can convince someone whose parents weren’t dragging them to piano lessons or symphony concerts, or who didn’t get their bachelor’s degree in music, that Beethoven’s ninth symphony is a more soaring and more emotional experience than, say, blasting an ecstatic trance or nightcore track into their ears through noise-cancelling headphones?
Why is any dead person (white or man or otherwise) worth such veneration and study if all they did was write books, paint pictures, or compose songs for the entertainment of total strangers? Who was Tolstoy to me or to anyone else that I should feel obliged to read a thousand pages of his fiction?
(Again, these aren’t rhetorical questions—and the need for good answers will become more and more urgent as the institutions preserving and teaching a “canon” of pre-digital art and culture find themselves trying to impress the value of this stuff upon generations who will not see anything pertinent—let alone necessary—in it.)
18.
Don’t get too enamored of Tolstoy and his apparent championing of popular art and culture just yet.
The man repeatedly snarls about works “devoted to describing, depicting, and inflaming sexual love in every shape and form,” so there goes your lewd alt from his theoretical Christian anarcho-pacifist Republic. He’s no fan of the “denial of morality and the laudation of vice” in art, so I’m guessing a big chunk of our favorite spicy, edgy, and/or ambiguous series, films, comedians, musicians, etc. are out too. When he inveighs against “pleasure which never satisfies,” we must suppose he’d be appalled by the infinite scroll—and, moreover, he’d probably be horrified to see the extent to which engaging with Content has become a substitute for being with and doing things with other people. And if he castigated himself for writing classics of world literature just because he wanted to be popular and seen as clever, it’s doubtful he’d regard kindly those creatives and communicators whose principal sources of inspiration are digitally mediated social validation feedback loops.
When Tolstoy brings up the “real” art of the people, he’s ready with examples: “the epic of Genesis, the Gospel parables, folk-legends, fairy-tales, and folk-songs.” He also despises professionalism in art—so it is unlikely that he’d be much pleased to step out of a time machine and behold the wholesale replacement of organic folk traditions by the output of a culture industry. If he had a problem with all the workers laboring in the “unnecessary and harmful business” of nineteenth-century publishing, imagine how he’d feel about Hollywood. Or the video game industry. Or pop music: “It were well if artists made all they require for themselves, but, as it is, they all need the help of workmen, not only to produce art, but also for their own usually luxurious maintenance.” Hell—if Tolstoy thought young girls undergoing ballet training was a pitiful sight, we can well imagine how sick he’d be to learn about what happens inside the pipeline between child stardom on the Disney Channel and a #1 pop single.
I’d guess that however glad Tolstoy might be about the Great Flattening of art and culture, he’d be shattered to discover that the functional purpose of twenty-first-century Content—its “sense and importance,” “its dependence on causes” and its “connection with its effects”—is to facilitate capital accumulation and consolidation, collect consumer data for use by private firms and governments, and keep his beloved working men entertained and docile. Though it might give him a tinge of pleasure to observe the “clearness, simplicity, and brevity” of digital art and culture, the material conditions and social relations on which it is erected would disgust him.
19.
But maybe we’re being too hasty—and perhaps we’d find Tolstoy, stepping out of his time machine, too fixed in the old world, and too attached to his idea of the intrinsic goodness of “simple, unperverted peasant labourers” and their folkways to see the virtues and possibilities of our singularly energetic epoch.
This brings us at last to his ideas about the intersection of art with religious perception—which he defines as “nothing else than the first indication of that which is coming into existence.” (We don’t necessarily have to bring the idea of a god into it, but Tolstoy would certainly prefer that we did.)
In every period of history, and in every human society, there exists an understanding of the meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that society have attained,—an understanding defining the highest good at which that society aims. And this understanding is the religious perception of the given time and society. And this religious perception is always clearly expressed by some advanced men, and more or less vividly perceived by all the members of the society. Such a religious perception and its corresponding expression exists always in every society. If it appears to us that in our society there is no religious perception, this is not because there really is none, but only because we do not want to see it. And we often wish not to see it because it exposes the fact that our life is inconsistent with that religious perception.
Religious perception in a society is like the direction of a flowing river. If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.
And so there always has been, and there is, a religious perception in every society. And it is by the standard of this religious perception that the feelings transmitted by art have always been estimated.
In the depths of my emotional and irrational heart, I have to agree with Leo when he says that the true criterion for judging art, aesthetics, content, cultural artifacts—whatever we’d like to call it—is the conception (or rationalization, if we’re being cynical) of The Good in the society that creates it. We’ve heard over and over again that we’re too atomized, too diverse in our perspectives, too distrustful of master narratives and moral absolutes, and too susceptible to getting caught up in fleeting intellectual, aesthetic, and moral crazes to possess any coherent sense of such a thing, but I’m not entirely sure about that.
What is our understanding of the highest good to which we can collectively aspire? What is the direction in which all of us tend to flow? What consistent themes can we discern in our myriad hopes of a future we’d like to live in? What do we see when we read the room?
I’m of two minds. I will first try to be optimistic.
We are living during a period of intense cultural flux. It is true that we are being retribalized; it is true that two centuries of uninterrupted technological revolution and societal reorganization have disintegrated our old roles, relations, and identities, leaving us to figure out (or dynamically invent) new ones ad hoc. The twentieth-century liberal consensus is falling apart, and we look askance at entrenched institutions. There is no master narrative; feelings of common purpose that transcend the new tribal framework(s) are scarce indeed, and the “tribes” themselves frequently appear to be loose confederations of estranged individuals yearning for community and a sense of meaning, and discovering something like it through correspondence and observation through the network.
It is possible that the “religious perception” of our time has yet to coalesce. After the invasive social surgery of the digital revolution, it is understandable if we’re disoriented as we adjust in fits and starts to the new ways of seeing and being in the world necessitated by the most dramatic outering of our central nervous systems up to this point.
This is to say that our epoch’s conception of The Good may have yet to crown—and its birth may prove a wrenchingly traumatic one. People of any era are desperately protective of their cherished idols, and gods very seldom die quietly. But the fever of retribalization and the politicization of everything may be an intense preliminary to arriving at a new state of individual and collective consciousness. Maybe things will settle. Maybe the down-trending happiness quotient will tick up again after this uncomfortable interregnum runs its course, and the new values, practices, and institutions entailed by contemporary modes of knowing and relating to each other congeal. Maybe it will all make sense, and the currently disconsolate and alienated masses will thrill to a new awareness of what they’re living for. Art and culture will be ingenuous, uncynical, and veritably transparent to us as it intersects frictionlessly with the praxis of life.
One can hope. (One must hope.) On the other hand:
After his spiritual crisis, Tolstoy wrote off Anna Karenina as an elaborate exercise in vanity, as counterfeit art—but it’s clear to me that while he was writing it, his awakening religious conscience was stirring in him like a chick pecking at its shell. You cannot but read this novel and find yourself intuiting, as Tolstoy certainly did, the gist of Adorno’s adage: “wrong life can’t be lived rightly.”
What I mean is that maybe we are possessed of the religious perception of our age and in denial about it. Among many other things, it might account for the validation gamers so eagerly sought during the aughts, why readers well past their teens mount political arguments in their advocacy of this year’s popular YA fantasy novel crop, and why poptimism was so determined to assert that the Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande fan should not think of their pleasures as “guilty.” Harsh external judgements are always unwelcome, but their coincidence with the internal needling of one’s conscience makes them intolerable.
If we are liable to get shrill and defensive when someone calls us out on our media and consumption habits—which boils down a criticism of how we are living, what we are seen to value, and how we are using our time on this planet—it’s because we do have a lucid sense of The Good, and are aware that the way of life to which we’re accustomed—and which binds us like a straightjacket—has made it inaccessible to us in practice.
Well, that got pretty serious. I’m going to go camping.
Although it’s all probably eminently intuitive and legible to the under-twenties, just as the culture and implicit values of the early internet were to my own generation.
Yes, I know the rightoids do it too: “this Content is good and we should support it because it resists the woke mind virus and celebrates masculinity” & whatever.
Guy Debord:
Under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern society the world over and at every point where the developed consumption of commodities has seemingly multiplied the roles and objects to choose from…
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process…[A] star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived.
True, the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are themselves of the elite, enjoying positions of prestige that would have been the envy of poet laureates and avant-garde painters (back when such figures were actually seen to matter)—but they don’t challenge anyone, their assiduously managed public profiles are politically beyond reproach (where Decent Human Beings are concerned, anyway), and they’re definitely not pretentious white dude-bros. We like them for the same reason The Poorly Educated appreciated George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Now on 2020s Twitter X all the top replies are from anti-woke profiles with purchased blueticks bitching out of the right-hand speaker instead of the left. It’s not really an improvement.
What’s especially interesting is that the so-called professional managerial class—which has to some extent eclipsed the old petit bourgeoisie—apparently has little desire to be seen striving to associate itself with the upper crust by emulating its traditional interest in the rarefied intellectual and aesthetic pleasures once regarded as evidence of breeding, a good education, and moral fiber. (Probably today’s idle rich aren’t much interested in that shit anymore either.) Anti-elitism has become really rather bougie.
To update this list for today, we might add futurism, transhumanism, effective altruism, longtermism, and some of the more esoteric varieties of identity politics.
I decided to re-read this series because I’m trying to figure out where does technique enter into all of this. Technique, as in focused practice and study to become a better painter/writer/dancer, etc. There is a stage at which what we put out is so formless and chaotic as to not be understood by a lot of people. Social media, however, lends itself to these half-cooked shapes, and I’m seeing many artists stay at that level without progressing further because, what’s the point ? Unfortunately, Technique has been deployed as a tool for elitism, and so it’s very difficult to bring it up without being accused of that, especially when you yourself are working to improve as an artist (as is my case) and are not putting out flawless works. But I do believe that we cannot entirely throw it out the window. I think the difference between art and slop can perhaps be teased out from the point of view of technical intent or the application of technique towards the expression of ideas and a commitment to getting better. Some content on the internet falls in that definition, most of it does not. When the primary goal is to make money or get validation, you become so distanced from trying to get better technically while also saying something that the question of making something valuable becomes moot.
I say all this because I think social media has kind of blurred the distinction between amateurish art and non-amateurish art (I won’t say “professional” because to me that is a whole other can of worms). You can launch a professional career with little or very limited technique in a way that perhaps wasn’t possible decades ago. Heck, like Raygun, you can make it into the Olympics with very basic elements of the art form you’re representing.
But of course technique very much happens at the individual level of the artist and thus is a terrible barometer for understanding general cultural trends like taste. I do think, however, that if we strip all media from any technique people would definitely complain. That is perhaps a potential starting place that has some level of objectivity?
That... is an interesting point. I am glad that the enui? am I using that word right? I am glad that the naked pointlessness of what we're fed is leading more people to unionize.
A point in favor of tribalism: I stayed off Twitter mostly.