I haven't written much lately. This past year has been busier than expected, which has curtailed my focus and attention. Time and space for a flow state are more precious than gold. Too much to process in too little time.
There are many out there currently experiencing their own versions of this frustration, which can make life seem dull, aimless, unbearable. I write and send these irregular missives in the hope that doing so will provide me and perhaps any of you readers with a sense of camaraderie. Whether we are old and close friends, or total strangers, there may be something held in common that proves a little light, a little stimulation.
Sometimes I have insomnia, and sometimes when I have insomnia it is because I’ve fixated on horrible thoughts, anxieties, countless regrets and second guesses. I’ve found, personally, that one of the better strategies to handle this is to redirect this restless mental energy by finding something interesting and future-oriented to think about, instead. Distract from the stupid, irreconcilable, exhausting problem by channeling that energy into something that builds, that repurposes, that renews.
There remains an unsolved problem. I have not yet reconciled the fact that what I do on a day-to-day basis is so detached from the intellectual and communicative “work” I do that seems so central to who I am, what I value, and what value my life can offer other people.
Maybe, had I stayed and struggled and if lucky eventually succeeded in academia, I would have felt more integrated in this respect. But I doubt it. Being a professor remains a good job overall. There are no tenured professors pining away at their desks, wishing instead to be truck drivers or retail workers. But most professors these days are not living peachy lives-of-the-mind, full of reverie and open intellectual inquiry with a community of like-minded searchers. Most academics I know are, just like the rest of us, trying their best to balance their real passions with the demands of their day jobs.
One person who certainly found a compelling way to live an intellectual life was the late Dave Hickey (1940-2021), whose collections Air Guitar and The Invisible Dragon are justly celebrated. I read his 2014 collection Pirates & Farmers only a few days before he passed.
Hickey was a real original, with his drawl, his fidgeting, and his remarkable knowledge of linguistics, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, and art. He drew on many years of experience on the road with musicians, running an art gallery (where he didn't "make money" but instead "made a living"), writing songs and music journalism, getting high, gambling, teaching, and so on. From Ruskin to Ruscha, from the Lakers to Liberace, he had a formidable and inimitable handle on culture, history, and aesthetics. He was a superb writer.
He was also a proponent of democracies where expertise mattered, not as a matter of authority but as a matter of trust. I like his discussion of what he called “sibling society”:
“The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority.
“All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.”
One earned trust over time among “siblings” by demonstrating knowledge and reliability. Nassim Nicholas Taleb might point out that sibling society involves “skin in the game.” By contrast, the more hierarchical environment that Hickey diagnosed after the 1960s was one where the stakes were lower for being wrong, and where there was more incentive to cozy up to institutional authorities.
Film culture is a different beast than the art world, but I think there’s an opening for similar criticisms there. I don’t try to publish reviews myself, but I think of how the market for film criticism and reviews is so small, and what remains is populated mostly by shills who don’t care much about the breadth, depth, and length of film history so much as the appearance of new content. They “discover” old films, for example, primarily through the channels of film restorations, big retrospectives, marketed streaming curation, and nice hyped Blu-Ray releases.
Now, all of these are fine things. It’s great that good old works can find new audiences. It’s inevitable that things cycle like this. Plus, it goes without saying that nobody’s seen everything and that part of the fun of art is that we always approach artworks from positions of, at least, partial ignorance. But a critic is someone who can, one hopes, write decently and respond honestly—and also the critic is someone who is supposed to know. If you’re supposed to know, especially if you are paid to know, then your knowledge should be of what’s current & happening … but also of what is recherché, unfashionable, still waiting for a revival that may never come. The critic draws on reservoirs of knowledge that don’t have currency. Whether academic or journalistic, or something else entirely, the critic establishes authority through applied curiosity and earned erudition.
This is what differentiates this role from that of the consumer, the publicist, and the marketer.
Vernacular expertise involves patient study (but not necessarily a credential). It involves plenty of informal chats and care and a willingness to venture opinions. It takes time to achieve. The environment we inhabit today is a kind of shell over this structure of literate culture; or maybe it’s a simulacrum. It offers the take in imitation of the considered opinion. It offers “discourse” in “the current climate” as a substitute for debate within a community. This simulacrum of expertise doesn’t take much time to achieve. It can be acquired quickly by anyone who can read the virtual room.
Now, let me take a step back and say that I don’t mean to idealize (or idolize) the twentieth century. I’m only trying to look at some good things that came together previously by chance and have now largely been lost; I think we are in danger of forgetting how to see how they have been lost. But there have been some things gained, as well … and if we are fortunate we might continue to see some good things coalesce again.
What are some of the things gained? Well, I do think that we have exciting opportunities to correspond and share and learn with one another. This aspect continues to really excite me; it’s the biggest boon of the digital age. I want to write about this kind of thing in more detail and more ambition, as I move forward, because some of the interesting and future-oriented things I like to think about include questions like,
How can we form alternatives to sagging institutions, or form new collectives and networks for people to pursue knowledge and fellowship?
How does one build a professional life that can overlap with vocation, and how one can make a living from uncharted career paths?
How can vernacular kinds of legitimacy (like expertise won over time, among peers) flourish, even as credentialism and atomization seem to work against this?
I don’t yet know what the continued pursuit of these questions will look like. But I welcome the opportunity to think together as well as alone about any of these things.
Writing is one of my favorite things to do, and if I don’t write as much as I’d like, I do write much more than I publish. However, my media theory manuscript, which I talked about months ago, remains unfinished. I confess it will stay unfinished. It’s for the best. It pains me to fail to complete yet another project; still, in this case it’s also a sign of growth. Trust me: you wouldn't want to read what I was working on, and anything GOOD and LASTING in it will come out in other forms, in other writing. So nobody's losing anything, except me, losing some future grief. More will come.
P.S. I’m currently, slowly reading a stupid number of books at the same time. It really is stupid. But the books are good. Hit me up if you want to discuss soon Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Matthew Clayfield’s A Death in Phnom Penh, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics. (Probably forgetting something.)
I feel as if it's probably harder to enter the market of criticism these days, but maybe easier to get one's vanity criticism read? And maybe the same for filmmaking? I don't want to minimize the value of being able to keep body and soul together by doing these things, but all this new technology has made some of these endeavors more feasible for the layperson.