These notes are a palimpsest of minor observations I’ve tinkered on for a few years. I’ve tried to shrink rather than expand references; the result might be muddled and dark. Like the great literary curmudgeon Edward Dahlberg said, “It takes a long time to understand nothing.”
Cliché keeps us humming along, certainly for me, as much as I hate it. Call it a script or autopilot; chalk it up to the dispersion of memes. Maybe the burden of secondary orality is that language, having been standardized by literacy and authority, then becomes starved and stretched. A friend writes,
“secondary orality means instituting rigid hierarchies of voices, or vocalizations, over class based layers of 'undifferentiated' murmurs; and naturally we've lost the ancient vernacular skills of listening, and teasing out subtexts required for rich oral cultures”
Meanwhile, Craig Keller’s blog, Cinemasparagus, features on its left sidebar (scroll down) a list of clichés in Anglophone film criticism. “Achingly beautiful,” “tissue of lies,” “reading of the film,” and so on. I’m sure I’ve used a lot of the terms on the list, myself. Anyway, how many acclaimed wordsmiths are, in fact, charlatans? I say this because it can be so bracing to read people who are interesting and thoughtful, and it’s demoralizing to see how rarely the people most interested in having their voices heard deviate from the wheel ruts of contemporary language’s rigid hierarchies of voices.
To put it too neatly: the cliché is the artifact of a power whose appearance has been buried.
What if we more readily approached the forms and manifestations of cultural rhetoric as the submerged fossils of activities—wars already fought, populations ascendant or dwindled, behaviors forgotten?
For ten years I’ve ruminated on a New York Times Magazine piece by Dan Kois about “cultural vegetables.” Largely if not exclusively addressing film and television, Kois admits to seeing “aridity as a sign of sophistication,” and he has a complicated relationship with the slow cinematic works he doesn’t really like but which seem to be favorites of his so-smart friends: they don’t fit his “metabolism” as a viewer. His piece presumes—and this presumption is shared by many—that there are some cultural works that are recommended to us because they’re good for us, we should observe them and like them, but they’re not naturally pleasurable.
The ghost of Pierre Bourdieu haunts these kinds of arguments, obviously, when they are pitched by intellectuals who might know Bourdieu’s name at all. I find that these arguments are rarely made in the spirit of curiosity, though. Is it philistinism? I don’t think it’s quite that; for instance Malcolm Bull proposes that philistines “are not just opposed to art for art’s sake but have no time for the arts whatsoever.” I do think, however, that people sometimes try to launder their distaste for something they believe is being foisted on them by couching their refusal in a specific kind of principle. They want something good, but not boring, not stuffy, not merely good for them. This principle is then assumed to be sufficient justification for any verbal exchange, and the challenge of articulating why something doesn’t work, or why something is bad, is shrugged off. (After all, if you dislike something because it’s too much work, why go through the additional work of explaining it in a way that someone else can understand?) “Cultural vegetables” is a metaphor that affirms but also conceals.
Vegetables are, of course, good for us. They can be delicious, too, but when someone uses the metaphor, as Kois does, the nutrition is the point. Vegetables are healthy, but they’re not usually calorie-dense, and so the metaphor works like this: we know we should like what we’re offered, we might even eat it sometimes, like dutiful kids dragging our feet to the dinner table. We might even enjoy it selectively. (Kois notes how much he loves Yi Yi.) The metaphor underlines for us, still, that the vegetable and its boring minerals and vitamins and fiber are not satisfying. What satisfies? Cheeseburgers, lasagna, chocolate cake, Doritos.
These foods are calorie-dense, and they may or may not offer nutritional benefits, but that’s not why they satisfy. They provide in the way that superstimuli excel at providing.
I’ve already wrung enough out of this metaphor but let me pause to say this: I am sympathetic to the idea that our media consumption bears some analogical resemblance to our food consumption, in that we humans are omnivorous and can manage a variety of diets, but also that the diet based on superstimulus is unwise. The “cultural vegetables” metaphor is the fossil of a logic which venerates novelty and extremity, perhaps even cancerous growth …
This piece by Jasmine Wang is really wonderful, and addresses questions that I think will be of interest to readers of Attendance Optional.
Please spare a good thought or two for some people I love most in this world—some challenges are before us. I’m hoping for the best outcomes. I’ll be back writing when I can.
Sometimes I think that the art I love most contains one surprising feeling that is supported, kept in a clear context, by conventions. When the whole array draws our attention to the conventions instead of the surprise, then the art feels conventional. But both the desirable and the undesirable effects are a mix of surprise and familiarity. As Richard Thompson once quipped about his song "Long Dead Love": "It all depends on where you put the comma."