Anaïs Nin suggests that one has to write because “one has to create a world in which one can live.” Imagination orders our world, when it creates in this way, and it orders it even when, from a different point of view, we could claim that imagination is destroying or disordering the world.
A while back, after one of my earlier installments, my friend Carloss wrote me: “another example of self-curation as art of course is the diary of Anaïs Nin—being a piscean, she kind of re-invented decentralized selfhood, the mensonge vital (which is indistinguishable from narcissism, naturally) which ultimately becomes the motile and electronic life as art that we are enjoying (sic) today.”
I don’t know if this is exactly what Carloss had in mind, but a decentralized selfhood, to me, involves some form of curatorial investment in the external world, dispersing oneself into images and objects, in vibratory patterns, and allowing that to influence oneself in turn. The barrier between person and world, or between subject and object, becomes quite porous. The self might be experienced as a fragmented and diffuse array of functions out there—a social reputation, a collection of images, a combination of labels—as surely as it is in the body, in the place where the body collects thoughts.
Are these features of postliteracy?—oceanic feeling rushing in, in waves, dissolving distinctions that previously made sense and had authority to back them up?
I’ve been thinking about the common perplexities of instructors to account for disconnects in terminology, especially in areas, like media studies, where students are already experienced users if still inexperienced scholars. Peter Labuza notes that many of his students classify “panning” as a type of editing, or that “jump cuts” mean that we “jump” very suddenly to a different type of shot in a different setting. Certain shifts in terminology reflect changing technological environments and roles. When I was teaching introductory film courses, I learned how production students understood what Bordwell & Thompson call “sound bridges” as “L-cuts” and “J-cuts”—referred to that way due to how they look on digital editing software.
After a certain point, alternative answers—even wrong answers—to textbook questions reflect sea changes. (This is why we might expect “I’m bias” eventually to replace “I’m biased.” Or why so many of us, including myself, use the word “hopefully” in a way that is technically incorrect.) Academic thought, which may be ahead of the curve by certain measures, is here necessarily behind the curve. If a teacher wants to connect with students about form and technique, the teacher at least has to know where the students are coming from in order to reach them. People don’t speak or name things in their native languages according to rulebooks; the glossaries and grammars come later, if they come at all.
All media are subject to these kinds of shifts, too. Since at least 2014, and probably earlier, people have noticed that many people, including students, now call all books, including nonfiction books, novels. The observation itself has accrued mild bit meme status, and you can count on some faculty member somewhere tweeting about it every few months. And then the same conversation ensues, and then everyone forgets about it until next time.
Recurrence (and recursion) are recognized features of our cultural environment, but they are frequently couched in a very presentist modality: attention isn’t drawn to the larger pattern so much as the recognition of the new arrangement of old appearances. So people talk about “vibe shifts.” (If you’re worried about keeping up with a vibe, you are already culturally dead. But that’s OK! At least now you know you know nothing.) An authentic vibe is felt and embodied—embodied in the physical body of yore, perhaps, but also “embodied” in the decentralized self.
In other words, I think, the language and logic of vibes is a reflection of how we experience our selfhood floating in larger currents of oceanic feelings. Distinctions break down; new ones are made, even when they are “wrong”; elements are recombined. Nothing I’m saying is new thought.
But as long as we’re trying to understand our situation, whether we’re making novel observations about old things, or trusty observations about new things, I recommend Peli Grietzer’s superb essay “A Theory of the Vibe,” which zeroes in on poetics from a position informed by machine learning. A few choice quotes:
“The meaning of a literary work … lies at least partly in an aesthetic ‘vibe’ or a ‘style’ that we can sense when we consider all the myriad objects and phenomena that make up the imaginative landscape of the work as a kind of curated set. The meaning of Dante’s “Inferno,” let us say, lies in part in that certain je ne sais quoi that makes every soul, demon, and machine in Dante’s vision of hell a good fit for Dante’s vision of hell.”
and
“A vibe is therefore, in this sense, an abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta. The above phrasing tellingly, if unintentionally, echoes and inverts a certain formula of the “romantic theory of the symbol”—as given, for example, in Goethe’s definition of a symbol as “a living and momentary revelation of the inscrutable” in a particular, wherein “the idea remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible [wirksam und unerreichbar] in the image, and even if expressed in all languages would still remain inexpressible [selbst in allen Sprachen ausgesprochen, doch unauspprechlich bliebe].””
Grietzer proposes that the shift of Modernist poetics and aesthetics (after Romanticism and Symbolism) comes from the incorporation of a kind of materialism or immanence, which in effect represents an “Aristotelian” break from “Platonist” precursors.
“For the Modernist aesthetic theorist, the philosophical burden on poetics partly shifts from the broadly Platonist burden of explaining how concreta could rise up to reach an otherwise inexpressible abstract idea, to the broadly Aristotelian burden of explaining how a set of concreta is (or can be) an abstract idea. Where Coleridge looked to the Imagination as the faculty that vertically connects the world of things to the world of ideas for example, William Carlos Williams looked to the Imagination as the faculty that horizontally connects things to create a world. From a broadly Aristotelian point of view, the Poundian/Eliotian —or, less canonically but more accurately, Steinian—operation wherein poetry explicitly arranges or aggregates objects in accordance with new, unfamiliar partitions is precisely what it means to fully and directly represent abstracta: an abstractum just is the collective affinity of the objects in a class.”
Grietzer’s article is a compelling way of outlining the problem. It is also useful to my self-understanding, because though I am drawn to abstractions, possibilities, and ambiguities, my reasoning process is often very concrete and literalist. This is one of the reasons I can sometimes be slow to react, slow to form an opinion about a complex phenomenon, and slow to learn something. I also realize that my longstanding wavering between what we can tag as Platonist or Aristotelian approaches to the concrete and the abstract is that, even if I’m wrong and my intuition is indefensible, my gut sense is that the difference between the two is not actually a problem—not a contradiction so much as a shifting of figure into ground, and back again.
I’ll say it again: thank you for reading. I am not publishing much these days but maybe that’s not so bad; there’s a lot to read now. There is “content” in the pipeline, which I’m working on slowly, always slowly. Something else I’m interested in pursuing more in the future—and I’ve already talked about this with some people who read Attendance Optional—is the possibility of collaboration. This might look like writing or creative projects, but I also feel a persistent itch to look into experiments in publishing, education, and conversation. Most of us, I suspect, feel stretched thin in some deep way but also crave the substance of focused attention in community, in thinking, in art. So if anything I’m writing ever converges with anything of interest for you, feel free to reach out and speak up.