How Public Like a Frog

Over at the Arcade Editors' Blog, I've just posted some more of my usual ramblings about academic blogging. I may enlarge on the issues raised in the final paragraph at a later date, since they relate to teaching and some particular problems I want to solve.

"We need a vocabulary for," "we need terms for thinking through," "we need an ecology of," "we need an aesthetics/ethics/epistemology of."

I can see why one makes this gesture. But one is tempted to answer: If we need it, then make it. I propose this vocabulary for, I propose these terms for thinking through, etc.

It's easier said than done. But then, that's why it's more often said than done.

And if we need it, then we should get it, no?

Criticism, creation, enthusiasm

I have to return to the subject of fans and criticism for a moment, especially after the deep irony of the minor Eyresses incident. (Poor Roberta C. Holloway, she never signed up for any of it.) There really is something utterly appropriate about being read absolutely backwards on the internet. As the Gregory Brothers (remember Autotune the News?) would say, "everything sounds better."

In a journal--say, in Critical Inquiry's occasional article-response-response pairings--one likes to see an absolutely cool, faintly patronizing takedown of the misreader, one that gently suggests that the misreader has quite understandably made an error in her or his translation of the Latin -- yes, that would explain such a tragic misunderstanding. Every once in a while you might get a puerile yet awesome lashing out, like Michael Taussig's response [pdf, Wiley paywall] to Martin Jay's review [ditto] of Mimesis and Alterity, but the principle is the same. The misreader has transgressed.

In scholarship, it makes sense that a baseline level of comprehension is expected. Scholarship is usually quite sincere about the idea of communication. But it seems to me that that's also why it so rarely has room for understanding the critical power of misreading.

And that brings me to Dana Vachon's recent, amazing essay "Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's 'Friday' as Radical Text." The opening gives you an idea of the piece's brilliance:

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, "Friday." Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Evie Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage's smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

The piece is, of course, a travesty. It's a travesty of everything the "Friday" video is about (or isn't about), a reading thoroughly against the grain, a recuperation of the unrecuperable. In one fell swoop, Vachon parodies both Black's video and the serious pop culture criticism that generates miles of (you said it) fan criticism, and the best part is the glorious persuasiveness of it all, the thickness of the description, the way it forces you to concede that, after all, Vachon does have a point, and "Friday" really can be read as a radical text, which either tells you something terrible about criticism or something perfectly wonderful.

Vachon's piece isn't criticism, not exactly. Phil Nel's post is closer to what we'd normally call criticism. But as Phil rightly notes, Vachon's piece puts his to shame. It's a performance. It's the article's exuberance, its fearlessness, its sheer creativity that makes it so thoroughly exceed its abject object of study and become a little internet masterpiece in its own right. It commits to the project.

It's worth noting that the brilliance of the creation depends in part on the meagerness of the materials with which Vachon has to work. It's not so much that the hordes of fans have terrible taste and that's why they're all talking about Rebecca Black (or the news, or Céline Dion, harbinger of the end of taste). You autotune something banal, corporate, and content-free, like the news, not Bach's B minor mass. It gives you space to play, to create. That's why the criticism of enthusiasm need not be a form of appreciation. In this case, in the remix/appropriation logic of the internet, it's more like transfiguration. Travesty and love are intertwined in the criticism of enthusiasm. As is right and proper.

[related]

Jay, Martin. "Unsympathetic Magic." Rev. of Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig. Visual Anthropology Review 9.2 (1993): 79-82.

Taussig, Michael. "Michael Taussig Replies to Martin Jay." Visual Anthropology Review 10.1 (1994): 154.

Wilson, Carl. Celine Dion's "Let's Talk about Love": A Journey to the End of Taste. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Sigh. Away from the internets for a day and I find that my recent response to Roland was construed exactly backwards by a writer for Eyresses.

Alas, writing is an instance of partible personhood, and folks will construe it as they will. I suppose I could ask that the poster re-read, but it would be hypocritical, I think, to contest her creative reappropriation of my words!

The criticism of enthusiasm

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

* * * * *

This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

* * * * *

Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

Paul Hiebert at The Awl:

The post-World War II "neat" may have been an ignorant oversimplification of the world and its inherent messiness, but the post-9/11 random is an exaggeration of this messiness and an unwillingness to find resolve or connection. There is something unthinking and uncurious and unfeeling in its use.

Risk society, statistical panic, flows?

Tension, anxiety, fear

I may see more of this than most--I work in modernism and science studies after all. But it seems to me that literary critics talk an awful lot about "tensions" in lit and culture, social "anxieties," and historical "fears."

It would be too glib to just call this projection on the part of a famously neurotic lot. But I'd like to think more on why it is that tensions, anxieties, and fears play such a large part in contemporary literary criticism.

(And is it just me or was "excess" all the rage in the 90s?)

Is criticism a métier?

I've come to think that criticism is defined by the cultivation of a particular kind of self, one that has the right feelings and perceptions as well as the right thoughts and professional training and work-disciplines.

What are the consequences of this understanding of criticism?

Thoughts, others?

Clarity and work

It occurs to me that discussions of "clarity" usually implicitly hinge on the following assumption:

Difficulty for the writer means ease for the reader; ease for the writer means difficulty for the reader.

This is why accusations that writing is unclear so often devolve into accusations of authorial laziness, and why defenses of dense writing so often hint that the aggrieved readers are lazy. This is why the discussion so easily becomes moralistic. (Work is after all a moral category.)

It isn't at all clear to me (modernist that I am) that it is easy to write dense prose, though. How does it change the discussion about clarity, if we bracket the above premise?

Archival trepidations

I enjoyed Claire Potter's recent post on what to do with bits of private lives that show up in the archive.

Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I'm thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn't want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn't want me to know?

I'm having a related problem with Twain, although it's not really a matter of professional ethics in this case. Some of Twain's papers are just, well, embarrassing. The Twain that's mourning Susy is just a little too raw, and when he needs to be raw, he turns to the conventional. I feel like I'm intruding, and the weirdest part is that I'm intruding on something that is, in a way, utterly boilerplate--and that's embarrassing, too.