Craft Notes
23 brief replies to Blake Butler & Elisa Gabbert & Johannes Göransson & Chris Higgs re: (dear god, what else?) the fucking New Fucking Sincerity
ToBS R∞: Arguing in blog posts and on Facebook about aesthetics vs. Going out for a pleasant dinner together, then taking a nice walk at sunset in a park
I’ve decided that, from now on, all I’m going to write about at this goddamned site is this goddamned thing.
… No, seriously, I’m delighted that so many have chimed in. Thanks to everyone! I thought one massive reply would be easiest. If you read this whole thing, may your god shower blessings upon you. And if I missed any pertinent responses, kindly direct me to them in the comments. (I was traveling last weekend, and as such had trouble keeping up with all the discussion.)
1.
I’ve claimed (here, here, here) that one thing at stake in the New Sincerity is the discovery of what maneuvers currently count as “feeling sincere.” That such maneuvers exist I consider more an observation than a topic for debate. E.g., Blake, in his recent post about Marie Calloway’s Google doc pieces, wrote that Calloway’s recent work:
Seems significantly more “sincere” in an actually vibrant way than a lot of the other things people have been pointing at as “sincere” lately. Not that I think sincerity is important, but I’m confused as to how people can point to repurposed internet-speak tumblr-timez poise as not of an extremely orchestrated intent. It’s not very interesting to watch the same buttons being pressed over and over. I like mutation. I wish there was less obvious fear.
Blake’s demonstrating my point exactly (thank you, Blake). He’s essentially claiming that “repurposed internet-speak tumblr-timez poise” (a particular style) no longer feels or seems all that “sincere” to him—he can see it as a poise, as affectation. He can’t help but see the artifice behind it. (All writing is artifice; the question is whether there exists at any given moment some way or ways of writing that allow audiences to forget or not see the artifice.) Note also how Blake identifies said style’s loss of effect as being its overuse. This is pure familiarization, as Viktor Shklovsky described (via Tolstoy). And when he calls for mutation, for risk, for lack of fear, he is calling for defamiliarization.
2.
These two questions interest me:
- What styles currently generate the “sincere” effect? &
- Why are those styles currently so valued? What does making an artwork that “feels sincere” get you?
3.
I’ve seen many confuse the real life author’s “actual sincerity” with the artificial effects of sincerity. I have no interest in the former and every interest in the world in the latter.
To whit:
- When an author sits down to write, they may be very sincere about many things. For instance, they may sincerely want to make $1,000,000. This I don’t care about.
- There exist, in writing, at any given time and place, certain formal devices that feel “more sincere” (more directly communicative / more transparent / more genuine) than others. This is what interests me.
4.
Here’s a demonstration of claim #2 above. Consider the following two poems:
my dog died last night
i took off work today
i called in sick but i’m not sick
perhaps i’m sick with grief, for boss?
my dog’s name was boss he was boss
he had a funny limp & a bad smell
i’m not sick with grief
i haven’t cried at all
maybe i’ll start crying later
maybe i’ll never cry for boss
even though i miss him
& i just thought that maybe someday i’ll no longer miss him
now i’m crying
I can write this despite the fact that my dog hasn’t died—because I have never owned one. What’s more, when my dog died, I could have instead written the following:
“For Boss”
If I had known that on that day our time was near the end
I would have done things differently, my forever best friend.
I would have stayed right next to you deep into the night
but I thought I’d see you in the early morning light.And so I said “Good night” to you as I walked in through the door
never thinking of the time when I’d see you no more.
But if I had known that on that day our time was at the end
I would have done things so differently, my forever best friend.
I plagiarized that poem (retitling it), and for all I know its author was genuinely sick with genuine grief over Boss’s passing. But the poem is so trite that it does not communicate that grief. Rather, it “feels” hackneyed. (If, the next time I’m invited to read at P. Fanatics, I read that poem, even if I do so with a very sincere expression, the audience will laugh.)
The invention of the New Sincerity is the invention of a way of writing that will not, for at least a while, feel hackneyed or trite. It will create the illusion of transparency, of direct communication, of the lack of artifice. It does this precisely by means of artifice.
5.
Elisa Gabbert has claimed that Tao Lin’s you are a little bit happier than i am (2006) is “utterly dripping with irony.” It’s a little hard to know how to reply to such a general claim, and I look forward to Elisa developing this argument further in her customarily elegant and insightful manner. [Note: Elisa has done so, here. I’d finished this post before I read it, so this isn’t a full response, although I think I’m addressing some of her points. Overall, I think Elisa and I are mostly on the same page, but using terms somewhat differently, and emphasizing different effects.]
I want to note that even an ironic usage of “the NS aesthetic” does not preclude Lin from being New Sincerist. Again, the question is whether there exists a recognizable style or body of styles that people regard as “feeling” sincere, and that they want to call “New Sincerist.” If such styles exist, then artists can use them for whatever purposes they wish.
Elisa demonstrates this herself when she alludes to Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Swift’s essay is ultimately ironic (he meant the opposite of what he literally wrote). But his satire depended on its appearing sincere as long as possible—in delaying the reader’s realization that the essay is satirical. This is why satires always risk being mistaken for saying the opposite of what their authors intend.
Once there exists a style or set of styles that “feel sincere,” artists may do what they wish with them, including use them ironically. If Tao Lin is able to do that, then might that not help demonstrate that “sincere” devices exist?
6.
It’s not hard to make a mundane stylistic device feel weird:
Good 2 c u last night :)
:) Good :) 2 :) c :) u :) last :) night :)
7.
Even if Elisa considers Lin an avatar of irony, it’s easy to demonstrate that others disagree. Recall Josh Cohen’s review of Richard Yates in Bookforum. Selected quotes:
Fiction writer Tao Lin projects his life as a series of boredom-filled blog posts.
[…] he’s cannier than I’d thought.
his style […] directly […] regular language
[…] this sentence that doesn’t have any commas and is all just information might be a typical sentence from [Richard Yates]
Lin’s plot, in other words, is life’s.
What’s uncomfortable about the book is the notion that all of this actually happened, that this book seems to be pure transcription: not only of events but also, appreciably, of e-mails and g-chat sessions. The situations fairly sweat verisimilitude, being as mundane and relentlessly torpid as the afternoon I’ve spent writing this review […]
One wonders not whether the real Fanning or Osment should retain counsel and sue Lin and his publisher but whether the unfortunate girl on whom Fanning is based will. It should be said that documentary fiction has been written before […]
To Lin’s generation, which is to say to mine as well, transparency is the new sincerity; many of our peers maintain that it’s psychologically healthy, and artistic, to expose oneself entirely online. Anonymity was so 1990s—the Age of Fake Screen Names. Today, only utter exposure can set one free, while the only thing proscribed is regret.
Total transparency […]
If Lin retains this transparency there will literally be no other way he can write […]
Kiddies, forgive the majuscules and punctuation, but Lin’s honesty deserves them […]
Josh Cohen’s a smart guy and a good writer. But am I wrong in thinking that he has been deceived by Lin into thinking that Richard Yates
- is transcription;
- is honest and sincere and transparent;
- is artless (i.e., free of artifice)?
It certainly looks that way to me! (It should go without saying that I most strenuously disagree with Josh. But I am interested as to what it is about Lin’s writing that has caused Josh’s conclusions.)
Furthermore, here are some of the comments people have made on Josh’s review:
I ordered Shoplifting at American Apparel for my library and it was horrible, completely artless and without any soul whatsoever.
It’s about time someone called out Tao Lin, and not just hate on but intelligently destroy. I have been waiting to read something like this for a long time. I am now going to go out and buy a copy of “Witz” as soon as possible to thank you. I hope to meet you someday so you can sign it and then we can talk about how bad Tao Lin is. Also thank you for calling out fishman’s blog and the legion of hipster kids who want to be Tao Lin because they also lead boring lives and are dumb. Thanks again.
Any critic who thinks Tao can write disrespects the critical aesthetic.
Me, I see style all over Lin’s work. Maybe you do, too. But there are unquestionably many others who feel otherwise—and who are happy to profess that on the internet.
8.
Elisa has mentioned the New Childishness, a formulation she attributes to Ana Bozicevic. I don’t doubt that such a thing exists; nor do I doubt that many of the authors called New Sincere can also be called New Childish. Indeed, there seem to me many affinities and points of intersection here. However, I don’t think the two are synonymous.
For instance, Michael Kelly’s (brilliant) 2008 novel Ulrich Haarbürste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm is extremely childish. It is also arguably Twee and precious. But it is not New Sincerist. Michael is really not engaging with the aesthetic strategies or devices we might identify with the NS, and the whole thing is very obviously a put on, calculated to achieve ironic effects:
Now here is a cliffhanger to kill for! What can happen now? Will I be forced to wrap Jim Morrison in cling-film or will something occur to forestall this foolish and hideous travesty? Do not expect mercy from this quarter for I am resolved not to tell you until the next chapter. I confess the power has gone to my head and I am tempted to forbid you to read it for two weeks at least. But I will not do so.
Chapter 14
I resume without ado as it would be the rankest impoliteness to tarry with preamble after such a shocking cliffhanger.
‘Do not be so foolish,’ Yul Brynner snaps at Jim Morrison. ‘You are like the emulous dog in the fine old Dusseldorf fable who wished to be an octopus and was covered in humiliation. One clingfilm wrapping is more than enough for any party.’ Here I disagree with Yul but as he is the host it would be impolite to say so.
(For more on Michael’s wonderful book, see here, here, and here.)
9.
Johannes Göransson penned a response (at Montevidayo) to my post “I am drinking gin & wrote about 18 long titles i randomly chose using wikipedia.” I read it right away and it seemed to me that Johannes wasn’t really replying to my post, as he initially claimed, but rather responding to it, using the occasion to offer various thoughts on sincerity and art. And Johannes’s writing is always interesting, but I fail to see how his thoughts engage my actual claims and assumptions. For one thing, he spends a large part of the post talking about things he likes and dislikes. So I’m now better equipped to buy Johannes a birthday present, but the substance of my argument has gone unaddressed.
Johannes also seems concerned with whether an author “really is” sincere or not:
I’ve always felt very sincere about my approach to poetry […]
I’ve written a book [that] was very sincere and autobiographical […]
But the noiseiness is not opposed to sincerity! I’m perfectly sincere when I write in my fake English!
I’ve stated numerous times that I am not at all interested in whether the author is being “genuinely sincere”; regardless, here it is again:
- I am concerned with a particular aesthetic—with artifice. (All writing is artifice.)
- Some people regard that artifice’s devices and styles as “feeling more sincere” (more transparent, more genuine) than other artifices.
- Why is that?
10.
Johannes also states a general dislike of how certain kinds of writing come across as insincere:
Another thing I don’t like about sincerity discussions is that they often lead to disparagements of the art-ness of art – the pageantry, the metaphors, the spectacular effects, the excess, the deadly glamour become signs of insincerity. This leads to boring poetry that feels very restrained to me; poetry that seems involved in a humanist idea of interiority.
It’s hard to know what he means here, without specific examples. But, again, this isn’t my current concern, and I hardly think I’m “disparaging the art-ness of art.” (This is a fine example of how I don’t see Johannes’s response as directly engaging what I’ve written.)
11.
The discussion of the New Sincerity is not a discussion of affect, but effect. Consider the movie Cabin in the Woods. I was fortunate enough to see it in the company of a charming young woman, who spent large parts of the film covering her eyes (as well as laughing). She wasn’t alone in doing this.
But what if she hadn’t? What if no one had? Even if no one thought Cabin scary, or grimly funny, it wouldn’t “not be” a horror film—it just wouldn’t be a good one. But we’d still identify it with a particular genre, due to its style and the conventions it engages.
12.
Johannes is mistaken when he writes that “One of Jameson’s examples is Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In an Aeroplane Over the Sea.”” In all of my posts, I’ve mentioned that album entirely once, and not as an example of the New Sincerity. Instead I wrote:
This title [of Sasha Fletcher’s 2010 novel When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds] also reminds me of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, certainly a nakedly emotional / sincere-sounding album.
Nonetheless, Johannes wrote:
Here we have a record that – as far as I remember it, it’s been years since I listened to it – is loaded with occult symbolism, baroque lyrics, pataphysics and a central story about ouiji-boarding Anne Frank back in the songs. In that way, the occult seems to be almost a parody of sincerity: to actually have a dead girls talk through one’s own microphone […]
I don’t fully understand Johannes’s point here; can’t ghosts speak as sincerely as the living? (Does the late King Hamlet tell the truth?) But what’s odder is how Johannes now appears to be arguing against himself. Elsewhere, you’ll recall, he wrote:
Another thing I don’t like about sincerity discussions is that they often lead to disparagements of the art-ness of art.
Now, though, he seems to be claiming that the album’s occult elements somehow parody sincerity? The logic here is that one can’t be sincere about certain content? Or that certain styles or forms can’t be read as sincere? Again, it’s hard to follow Johannes’s logic here, but it seems to me he’s constructing some kind of either/or argument that butts heads with his previous statement.
13.
Since we’re talking now about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, let’s keep talking about. (I love the album.) I will maintain that it sounds “sincere” and “nakedly emotional” to my ears. I don’t suspect that Jeff Mangum is putting me on, or trying to be ironic. When he strains his voice and fails to hit notes, I take that as a sign of his earnestness—similar to Richard Beck’s observations about Win Butler and Arcade Fire:
But if the instrumentation and stage costumes suggested a Victorian, semi-handmade aesthetic, the music itself embraced unembarrassed emotionalism. Lead singer Win Butler yelled his lyrics as often as he sang them—these were often laments for a damaged childhood—and he relished the moments when his voice would crack from the strain. […] Expressiveness and sentimentality are what [Pitchfork reviewer David] Moore liked best about Arcade Fire.
Many of Mangum’s lyrics, too, like the ones to “Holland, 1945,” seem “earnest,” too:
And here’s where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
And it’s so sad to see the world agree
That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes
I don’t think I’m alone. In his 2005 Pitchfork review, Mark Richardson wrote:
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum’s honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
The “occult symbolism, baroque lyrics, pataphysics,” and presence of “Anna’s ghost all around” don’t obstruct that. They are instead a part and parcel of that “honesty […] translated directly to his music.” (That’s not at all the way I’d put it, but.) Indeed, Richardson addresses many of Johannes’s points:
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It’s not biography. It’s a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused “kaleidoscope.” It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with “King of Carrot Flowers Part 1”. The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album’s world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he’s running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: “When you were young…” Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad’s shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
14.
Here’s some formal analysis, which is what I really prefer doing to making grand arguments about artistic movements (although, alas, I do my fair share of the latter). Mangum regularly uses elaborate and intricate imagery in his lyrics:
Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings and bend all your notes for me
Soft silly music is meaningful magical
The movements were beautiful all in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden was all you were needing
When you still believed in me
Say what you want to say and hang for your hollow ways
Moving your mouth to pull out all your miracle for me
But notice how he immediately follows that verse with this much sparser one:
I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are
I wouldn’t call either verse “more sincere” than the other. But I would say that she second one is designed to appear more straightforward. This is a calculated aesthetic effect. Mangum is juxtaposing two styles, lyrically, creating the sense that the second verse is getting “stripped down” (he’s setting aside the surrealist imagery). Meanwhile, the accompanying music also strips down, growing slower and quieter and thinner. (Listen from 4:30 onward, although the effect progresses throughout the entire song.) The two maneuvers compliment and reinforce one another, creating the impression that Mangum is taking a moment to speak “more directly.” Again, this is entirely an aesthetic effect—a rather successful one!
(Although to reiterate, I am not calling the album New Sincerist!)
15.
Again, my focus in all of these posts is fixated on a very particular aesthetic, and why people have attributed it certain effects, and why those effects may currently be desirable. I am pursuing this because I’m an artist and I want to know how to create specific effects in my own work. I also just plain enjoy analyzing artworks and better learning how their artists have designed them. This is, to me, a very sensual practice.
16.
Allow me to speculate a little (and this is not analysis.) I know that I’ve been hearing for a long time now that language is always about itself, locked in an endless chain of self-signification; that personal expression is impossible (critics can deconstruct anything anyone says); that the author is dead and cannot determine the meaning of what he or she writes; and that the meaning of texts should be open to the reader’s interpretation. I will, if I may, offer my good pal Chris Higgs as an example of someone who embraces all of these claims.
These claims are debatable; they’re not gospel, and not eternal truths. And just as reason and formal analysis have their limits, so too does Theory. Deconstruction, taken to its limit, might convince a person that meaning is entirely determined by the reader, and that the intentions of authors and artists are irrelevant. Me, I think that would be a foolish conclusion to reach, but I hear a select few have gotten there.
17.
Chris can certainly claim that an author’s intention doesn’t matter, and that interpretation’s unimportant—but it’s hard to fully embrace the consequences of those claims.
A thought experiment. Chris assigns his students Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. One of those students objects to Chris making them read a work of Holocaust denial. The student is so incensed that she goes to the department head, complaining about how Chris is promoting genocide against the Jews and should be dismissed from the school. She has even retained legal counsel.
At what point does Chris argue that the student has (laughably but tragically) misinterpreted the Sontag? Or does he say, “Your reading is as good as any other! Bravura performance! A+!”
18.
Chris Higgs is so fucking dumb that when his professors asked him why he couldn’t read, he said it was because he was “illegitimate.” Which he is—I screw his mother every second Tuesday.
19.
Chris’s claims are admittedly fun to think about for a while, but they disregard much of what I find beautiful and powerful about art. Once the artist is no longer capable of producing intended artistic effects, art becomes a lot less interesting: since any response is valid, why pick any particular artwork to respond to? If you say it’s because you admire the salient qualities of this one, then you’re starting to let intention back in—because who’s to say those effects aren’t accidental? And once you’re there, why do you need art to produce accidental effects? Just go look at a drainpipe or a tree or whatever it is in the world you want to look at. Now we no longer need art programs or museums or galleries or funding for the arts; neoliberal capitalism loves this line of thinking, because it removes precisely what distinguishes art from any other market commodity. Art becomes something worth preserving only if someone can make money off it.
Chris’s claims also severely reduce art criticism, because any reading, any response, becomes just as good as any other:
Go ahead, wreck your life;
that might be good.
Who can say what’s wrong or right?
Nobody can.
Me, I don’t want to live in a world like that. That spiraling shape will make you go insane.
20.
Steve Roggenbuck recently claimed this about his own work:
i’d hope that my writing and videos are emotionally powerful for people, and they seem to be, but usually what im trying to convey is a kind of profound moment of sadness that seems like, “ultimately beatiful,” not a stagnant ongoing depression […]
also in my personal life i’ve found that the only way i wil actual achieve what i want is by sincerly believing that i can, and putting in the work every day. idk its cheesy but i truely believe it. most people give up before they even try at something. if youre going to do something awesome it probably won’t be easy, u have to be willing to work hard for a long time. will smith (hehe) has said you shouldnt have a back-up plan because it distracts from the main plan. u see? i truely believe this stuf. i will never stop. i will build something gigantic while tons of people sit around thinking it is not possible. 666
Again, it’s easy to demonstrate that there are artists out there currently concerned with sincerity, and what counts as such.
21.
A key part of Steve achieving that effect—of his aesthetic—is his use of misspelling. The persistent typos signal that the work has been written quickly, spontaneously, and is therefore less revised” and “more earnest.”
His professors at Columbia College discouraged this device; they favored refinement/revision. Steve correctly realized that doing that would mean sacrificing a desired aesthetic effect—an effect that’s currently possible because there exists a “proper” or “normative” way of writing it can be perceived against. (He doesn’t want to “save it for his blog,” as his teacher advised, because it wouldn’t be perceptible there. Rather, Steve’s goal is to import that device or maneuver into his poetry, where it produces an effect.)
22.
Watch out, Steve! Your misspelling strategy won’t work forever. Like any other artistic device, it will gradually grow familiar, necessitating some other approach that “makes the stone feel stoney.”
23.
oK next mondsy, rigfhtb back to Shlkolovsky!!!!11!
(See? It’s hard to convey “sincerity” without just copying something already done. If you’re looking for a homework assignment, try finding a new way to do it!)
Tags: ana bozicevic, blake butler, Christopher Higgs, elisa gabbert, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Jeff Mangum, Johannes Göransson, Joshua Cohen, Marie Calloway, Mark Richardson, Michael Kelly, Neutral Milk Hotel, New Sincerity, Nicholas Brown, Piss Fanatics, steve roggenbuck, Tao Lin, They Might Be Giants, Ulrich Haarbürste's Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm, Viktor Shklovsky
Man. All this talkin’ makes me feel dumb. And I have multiple degrees.
College writing was a waste of time. I could’ve just hung out here and learned to think everything was stupid.
interesting thoughts, Adam.
one thing, though: i’m fairly certain Roggenbuck doesn’t use misspellings to convey sincerity. i’d say he’s sincere *about* his misspellings (outside the work, if you ask him about them, because they relate to an ethos of pursuing what makes you happy to the fullest and sharing it with others), but the misspellings don’t signal sincerity but rather create work that can feel funny or cute or cheeky. they cause certain people delight and make other people annoyed. they are not typos but rather intentional misspellings.
Adam,
I think your idea of a blog post is somehow more antagonistic than mine. My response/reply certainly deals with the issues you raise, but perhaps not as directly pro/con as you would like. I am interested in the example of the Neutral Milk Hotel because it challenges simple sincere/insincere artifice/nonartifice binaries – and I fail to see how this doesn’t quite directly respond to your post, as you point out in this post, it has everything to do with your argument. You do a good job explaining just why I thought this was a very good case to discuss in matters of sincerity.
Notice however, that the description of Mangum goes outside devices – to an interview about him talking about Anne Frank etc. You could say that’s yet another device, but to me this suggests something about the power of “sincerity” – that it challenges such purely formalist readings of works.
What I wanted to do was move away from your assertion that “sincerity” is only about aesthetic devices and broaden the conversation. Devices don’t exist in a vacuum (and I think the Russian Formalists conceded as much after their initial phase). Contrary to you I don’t think “sincerity” is merely devices. It’s a very interesting line of rhetoric that is very pervasive, so it’s worth thinking about it. There’s been like 5 more posts on Montevidayo since my initial post moving the discussion in other directions.
I realize I’m coming late to this discussion on HTML Giant (though I’ve written about it quite a bit at Montevidayo), but it seems to me you’re being a bit defensive. You’ve done a good job raising an important issue, but I don’t think it’s essential that we keep the discussion about merely devices.
Johannes
i don’t think content and form can be separated so easily. steve’s mispellings are brilliant in the context of the internet, where search engine optimization motives mean that even the most spontaneous ridiculous expressions conform to the needs of a “legible” title. his videos stand out in youtube even before you press play. the “sincerity” is generative because it engages with the mountain of textual content that is the internet, and our expectations for what we find there. suddenly perfectly spelled titles begin to look artificial, like something created for machines or word documents, not humans. even if / when it grows familiar, i think it will be familiar in a global, 21st century kind of way, not a dead done kind of way.
yeah, but searching Google corrects spelling
when i just now typed ‘corect my’ into the Google search window, the Google suggestions that dropped down were ‘correct my english’ and ‘correct my essay’
(Not to deconstruct you, but) It seems to me that this post asserts two contradictory points. The first is that a person can write something that seems sincere using a variety of formal devices even if she is not writing something she is sincere about; you are interested in the devices rather than the intention to be sincere or not. But then you take on Theory (in a sweeping and dismissive manner that seems glib and uncommon for your usually thoughtful posts) and assert that those who dismiss authorial intention are dumbfucked. This is a problem because there seems to be a desire to discuss the context of new sincerest productions; is Tao Lin intending to demonstrate that the aesthetics of NS result in boring and mundane writing? According to him, no. To what extent should we take his word for it? Formal analysis is revealing, but why stop there? How do NS aesthetics buck the neoliberal commodification of art? Or doesn’t it? Can you elaborate?
I think a “sincere” work is one that makes an effort to explore the more profound issues underlying everything we do – love, mortality, spirituality, etc. Steve Roggenbuck does this, as is evident in “i’d hope that my writing and videos are emotionally powerful for people,
and they seem to be, but usually what im trying to convey is a kind of
profound moment of sadness that seems like, “ultimately beatiful,” not a
stagnant ongoing depression […]” – this “profound sadness” is something I picked up while studying Buddhism several years ago, and is a way of dealing with those things.
Tao Lin’s work, however, does none of this. There’s very little underlying meaning to anything he writes and no exploration of the great emotional struggles man has dealt with for centuries. I guess that means he as a person has had a pretty solid life where everything has gone his way, which is great for him. Why anyone would want to read his little experiments, though, has always puzzled me.
However, your dog poems are fascinating. #1 above is basically like Tao Lin’s work – there’s no exploration of anything and no attempt to come to terms with emotions (it’s just, this is happening), yet you think it’s superior. I wouldn’t be surprised if the speaker of that poem killed his dog just to see what it was like. #2 is a sincere attempt at finding a commonality in human emotions, though (living every moment with someone as if it could be the last and things of that sort).
exactly, machines correct spelling at this point
ah, got it, think i read your comment ‘cross-eyed’, thought you meant roggenbeck was aiming for ‘not being found’ by machines
and you’re right, his mis-spellings stand out in the searches/searched
: )
ps – love the ‘edit’ function in disqus
I just want to say one thing, which is IN RESPONSE to this:
“I read it right away and it seemed to me that Johannes wasn’t really replying to my post, as he initially claimed, but rather responding to it, using the occasion to offer various thoughts on sincerity and art. And Johannes’s writing is always interesting, but I fail to see how his thoughts engage my actual claims and assumptions.”
I think the only way to have conversations on the internet that don’t turn into the transcript of a bunch of tweens talking about each other in different bedrooms at the same sleepover party is via J’s method
“Once the artist is no longer capable of producing intended artistic effects, art becomes a lot less interesting: since any response is valid, why pick any particular artwork to respond to?”
going to save this response… i knew c.h.’s arguments seemed off to me but didn’t know how to articulate my problem and i think you did
do you think AD’s advisors asked him to ‘save it for his blog’ hence all this?
we need some UP to formalize all this so he gets tenure
Adam, you wrote:
“Some people regard that artifice’s devices and styles as ‘feeling more sincere’ (more transparent, more genuine) than other artifices. Why is that?”
At the risk of sounding really glib, I propose two theories: 1) Those readers aren’t very sophisticated. 2) It’s fashionable in certain circles to do so. (Don’t proponents of a movement always think their way is the only true way?)
I still reject, and will continue to reject forever (or least until late 2012), this freewheeling use of the word “sincerity” which runs counter to working dictionaries. I support your other characterizations of the work (as seemingly artless/effortless).
I think that’s all I’ll respond to for now, but thanks for responding to my response to your response, etc! More soon.
man Adam these new sincerity posts have been really great and this post in particular was probably the best post i’ve read on htmlgiant in maybe ever. i was educated. i was intrigued (going to check out Michael Kelly and that NMH album). I laughed a long time at #18 which I assumed was NOT sincere…though who’m I to say? only the author can tell me what he or she meant, his/her INTENTION….
also makes me want to hang out with you when I’m in chicago in about a month if you’re still in chicago, though i have nothing to add or take away from what you’ve said in your past posts on NewSincerity. i’m just mostly consistently enlightened, is how it feels.
and i’m really glad none of this had anything to do with Drive…
Okay, okay. I know the trolls need their dose: all those
Deadgods, Dons, and Doppelgangers frantically scrutinizing my every key-punch,
feeding off me like leaches, like parasites, like little negative vampires
craving a source from which to unleash their rage. Here, my pretties, feed on this…
Adam, Adam, Adam.
I do not claim “that the author is dead and cannot determine the
meaning of what he or she writes; and that the meaning of texts should be open
to the reader’s interpretation.”
I claim: interpretation is irrelevant to art. Period.
I do not acknowledge the value of interpreting art, and I do not acknowledge
the legitimacy of an artist’s use of art as a way to communicate meaning.
I do not recognize interpretation as either a necessary or sufficient criteria
for evaluating art.
It is not a matter of where meaning comes from; it is a matter of experiencing
art for art, not art for meaning.
It is a matter of revaluing the experience of art.
To approach art/literature through interpretation,
especially your version of interpretation (“there is a right way and a wrong
way”) is an exercise in power, an exertion of dominance, an enforcement of
subordination. It is closed, oppressive,
and tyrannical.
To approach art/literature through description, as
I profess, is an exercise in power, yes, but a different type of power: a more
equally distributed power. It is open,
inclusive, and pluralistic.
You ask: what does the text mean? If the answer differs from yours, you decree:
wrong! Conversation over.
I ask: what do you notice about the text? No matter what the answer is, the
conversation continues, because unlike your approach, there is no “right or
wrong” when describing.
Your approach attempts to make art/texts smaller, simpler.
My approach attempts to make art/texts larger, more complicated. You limit and reduce. I expand and increase.
Your approach is to conquer. My approach is to survey.
Further, your entire argument against my position is predicated on the assumption
that I approach meaning differently than you do. (That I’m some kind of postmodern nihilist.)
This is false. I simply approach art/literature
differently. I ask other questions.
Your thought experiment fails because in order for a student to claim that
Sontag’s piece is “a work of Holocaust denial” that student would need
to identify the location demonstrating this claim within the text, through
description. Since it is absent from the text, it cannot be identified and
therefore cannot be described. Hence, a claim about Holocaust denial in
Against Interpretation would be an act of interpretation. I neither condone nor engage acts of interpretation. I redirect those reductive impulses toward
generative impulses. Put another way, there
would never be a moment in one of my classes where a student said “This essay
is about X.” or “Sontag is trying to say
X.” That is not how I discuss or teach
literature. And frankly, I dislike that way with a vengeance because it is the credo of the
conservative and traditional approach to reading that in many cases cause
students to dislike reading in the first place!
To repeat, as it seems necessary, this is the
difference between my approach and your approach: I describe, you explain. I don’t have to worry about the rightness or
wrongness of different interpretations, because I deny the value of
interpretation outright. So despite your
claim, I do not think “any interpretation is acceptable.” On the contrary,
I think all interpretation is rotten. Full
stop. It is a bankrupt practice.
Since you brought her into this, I will sign off
with the powerful last line in Sontag’s essay:
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an
erotics of art.”
Amen!
Have a good weekend!
And please, please, please, troll
vultures, feast your hatred on me! I am
your sustenance. Do not for a moment
consider the effect of your negativity.
Merely feast, blindly, wantonly, unabashed. I am not a human being. I am a monster, remember? And what do we do to monsters? Oh, my pretties, what do we do? Oh, bring the pitchforks, bring the
fire. Cast me out. Oh, my little negative vampires, yes, yes,
yes…I am everything you fear about yourself.
I am your insecurities. Feast,
feast, feast…let it out…let your anger surface…let your vitriol boil…oh, how
you hate me, oh how you are so much smarter than me, oh how you know so much
more than me, oh how you are right and I am wrong, oh how you wish I would shut
my pretty mouth, oh how you need me, oh how you want me to give you what you
need…oh yes, that is good, very good, the life of the hater is your calling,
you are my little haters, my little negative vampires, sucking, slurping, oh
how I cherish each and every one of you.
Wink, wink. Kiss, kiss.
Sol Lewitt, “Sentences on
Conceptual Art” #35 – These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
I think the adventure story will be the new rage, Christopher.
[…] If your curious about the ongoing New Sincerity ‘blogoff’ catch this HTMLGIANT post. […]
I don’t understand. You are an academic (and a writer who puts his ideas out into the public), but you seem totally incapable of dealing with the fact that others disagree with you. Nobody has brought a pitchfork or called for your head or any of this victim mythology you’ve constructed. You’re getting a PhD and write on a popular literary blog. Critical or negative comments are not vampires; they’re part of writing and thinking publicly.
Describing art is great. When I got to an art museum, this is all I am capable of. I wander around in awe of the paintings, oohing and awing and describing them without an interpretation. I don’t know anything about painting or art history, so I couldn’t interpret the paintings if I wanted to. My approach to painting is childlike.
Thankfully, my approach to reading is not childlike.
A few thoughts:
1) It is impossible to read without dealing with meaning, unless one reads work in a language one does not understand. If only on the sentence or grammatical level, one is forced to understand meaning in some way. If, as you say, there is a difference between life and art (between a letter from a friend and a chapter of a novel mailed to one by a friend), one must read for meaning to understand this difference.
2) To say that there are right or wrong ways of interpreting a text does not mean there is only one right way or that one cannot consider conflicting interpretations. I mean, the hypothetical student reading Holocaust denial in the Sontag book could cite a bunch of random sentences and so on as textual “evidence”, or she could say – “the affects of this book are fascistic” or something. It’s an absurd example, but it’s not that far off from the sort of “readings” done in pomo literature departments.
3) Is Plato art? What about Nietzsche? Must one not read either of them for meaning, either? What about political or religious novels? It’s absurd to teach or read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without considering meaning. I can’t even imagine how that would work. If all you care about is “affect”, why not just read carry out menus or something? Do you also read philosophy for “affect” rather than meaning?
4) By abandoning the difficult pursuit of understanding literature, one is liberated to a land of solipsism and self-obsession. Why consider the intention or meaning of great writers when we can endlessly examine how texts make us feel or pretend poems and novels are “machines”?
5) “You ask: what does the text mean? If the answer differs from yours, you decree: wrong! Conversation over.” I’ve been in a lot of conversations about the meaning of texts, and I’ve never seen one play out this way. Usually, when two people disagree, there is a good argument or discussion that leaves both parties better off. Sometimes I interpret a book one way, then encounter a different interpretation and change my mind. That’s the joy of discourse.
6) The flight from interpretation and meaning seems to ultimately be about a flight from agonism and intellectual conflict. This is evident in your whining about people disagreeing with you (or your tendency to ‘bow out’ of threads where people don’t offer proper deference to your methods).
7) Of course, the great thing about interpretation is that it happens constantly within great works of literature. Great writers are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting each other. Joyce interprets Homer and Shakespeare. Bolaño interprets Borges. Hart Crane interprets Whitman. But one would never see or know that if only reading for “affects”.
8) Great writers crafted their work with intended meaning. The project of serious reading (in addition to enjoying the stuff – but that goes without saying!) is to understand the work of great artists and thinkers as they understood themselves. It is more liberating to submit ourselves to the tyranny of genius, than drown in the shallowness of petty
9) Finally, let’s talk about the political implications of your approach. For example, can one read Céline without considering intention or meaning or context? To read ‘Journey to the End of Night’ (nevermind Bagatelles pour un massacre…) for “affect” without considering Céline’s intentions or the context of France and Europe in the 30s and 40s or the meaning of Céline’s nihilism vis a vis Nazism… one could do it, but it would be gutless. Reading and interpreting critically does not prevent aesthetic appreciation and judgement (because aesthetics has both the first and the final word in art), but reading without interpretation is an abdication of political and ethical responsibility.
(Another thought experiment: Bolaño’s ‘2666’ if Bolaño was buddies with people in Mexican drug cartels, that is, if he were friends with those responsible for so many of the women dead in his ‘Santa Theresa’. That would change everything about the novel, especially the Part About the Crimes.)
Re: Roggenbuck
He probably (hopefully) already knows this, but “lief” is a word. It comes up in Shakespeare all the time:
“I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Lief
cocaine
AD didn’t say or suggest that interpretation should simplify art/texts. He gave you two extreme examples that underscore the cultural importance of “interpretation.” Both interpretations are commonly accepted today because people have already done most (if not all) of the work. Do you want to live in a world where, eventually, people don’t apply reasoned interpretations to Little Black Sambo?
Human progress depends on “interpretation,” and the effectiveness of any interpretation depends on its rhetorical persuasiveness, an act itself that belies “simplicity” and “expands” one’s understanding of a text. I’m fairly certain he gave you two extreme examples to further his point about the general importance of interpretation, not to suggest that most texts can be easily “conquered” through the tyranny otherwise known as interpretation. You’re so damn disingenuous–and the last one who should ever accuse anyone else of “trolling.”
“And please, please, please, troll vultures, feast your hatred on me! I am your sustenance. Do not for a moment consider the effect of your negativity. Merely feast, blindly, wantonly, unabashed. I am not a human being. I am a monster, remember? And what do we do to monsters? Oh, my pretties, what do we do?”
Hehe… nerd.
If you ask Chris for the difference between “description” and “interpretation”, he will understand you well enough to call you a “troll”, but not well enough to know that you’re not one.
An interpretation:
A commentary:
The ambition of a mouse to be monster: tra la.
As I was reading the blogicle, I thought, That’s pretty hostile or hostile-sounding. Hm. The ideas of dominant, device, and familiar are so clearly useful… the abrasiveness sounds like a put-on. Thematizing “sincerity”–who’s going to insist that that’s not happening?!
But now it’s a conspiracy that includes Johannes, Elisa, and Chris.
And Don and Bomb!
. . . and me, except that I’m too chicken-winged to muscle in.
“Never mix, never worry!”
Great stuff. You give me hope for the rest of the humanity.
Christopher “describes”–the rest of us plebeians “interpret.” Here is one of many examples of Christopher resisting the urge to interpret:
“In fact the more I think about it, the more I would disagree with your assertion that religious texts are “experimental” – especially those in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They most certainly have a beginning, middle, and end. They present the unity of time and space, as well as the unity of character. They are rigid, molar, and sedentary. Thus in many ways they abide by the commandments of Aristotle’s Poetics…”
http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2011/06/29/chris-higgs-is-getting-a-doctorate-he-is-an-experimental-writer-he-has-a-life-a-wife-a-future-in-academia-im-taking-drugs-and-trying-to-act-in-a-movie/
A random Google search yields numerous such examples of Christopher fighting the urge to “interpret” via his magical powers of “description.”
Wow:
“In fact the more I think about it, the more I would disagree with your assertion that religious texts are “experimental” – especially those in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They most certainly have a beginning, middle, and end. They present the unity of time and space, as well as the unity of character. They are rigid, molar, and sedentary. Thus in many ways they abide by the commandments of Aristotle’s Poetics…”Chris wrote this? Wow, crazy. Biblical Hebrew is not a temporal language like Romantic or Germanic languages, so the kind of beginning-middle-end thing does not exist in the Hebrew bible (nor does it exist in the Greek bible). Maybe it exists in whatever translation Higgs read, but I don’t even think the KJV is a linear narrative. Also – unity of time and space, unity of character? Not sure what bible he’s talking about.
Oh come on. Stand by your ideas and stop making excuses.
Of course he just throws shit against the wall and hopes it sicks. Christianity is obviously an easy target for his intellectual laziness. Yet another example of Higgs’ narrow-mindedness. You can’t trust a man who constantly huffs and puffs about his openness; commentary like this is always right around the corner, ready to expose the man’s posturing.
I agree. Fixing mistaken expressions, or clarifying muddy ones, seem to me reasonable uses of the edit function. Erasing the context for response, less so.
Chris’s chummy self-‘criticism’ doesn’t seem to me especially successful at reducing “inflammat[ion]” – whatever his intentions.
Deleting the claim that Don (one example among three, as I remember) is “trolling” in Don’s vulturine scavenging of Chris’s texts seems, rather, a scrubbing of an association of direct, topical, and mostly impersonal engagement with empty “antagonism”.
Chris now doesn’t appear to be an intellectual who’d not scruple to call any, what, threatening criticism “trolling”.
…well, doesn’t appear to be–if you didn’t see the comment replaced now (for now?) with an ‘I am/was so intoxicated!’ remark.
Whether ‘intentional’ or not, irony abounds deliciously.
I’d recommend Lionel Trilling’s “Sincerity & Authenticity” to anyone interested in this stuff.
I await The New Disingenuousness.
“Deconstruction, taken to its limit, might convince a person that meaning is entirely determined by the reader, and that the intentions of authors and artists are irrelevant. Me, I think that would be a foolish conclusion to reach, but I hear a select few have gotten there.”
/agree
Thanks for posting this!
stop putting sincerity in quotation marks. it’s annoying.
[…] sincerity” is often an unhelpful binary when thinking about phenomena like hipster irony or the New Sincerity; those scenes or movements aren’t strict artistic opposites, since they necessarily share a […]
[…] Laure Provost and doubtless many others have (intentionally or not) made use of. AD Jameson argues (again on htmlgiant) that in Steve Roggenbuck’s work, “persistent typos signal that the work has been written […]