The Last and Most Tedious Flex
One of the things that happens when you go to graduate school in the humanities is that they try to deromanticize the humanities for you. This is funny, when you think about it. Even during the Cold War economic expansion, when you could get a job-for-life on the strength of a monograph or two (if that), humanities academe was understood to be one of the less remunerative forms of white-collar employment, and if a person can slug their way through Ulysses or an Old English textbook or the Cantos or Gravity’s Rainbow, they can probably go to law school or figure out how to read a balance sheet or master the Black-Scholes equation. Being a bit romantic and besotted about literature, or ideas, or the power of discussion, was understood to form a part of one’s motivation in making such a strange career move.
Was this bad? It’s conventional to argue that such attitudes kept professors from forming, say, unions to advance their common interests. Teaching is nothing so vulgar as a job, it’s a sacred calling, and monks live in cells and eat vegetables, so … Maybe this is even true, as a statement about people’s motivations — it’s definitely true as a description of “the style of bullshit you’ll hear from your president, dean, department chair, or recalcitrant office neighbor if you say the word ‘union’” — but romanticism about the humanities could obviously be turned in the other direction. “This work is too important not to protect it.” “This work is too beautiful to restrict to the children of the well-off” (which is what you’re doing when you expect adults to live on the equivalent of a stipend forever). In any case, as I said, by the time I went to grad school, de-romanticization was part of the process, and you were hearing it from the very people who’d be most inconvenienced if you did form a union. One time I sat through a class where the person who was trying to be our next Director of Graduate Studies tried to talk us all out of the idea that you could teach students to love literature. Dude, if I thought that the only real outcomes of my work could be the ones captured by empirical methods of verification, I would just grit my teeth and learn to code. My presence in this class is evidence that I have already voted against this universe.
What do I mean by de-romanticization? Basically I mean vulgar Bourdieuism: the idea that there is nothing to study about philosophers or philosophies, art works or artists, except the way that they get used between people in status games, the ways they accrue or confer cultural capital. (I call that “vulgar” Bourdieuism because it’s not totally clear to me that Bordieu thinks that’s all there is. I want to be fair to him. To be fair to him, I can either read every last page of Distinction and probably a smattering of his other work or I can hedge a little bit. I absolutely do not want to read every page of Distinction any time soon because what I did read was boring. So I will hedge. But the short section of Distinction where Bourdieu talks about autodidacticism suggested to me, when I read it, that maybe Bourdieu understood, on some basic level, that sometimes people pursue learning for its own sake, which would then imply that what he offers is a proposal about what sociology can talk about rather than, as I generally see him used to suggest, a proposal that sociology be the only thing anyone talks about. Imperially overstating your side of the case is just what you do as a French intellectual. “Ziss side of ze binaree is zee only szide, sze oszer is an illusione” just is French for “let’s consider this side for a moment.”
Vulgar Bourdieuism, if you take it that far, is nothing other than behaviorism applied to art. There is no self, no will or imagination directing choices, just responses to rewards and punishments. There is no “I” who enjoys the wine; there is only a little machine inside me that notices when someone does or doesn’t give me an approving glance as I sip from the glass.
In rock criticism, Carl Wilson is one of the great vulgar Bourdieuists. He wrote that famous book where he tries to gaslight himself into liking Celine Dion. Now he’s writing about Neutral Milk Hotel, a short-lived Southern psychedelic rock band from the late ‘90s that I love. My best friend posted Wilson’s article on the subject in a group chat last night; I am going to have to have a talk with him about respecting my boundaries as an insomnia sufferer. No Carl Wilson articles after 9PM, Adam!!! I need my beauty sleep!!!
The article distills what is annoying about this approach so thoroughly that it’s kind of beautiful. I am going to try to outline the argument of this article, insofar as it has one. I will insert my reactions as I go, like someone responding to an email in the late ‘90s, paragraph by paragraph.
First two paragraphs: There is a new box set of old music from the beloved but short-lived indie rock band called Neutral Milk Hotel. People are also writing books and making documentaries about the group of artists. It all proves that the Neutral Milk Hotel guy was not the lone genius we’ve all been imagining he is (citation needed on “we’ve all been imagining he is”).
Nut graf which I must quote in full because it is truly precious: “So, the time seems ripe to ask: After a quarter century, are fans finally ready to listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and Aeroplane as historical artifacts? Or even simply as music, rather than fetishizing (or despising) them as cultural totems?”
>Sure, yeah, thanks for that, Carl. Just a quick question: Why the fuck would a “fan” need to listen to anything as a historical artifact? Why should “fans” have the same responsibilities as professional musicologists or historians? Why are you taking it upon yourself to give them homework? And as to your second point, about listening to it “simply as music” (which is what “fans” do, in the first place), rather than “fetishizing (or despising) them as cultural totems”: Bro, you wrote a whole book about how we’re being disrespectful to hard-working Quebecois housewives if we don’t browbeat ourselves into liking Celine Dion’s unlistenable music. Fetishizing or despising things as cultural totems is ALL THAT YOU DO. You assume from the outset that there’s nothing at all to any music or art except the way it gets talked about, labeled as this or that, and you let your conclusions about that determine who is up and who is down. That is very much a Carl Wilson problem, not a me problem, and not a fans of Neutral Milk Hotel as such problem.
Next para: fan culture is scary and also good. But fandom “harbors a violent ritual structure.” Some stupid, deluded people have tried to separate art from the violence of mass culture by liking niche or indie or other scenes. But those people are exactly the same as the other sorts of fans.
>Implied: The only way out of the wheel of fandom karma is to stop talking about the things you like and instead adopt my above-it-all pose, where I talk about how other people like the things they like.
Next para: When the really famous Neutral Milk Hotel album came out in 1998, it was “warmly but calmly received.” But then later people started writing about it like it was a work of distinctive and unusual genius. That is so sus. [You could also tell this story about most of the Beatles’ albums.]
>Gee, Carl, what an incredible secret history you’ve discovered! Look at the Seymour Hersh of musical taste, directing our attention to the lies and propaganda of the Neutral Milk Hotel industrial complex! Let me see if I can shed some light on this troubling pattern you’ve identified. What happens with works of art is that our initial reactions to them change or deepen with repeated exposure and further thought. This also happens with people. The first time I met my best friend, I thought “That guy is cool. We should have coffee some time.” The fifth time we hung out I was like “I’d fight a bear for this dude.” Similarly, the first time I heard Neutral Milk Hotel I thought “that sounded kinda cool. [Pause] Boy I’m still really sad about getting dumped last summer [context: it was Fall 1998 and I was still really sad about getting dumped last summer].” Then I found myself wanting to hear them again; then eventually I bought the album; then I became absolutely obsessed with it. As I had time to think about it, I found more things in it that I loved. This is normal. Framing this process as though it were a psyop that someone needs to debunk is silly, yes, but it’s also a deeply strange thing to do—far stranger than finding, after a few dozen listens, that you feel more strongly about an album than you did so to begin with. Even though this framing is also, now, a standard move in cultural criticism, it’s weird. It’s weirder than Jeff Mangum’s voice.
Next few paras: Meanwhile, even as people “decide” that this album is not merely “good” but “really really good”—how dare they. Those fools—the Neutral Milk Hotel guy has stopped being as reclusive as he was during the immediate aftermath of that album. Turns out that he had a nervous breakdown in the late ‘90s. Obsessive fans and music journalists made this period of the Neutral Milk Hotel guy’s life worse than it had to be.
>This is a good point! It could have been the seed of an interesting essay, but Wilson punts on it. He quotes the Neutral Milk Hotel guy telling a journalist to leave him alone, and then says, “Not that I think artists should have veto rights over all public accounts and discussions of their lives and work.” Sure! Where’s that boundary and how do we decide on it? That’s a great question. He sidesteps it to get back to scolding fans for thinking Neutral Milk Hotel guy is a genius; he seems to want to equate all fan-love with the obsessive, stalky kind.
Carl Wilson Finally Comes to the Fucking Point of the Article: “I remain astonished and bemused by the whole two-decade arc. As a listener and writer roughly Mangum’s age, I’ve always heard Neutral Milk Hotel’s music as a product of its time and influences. Aeroplane is nothing more or less than a highly accomplished work within a category, not a sui generis miracle. [Goes on to list Neutral Milk Hotel’s influences, which include other Elephant 6 bands, lo-fi indie artists, C-86ers, and Kiwi Rock.]”
>Don’t get it twisted. Wilson wants you to think that his point here is the whole tedious antiromantic catechism about how there are no geniuses, every artist has influences, there are more and less accomplished ways of doing particular styles but. nothing is really sui generis, etc. Which, as far as it goes, is trivially true. People who use the term “genius” readily acknowledge that artists emerge from a milieu; they reach for the term “genius” because they are struck by how far an artist sometimes emerges from that milieu. We keep reaching for the term, despite all the admonishments not to do so by our betters, because that just is one of our common experiences of art. I read Shakespeare; I read Jonson and Marlowe and Marston and Webster; my love for both the milieu and its greatest artist grows. The problem with genius discourse is a) using it to excuse the artist being a rapist, Nazi, etc.; b) not applying it evenly. But if you say, “This discourse is too tainted; stop using it,” people will just find another way. Because this is something we experience.
But that isn’t Wilson’s point, anyway. Wilson’s point is the first word in the first sentence of the paragraph. “I remain astonished and bemused by the whole two-decade arc.” I, Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, never thought their stuff was that good! I alone appreciated its exact and true level of goodness [which doesn’t exist; you could swap in Celine Dion for Neutral Milk Hotel but you’re a snob]. It’s a version of the “I never cared for his work” move, except that I think most people who pull that one are just blunderingly trying to find a way into a bewildering conversation rather than trying to get us to admire them, whereas I think Carl Wilson knows exactly what he’s doing.
This kind of criticism is never about the artist. It can’t be; the artist is just a token in the ol’ reward-and-punishment scheme, remember? And it’s not really about “society” or “other people,” because if you’re really looking at those things, you eventually find your way back to talking about the artist, because in real life, people do respond to artists, and one of the ways they respond is to obsess and admire and find meaning in and that’s exactly what this kind of criticism wants to debunk. So what does that leave? It leaves I. I I I I I. At the end of the great game of flex and counter-flex, of “David Bowie is awesome” and “David Bowie is not nearly so interesting when you’ve thoroughly digested his influences [flashes an Anthony Newley record that nobody outside Britain has ever actually listened to]” and “Actually knowing his influences makes Bowie seem even more impressive” and “Who cares about Bowie. Janelle is the new Bowie” and on and on, there is this: the last and most tedious flex.