Posted By BillHeise on May 12, 2009

[This essay is a continuation of a previous article.]

The Legacy of the Sentiment

Such an intellectual appreciation of art goes further back even than Duchamp. It has its modern roots in the rejection of science as a guide towards art. René Descartes had managed—for the first time, according to René Descartes—to found our human capacity to judge on the last metaphysical truth available to the human being: the truth of the being of God. With that one metaphysical sentiment in place, a poet like Alexander Pope could place human beings on a “Vast chain of being, which from God began” (Essay on Man 237). But we need to be careful when we read Pope. It is not our individual selves that are the subject of our place on the chain of being. Mankind’s place on the chain of being comes from his general nature, his species, rather than from his particular individuality: “Nature’s aethereal, human, angel, man, / Beast, bird, fish, insect!” (238-9).

Immanuel Kant had managed to reinsert the perceiving individual at the center of the universe, rather than man’s general nature. Individual human beings give rise to individual perceptions. This was a revolutionary idea, and it would seem to solve even the problems that even Plato had with art. Art was not something to be feared, something to be used circumspectly if at all. On the contrary, the aesthetic experience was the key to unlocking our human nature, which Rousseau had declared to have been suppressed by cultural forces and artificial ideas put forth by tyrants. All we had to do, as human beings, was to ally ourselves with the natural forces of good in opposition to the artificial forces of evil.

We were helped in this by the fact that there may be, in a Rousseau/Kant universe, no general human nature at all. Or rather the human nature that was accessible to reason was insufficient to get to the even deeper human nature that was available to those who threw aside their commitment to reason. Reason was increasingly associated with material gain; but, during the Industrial Revolution, people were looking for something to support themselves as individuals in the face of cultural displacement away from the rural economy into the cities, in the face of the city’s pitiless emphasis on labor and exchange. The new industrial economy was dehumanizing.

It is, then, from Kant that we date the rise of modern aesthetics. Marcel Duchamp is merely repeating the old saws of Kant. Andy Warhol is repeating the old saws of Duchamp. The moral content of the universe could only be approached by leaving aside “lower” forces of material gain to concentrate on “higher” intellectual forces. And Andy Kaufman is merely performing a “Dada” turn on an American icon: Slim Whitman. He is displacing attention away from the “cultural” baggage that comes with listen to country music into a more purely intellectual environment.

Andy’s Success

As it turns out, Andy Kaufman’s version of “Rose Marie” was much more successful than Slim Whitman’s version precisely because Andy Kaufman had managed to get people appreciate Slim Whitman’s voice without having to be bothered with the “lower” baggage of American country music culture. The view ratio of his video to Whitman’s original video shows the results of its success: there are 10 times more views of Andy’s video than of Whitman’s.

Corporate America figured out in the 1970s that if they could reach a wider audience for their products through this means, they would leap at the chance. And so, in Andy Kaufman’s “Rose Marie,” we get the subversion of commercial art as a corporate tool to promote commercialism in art.

What do we do when faced with a situation in which the corporate culture reaches into what we thought was an area protected from corporate culture: the aesthetic. Do we retrench back into our initial idea that art is to be associated with metaphysics rather than science and attempt to peel off even more of the commercial nature of art to find a more “pure” art? Do we re-examine the entire structure on which Andy Kaufman’s “Rose Marie” is built? Should we (can we) undo Andy Kaufman’s “Rose Marie,” Any Warhol’s soup cans, and even Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” without destroying the intellectual foundations of art itself? No, the artist answers; for destroying the foundation on which art is built destroys the artist. But apart from that single foundation, everything else was fair game.

Derrida

The “all-is-fair-game” approach was taken up by the French intellectual Jacques Derrida, who said that Western metaphysics was broken (my word, not his). In order to fix this situation, we needed to go back to the roots of the Western “historico-metaphysical” tradition (his word, not mine) and start over from scratch.

But rather than setting out to unbuild and rebuild his new metaphysics on a more solid foundation, he (oddly, in my opinion) deferred the process of unbuilding and rebuilding his new metaphysics on a more solid foundation and instead urged philosophers to begin tearing down the barriers that civilization had set up over/against us in a process he called deconstruction.

There was, it seemed, no solid metaphysical foundation on which we could rest our inquiries except the foundation of deconstruction. All we could ever do is raise up what had been suppressed by tyrants and oppressors: in particular, the moneyed classes. This put him in the situation of urging a state of permanent revolution. When would this permanent revolution come to an end? Never. That was the whole point of permanent revolution. As soon as we stopped questioning our assumptions, the deconstructionists said, we are no longer “authentic” beings. We have settled for something less than the ultimate truth of a human being.

But if this permanent settlement is elusive, and if we can never stop our permanent revolution, what is the point of all of this activity. For instance, let’s take a series of generations. The second generation raises up something that the first generation had suppressed. Now, we get to the third generation, they encounter raised and suppressed ideas, and they reverse them. Now we’re back to the original configuration.

As soon as we raise up our suppressed ideas to the level at which they are now elevated ideas, and ideas that were once elevated become suppressed, does that not mean that future generations will raise up once more ideas that are now suppressed? What, I ask, is the point of raising up ideas and suppressing other ideas every two generations? And what about ideas like the existence of evil? Are these not permanent ideas? Perhaps not, in a Kantian universe.

My Plotinus

I came to perceive this endless cycle as problematic, just as I had come to perceive Joseph Campbell’s final resolution of “Words Behind the Words” as problematic. And I wanted a better answer than the “This is it; this is all you can have” answer that I was getting from my academic colleagues. They thought that one must alienate one’s self from one’s self, from family and friends and every one that’s close to you in order to be at one with the greats.

I didn’t believe that I had to alienate myself from myself in order to return to myself at a “higher” level.

I have come to believe that the problem with Derrida is not that he went too far and that we need to go back into the past to recover what we’ve lost. The past is the past because of the weaknesses of ideas that were once held to be without weakness. Rather than going back to a “conservative” philosophy, which chooses to ignore the weaknesses of old ideas, I choose to move forward through these old ideas to come out stronger on the other side. And my model for this is Derrida. The problem I have with Derrida is that he did not go far enough, that there still ideas that are suppressed in his system, and if we manage to raise up those ideas, we will emerge stronger on the other side.

The thing about Derrida is he’s relying on the Rousseau/Kant position that makes metaphysics the carrier of human morality. At the same time, he does not believe that we can attain metaphysical certainty on anything. This position is known as philosophical skepticism. It has its roots in the modern world in the philosophy of René Descartes, who managed to doubt everything until he could find one metaphysical truth he could not do without. For Descartes, this was the truth of God’s existence. Over time, my academic colleagues have learned to doubt God’s existence, and this (they think) has given them free rein in the universe.

I look at Derrida as the last of a dying breed of philosophers that extend from René Descartes through Kant up until Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Each of these thinkers is looking for the final answer to metaphysical questions; each thinks that he’s found the final answer; and each can be shown to have failed. Derrida merely acknowledges this fact.

But why should we focus on the metaphysics of aesthetic experience as the fulfillment of our dreams if in fact our dreams cannot be fulfilled? Why not, instead, focus on the one thing that no philosopher has ever bothered to look at: the notion of logic and science. This has real value for us. The metaphysically based aesthetic experience can assign infinite value to even the measliest of our expressions (Warhol’s soup cans; Duchamp’s “”Fountain”), but we can have no basis on which to sort out a derivative expression of truth from a new and true truth except for the process of history. The historical process takes the evaluation of truth out of an individual’s hands and places it in the collective process of many minds sorting out was the individual could not.

And how long must we wait before we know the truth about historical process? A week? A month? A year? Several years? And what about works like RdR and Gower, who I like but no one else does? Am I wrong to love them in spite of the majority opinion, which dismisses them “merely” as allegorical art, which has fallen in the face of “symbolic” art.

In my mind, we can never know the truth based on a historical (and scientific) process. The problem is that no individual can master the truth, and even when we decide to extend ourselves outwards from our individual lives towards something greater than ourselves, we can never find the truth there, either.

So once again, we find ourselves trading away what we know of ourselves for something, external to ourselves, which we hope will be closer to the truth, but which we find in the end has merely alienated us from our individual selves with the promise of the goal that can never be fulfilled.

My Problem with Andy

And this is my problem with Andy Kaufman. It’s not that he’s not funny (he is). It’s not that I don’t like him (I do). It’s that he’s relying on a false philosophical distinction that we are better off giving up our attachment to our culture, which we can measure, for a speculative perspective in which he hope to find the truth, but which eludes us. And it’s not that I can’t appreciate his genius (I do). But my appreciation of his genius is not enough to make me want to follow him up to the rarefied heights from which he (like Keats in Shelley’s Adonais) calls me to.

The distinction between art and money goes back a long way, but it is not as permanent a feature of human experience as even Derrida thinks. The proof of this is in corporate America’s co-opting of the idea that we can revive genres by pulling them out their contextual environment and placing them in new contexts. For instance, the Brady Bunch Movie trailer begins with the line “It’s 1995. The world we know has changed. But the Brady’s never will.” This, in fact, was the whole approach of the “postmodern” movement to culture, steering us away from friends and family and the middle-class existence that we grew up with and placing us in a new cult of “believers.”

Rather than looking to beat the dead horse and going back to that dry well one more time, I think it’s time that we acknowledge that our brains are fairly skilled at evaluating relative constructions, but that for some reason we (in America; as Westerners; as human beings) place all our individual value in absolute constructions that we can never have access to. This focus is a major feature of Western civilization. It is also one of the main problems that Derrida has identified in Western civilization.

The terrorists that bombed us on 9/11 were believers in their actual culture, not people who had stepped away into diapers and turbans to make fun of believers from a safe distance. I suggest that in going back to our roots as Westerners—even those roots that go about beating our American culture up and questing for a larger world order that will make everything right—will not be enough if it travels away from the known individual placed in an active culture to a metaphorical and impossible place somewhere else in space (see my essay on My Dinner with Andre), time (the historicist approach to placing cultural works in their time), or (as is more likely) nowhere at all.

Categories: English, Philosophy
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