tell me there's a problem that goes something like "poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king, king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything". I
replied, "Darwin!" or "Stalin!"
They still tell me the problem is worse, now that I've screwed myself by
reinforcing my early ideas. Let's go to one of my earliest public ideas.
That is, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" does not have to apply to Man,
simply because we know enough to make our own rules regarding selection and
propagation of both species and the individual.
I'm too tired to cohere, I'll just throw some quotes at y'all, from a paper I
wrote in grad school and very recently edited.
<<
Anyway, Barthes also says: "The reduction of reading to consumption [that
is, as critics, we interpret, fix meaning into work] is obviously responsible
for the 'boredom' that many people feel when confronting the modern
('unreadable') text, or the avant-garde movie or painting: to suffer from
boredom means that one cannot produce the text, play it, open it out, make it
go." (Barthes p.80). What he says is that we are used to having critics
explain Art for us to the extent that we cannot access the Art for ourselves
-- critics chew our food for us [and spit it out, I couldn't resist], so to
speak. Hence, in the Western world, in Art and possibly in other fields of
study [there is no other field of study, I've learned], knowledge takes on a
magical quality -- inaccessible to the common man or more importantly to the
3rd world citizen; and that the production of Art becomes limited to a select
group of artists and critics who interpret its meaning as fixed and who
communicate with each other in mystic mumbo jumbo that only others in their
field can understand. What Barthes says can be likened to the schism of the
Catholic Church -- Martin Luther's 95 theses undermined the priests'
authority placing scripture in the hands of the common man without mediation
or interpretation or doctrinal decrees from the Vatican (though the Catholics
are right to argue that pluralism of interpretation has no business in the
Church of God or in any religion [wow, and I'll add to my own thought that
how you arrive at the monologistic interpretation is important]). Don't
worry, I'm enclosing a copy of Barthes essay "From Work to Text" so you won't
have to take my word for it. Note: this pertains to item B.
>>
You'll have to find a copy of Barthes for yourselves. His estate will be
happy at the sales.
<<
I do not, therefore, want to conform to something whose very foundation has
been (for me) undermined completely. My professors might say (and they have
every right to, according to the rules of Academics) "what you want is of no
consequence -- you must follow the convention or be dismissed, you
impertinent, irreverent, lazy piece of scum". For the most part, I would
have to agree with them. Life isn't a game; well, it is but with serious
consequences. It all boils down to following the rules until one attains a
position wher you get to make the rules and hence are free to do as you
please (Marxists are power brokers. Am I wrong in this?). I think that is
the Marxist strategy. Yet there is this little itsy bitsy squeamish thing in
my mind heart soul that tells me that I can and should do otherwise. You may
call it pride or megalomania or that which is determined (in the Marxist
sense) by my liberal humanist universalist frontiersman macho American
romantic bourgeousie upbringing (oh, I forgot Protestant). John Wayne might
call it gumption. Baldwin or Ellison might refer to rage or frustration.
>>
Pay attention to this next set of statements, please.
<<
It has been an observation of mine that the nature of writers can be thought
of as complaint. People bitch but the best complainers are the ones who
either are the most eloquent [DeWayne Linneman makes me laugh after all these
years] or who have the most to complain about (or both). The ones with the
most extreme neuroses or the biggest egos become writers because they have an
innate ability to make themselves heard. Even imagination implies a level of
escapism which is a form of complaint or commentary about society.
Dissatisfaction leads to complaint which leads to action which leads to
change [no it doesn't, you must obtain efficacy first].
. . .
This is not to say that analytic methodology (be it Formalistic or
Structuralist or Materialist or whatever) should be discarded or discredited
as being too rigid -- the human mind needs solid definitions of ideals or
truths (or a Holy Grail) in order to grasp its existence in the world -- it
needs a language (signs, metaphors) to order and make meaning out of being
(realm of the signified). Only we must allow the subversion of discourse
because it keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously -- keeps the idea
that our language, our system of signs which determines (see Raymond Williams
"Marxism and Literature" for the complex definition of determinism to which I
am referring -- it took him 70 horribly involved and tedious pages to do so
but the approximation ~ setting of limits or very definite assumptions and
conditions upon which we base our actions) our structure of belief and our
actions in accord with our belief, it keeps our mass hallucination [mass
lubrication is a better phrasing], our cultural dream from from taking
precedence over or subsuming the dream of cultures not our own. <snip stupid
question -- Has this been clear?>
>>
You must obtain efficacy before you protest individually, otherwise you will
accomplish little except your own demise. Collective protest is fine, as it
has a democratic principle as its base.
<<
Have I mentioned the writings of Black Americans yet? Oh yeah, Ralph
Ellison, Jones, Baldwin, Walker and the like (see, with rigid laws for
scientific analysis, verbal filters like this aren't necessary -- but this
ain't poetry, see?). Mark Antony's speech in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_
was a lot of filler. He could have just said, "Brutus was wrong to kill
Caesar even though he did it in the interest of the State" but it probably
wouldn't have been the same [and we know what happens to Antony later in
_Antony and Cleopatra_]. What I'd like to comment on has already been
touched upon in an essay by June Jordan, "The Difficult Miracle of Black
Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley":
". . . the difficult miracle of Black Poetry in America is that we have been
rejected and we are frequently dismissed as 'political' or 'topical' or
'sloganeering' and 'crude' and 'insignificant' because, like Phillis
Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa
and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague . . . We
will write . . . of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our
African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white
literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit
English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we 'neither sought nor
knew' [from Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America":
reader's note], as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of
slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the
truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved,
and sheltered, and published, but not otherwise." (Jordan, p. 97).
>>
Once we get there, though, we should be beloved, sheltered and published.
<<
That is, the general complaint that liberal-humanist idealism that strives to
unite all under a humane, civilized and enlightened system is inescapably a
white and a male and upperclass dream has substance and that we must
recognize the danger under the 'niceness' of its universalist assumptions.
>>
Recognize the danger, make it so it is not inescapably tied to one culture,
and then go play in the sandbox, because it is the same idealism that lets us
do so. Am I clear in this? I am one who *has* efficacy, I hope I don't have
to repeat that.
