Peli Grietzer · 2014 My Wife Was Very Beautiful in the Film Days of Heaven, You Throve Under the Direction of Terrence Malick
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Peli Grietzer · 2014 My wife was very beautiful in the film Days of Heaven, you throve under the direction of Terrence Malick —Cecilia Corrigan 2 screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine. I said to Mabel, I said, ‘ wanted to write a romantic poem in the Schlegel sense of romantic poetry, so a novel in the Bakhtin sense of a novel, and it does that for me! &nd I like the idea of purely mechanical seams cause I think trying to make the facilitating part of artworks smooth or interesting or pleasant ruins art. And I wanted to do something with the papers I wrote in the first few years of grad' school, that were playful and weird and not part of a larger intellectual pro(ect and I wrote because I liked the way they ‘looked) as part of my life at the time. So I)m happy with it, especailly now that I figured out the epirgraph. Oh, and I like that blogs are the one thing that we read backwards, and I think for things that don)t involve complicated sptial action seeing things unfold backwards is a lot more instructive and suspenseful than seeing them unfold forward, and makes for a better form of narrative thinking, for the standard Kierkegaard reason. And the few reverse chronological things that people made are about relationships, which is one big story running through the text, but this is framed as a bildungsroman and I think that a reverse chronological bildungsroman is cool. Also I like the idea of a biography that includes only the super-intentional, and my blog includes only 3 things that I thought were my perfected self for at least a month after writing them (otherwise I)d delete., and it)s kind of cool that the first thing I said on my blog the week I moved to the states was " want to be only the best of me all the time!) Also I like the idea of framing these five years as my negotiation with America, which they are though I never think about it. And ‘ said to Mabel, I said) is this $impsons line that was a slight meme online back in 2005 and is rumored to be from Gatsby and rumored to be from 3odehouse and is from neither so I love that it)s this ghostly stand'in for the depiction of casual speech in literary fiction/an internet hallucination of a hilobrow cartoon)s memory of the literary representation of casual speech. And I like the Thomas Bernhard endless'monologue style of novel and wanted to do something like that. And I figured, the actual contents are really strong so people who haven)t followed my writing in the last five years might find it compelling even if they)re not the post-langpo4post-conceptual crowed who could get any of the above from the act of cut-and' pasting a blog and adding ‘ said,) though I mean the people who can get any of the above from that are also people who don)t care about the above because it)s sorta literary fiction patter, way more a response to Elif)s dissertation and to ‘5e Possessed) than to avant- garde poetics, not because I want to but because I was thinking about Trisha)s post-conceptual narcissism and trying to think about my life'in-text-generation, my ideas and jokes and notes and comments that I)m so invested in, along some aesthetic category and it turned out to me that my mode of production in saying things is so novelistic, that when I make a joke the asymptote is it integrating into a novelistic continuum4tension with the rest of the things in the world, so I)m stuck with the tradition of the novel as the category for thinking about myself. And I like how there are papers in there that wish were shorter cause they ruin the book for me by being too long but make it unreadable as a novel even though the novel was 4 supposed to be this form that can take anything into itself, so it)s not a novel but the fantasy of a novel, the idea that the novel is supposed to be able to take in materials that are too affectively weak for a certain kind of poetry and too affectively strong for a different kind of poetry!) &nd I said, I said, ‘at least the N+1 piece on the cultural politics of drinking cider instead of beer hasn)t come out yet so happiness is still possible!) And I said, I said, ‘irony represents the real relationship of individuals to their imaginary conditions of existence!) And I said, I said, ‘is there a name for the kind of cold' on-hot aesthetic that)s the one in lots of artscene synthpop and performance and also like Spring Breakers and some tumblr and <ana Del Ray> Like a super tactile sensuality left in the free?er to ice' over thing> Like booty'melancholia or something>) And I said to Mabel, I said, ‘ used to know a person who was so upset that people who put a lot of time into learning things get to be considered more scholarly than her and I thought it)s an insane thing to even feel but )m kind of upset that people who are all'in artscene synthpop experimental film noise whatever people get to be considered more artscene synthpop experimental film noise whatever than me!) And said, I said, ‘like Ngai also wrote an essay that takes Schlegel as the framework for conceptual and post-conceptual aesthetics. (Mine isn)t as good!. I think beginning with Ngai)s incomplete take on $chlegel)s concept of ‘the interesting) and its relation to his later endorsement of romantic poetry is a good way to see how Ngai)s painfully good paper gives an incomplete picture of the relationship of conceptual art/literature to ‘the interesting) as an affect, to "interesting) as a term of aesthetic evaluation, and to the artistic practice of the ‘merely interesting) as a specific subgenre of conceptualism! Ngai takes Schlegel to be the first advocate of a type of art that is cool (emotionally and ideologically unattached., low' 5 affect, and particular (as opposed to concerned with the absolute or universal or infinite or total. – an art which Schlegel first judges negatively as ‘merely interesting) and later comes to endorse, thereby presumably endorsing the ‘merely interesting) as an aesthetic goal. $chlegel)s initial aesthetic judgement of what he calls the art of the interesting is indeed exactly what Ngai calls a judgement of interestingness, but it is not a judgement about art that)s cool, low' affect, and particular, and Schlegel)s reevaluation of (a part of. what he called the art of the interesting is neither a judgement about art that)s cool, low'affect, and particular nor a judgement of interestingness. Both these issues stem from the fact that while Ngai)s analysis of interestingnes as a cool, low'affect, particularist experience is maddeningly spot-on, and her view that the judgement of the interesting is expressive4assertive of this affect is surely right, there exists only a loose relationship between the first-order affective content of an aesthetic experience and the n-th order affective content which its aesthetic judgement typically expresses. The first issue illustrates this simply, by reminding us that the aesthetic (udgement of the interesting (and the aesthetic judgement of the "merely interesting). can be applied to works whose first-order affect is e.g. to be thrilling or hilarious or agonizing. The second issue has to do with the special role that irony plays in the dynamic of affect and meta'affect, since it is exactly irony -– often casually mentioned in Ngai)s discussion of both Schlegel and conceptual art but without much fanfare or a distinct role -– that transforms that second'order affect of interestingness that Schlegel gets from modern poetry into a third'order affect of ‘the romantic.) My contention is that irony, in a specifically Schlegelian sense, also crucially transforms the affect of interestingness in the kind of art that Ngai nicknames ‘merely interesting conceptual art) (a reference both to its indictment by Aried as ‘merely interesting) and to Judd)s claim that a work needs only to be interesting., and that in fact the aesthetic experience of 6 interest that Fried condemns as artistically valueless even when (ustified is not identical to the aesthetic experience of interest Judd advocates. The experience that Judd advocates is closer to an experience of the romantic in Schlegel)s sense than to Ngai)s affect of interestingness, and has to do with the experience of interest transformed by romantic irony to an experience of (something like. an art-historical totality. (=eally this is almost explicit in manifestos like Sol Lewitt)s paragraphs on conceptual art, but more on this later!. The art that Schlegel judges as merely interesting is hot -emotionally or ideologically invested, expressing a ‘one sided), particular and subjective passion), high'affect, and particular. Its highest manifestation, philosophical tragedy, is (per Schlegel. hot, high'affect, and universal in ambition but falling short of universality because of its ‘hotness): in the philosophical tragedy the subject matter is universal in scope, but the boundedness of the insight to a particular point of view due to its hotness means it isn)t truly universal. ($chlegel even admits in his discussion of $hakespeare that hotness and particularity may ultimately be one and the same!.