“The link has always been affected by a symptom ⎯ that of an oscillation or pulse.”
Alain Badiou, Art and Philosophy, “The Handbook of Inaesthetics.”
At the horizon of the International Center of Photography’s 2010 “Perspectives” exhibition we approach works that according to the wall text by curator Brian Wallis “open onto networks of reception and pulsing flows of information.” These words carry a distinctly quantum valence, of a pulsing, imaginary flow of images, that in a infinite multiplicity appear as a wave, resulting in a configuration where five photographers generate a field of consciousness that we might call “visuality(i)” or perhaps dispositif.
In this arrangement photography represents representation against a backdrop of a discipline “in crisis.” It is a crisis that yields variegations of histories, as opposed to History. From another point of view it may be said that the works on display meld languages and bodies, and that these images arrive as half-born specimens from the world of ideas. Within this schema the individual work of art becomes a receptacle for the labor of comparison, sabotaged by the bad faith of opinion and the travesty of effectuality. If we were to oppose this view, we would argue that vision is only an epistemological proposal, subject to a convulsive state of looking, a sustained pulse. Visuality as pulse has a history as an episteme, allowing concepts to traverse the mechanisms of objectivity. Visuality is an ideological apparatus in four parts: Seeing the visible (sight), the opposing impossibility of sightedness (blindness), anxiety over the lack of sight (blindness in sight), and sight as seeing the invisible (sight beyond sight).
We participate in a quartet that as a metaphor we understand as a grotesque spiral, as opposed to an eternally achiral mirror. We cannot straighten this metaphor of seeing since it relies on a crooked perspective in order to exist at all, a metaphor is a mental picture, and as such, presents reality askew. This is the only sure knowledge we may have of the One: It is that truth, the adherence of object and subject, shares the same location as freedom.
This image of the image must not be a communicative transmission in the code of psychoanalysis, but a truth. The present writing is meant as an incursion via the fourth element of the grid, seeing the invisible (sight beyond sight), to apply the vision of a saint, as divine seer, and to tear a cut in the fabric of the real, and see through in the sense of perspectiva to the real Real. This is called extremism, or in another idiom, this is hardcore.
This act of looking is, in a manner of speaking, a choice of weapons, and is as likely to be brought to use as an AK-47, a piece of outsider art, a camera, a dead baby, or a skateboard. If these things seem incongruent, it might only need explication that the idea of racial formation ran alongside with the history of collecting abnormal specimens, and as such, links to a certain discourse regarding superiority. Or we might add how the American cowboy drawn to rapturous life by Matthew Porter mimes elements of Romanticism, which in turn resonate in acts of suburban resistance, or in Maoist insurgence(ii) , or in the subtractive negation of the unviable and soulless fetuses in Lina Herzog’s grim collection. Perhaps all of these things share the aura of lost causes.
The coordinates of Carol Bove’s installation at the direct center of the exhibition space might be a perspective from which to explore how ideology turns on an axis, if provided the freedom to move in relation to a given point, and might help us imagine the gallery turned upside-down, raising the ocean up over the land in a way, tilting the balance to reverse the tide. While this view of the exhibition and how it works is but an outline of an infinite territory of allusions, it may be correct and applicable to the analysis of that structure, and as such, we should ask how do we subject the proposal to the power of truth? By what means can we achieve this outside of the question of visuality?
As a system of ordering objects in the world and placing them under organizational power a perspective is a field wherein objects separate from themselves and are made subject to the Other. In this way, the ordering of things is symbolic(iii), and as such, items in extreme recess are rendered as unseen, and the qualities of visibility are accorded first to the proximal and “at-hand”. This does not mean that any perspective, even the perspective of having no perspective, keeps anything secret, however. Indeed, the blocking of items in space, the occlusion and half-veiling of things, the fading from view of one thing or another, or temporal obscurations, do not make objects themselves cease to exist, but only not to appear. This transitive appearing, within the guidelines of a given vantage, does not limit the potential appearance of the as yet unseen, or exclude a certain “blind sight” or intuition of things beyond the seen or see-able. In fact the perspective of multiple perspectives leads directly to the use of intuition to ascertain any view at all. This means that the nominal condition for seeing within the schemata (cf.) of visuality is the freedom to move from one perspective to the next. Symbolic interchangeability is no less than the view of perspective itself, the perspective of perspective. The stated intention of the ICP show is that the content is not thematic, and where themes establish themselves they do so according to that theme. So, to pass a line of sight, or to refract a viewpoint back onto itself follows the stated intention of having no thematic intention.
In this way we might see the pulsing links between Ed Templeton as skateboarder and as photographer, bent on a rebellion against the laws of physics and the laws of conformity, or connections between mutation and colonialism. The intuitive factor, the means by which one can see using any perspective as opposed to any other, or in a combination, interchangeably, is both a roll of the dice and a skill to see what is written in the stars. According to this intuition, schisms unite as the plenary One, and a chorus sings difference as différance.
The joining of body and language is, again, the fourth part of seeing, and is an idealized singularity that breaks apart as an object comes under view, as though refracted in a kaleidoscope. The resulting disorientation can be unrecognizable but it is the vision of the real. As such, ‘Perspectives’ seeks a consolation between an anti-humanistic historical index and a work of art that maintains sovereignty as subject and object. It is here that the conceptual ground slips away if it can only be in the appearance of seeing that visuality exists at all.
Visuality is not the conduit for seeing, nor the aggregate presence of all perspectives, but is the dialectical potential and the procedure for active viewing, which may also be seen as a resistance to a single given viewpoint. The question is how well does ‘Perspectives’ make sense of colliding views? Does it encourage collisions? And where frisson does occur what happens to the energy created? It can feel like the gallery setting for exhibiting pictures has reached a nadir(iv).
Whatever smashing takes place the chaos produced will serve as no record without some sense of observance, and that observation registers in neither the index, nor the everyday, as long as the contestation of categories is seen as in an anxious flux and in need of regulation. In the same way as in other areas of epistemology, the view one takes determines the outcome of a given observational process. The ontological prerequisite cannot be transferred in these circumstances, except when subject is subject to the truth, and not epistemology. Where ‘Perspectives’ fails, if it does, is where viewing fails, as a blind accumulation of indexical relations, or as an attempt to imprecate viewing itself. Viewing should become subject; a faithful subject should resist, making a convulsion. The intersections and enjambments outside the gallery possess images with the power of the unseen. A gallery image is but a corpuscle that contains resistance to blindness. The monadic air of a photograph displayed in a public space sometimes fails as a display of content, but never fails as an example of being subject to display. Suffusing the subject, building it up or educating it, as a kernel inside another system, is what every photographer does when they take a photograph. It shows how a visual item can succeed in provoking the secret buried in perspective, and can explicate that secret is void.
And another truism follows, that nothing is secret. The zenith of the visual is the evocation of the Other, the throbbing viscera of response for which there is no single origin. It is hardly the fault of the work of art if this is not achieved in a gallery setting, nor the fault of critical practice, nor the fault of the analysis of mass ornament. The responsibility lies in the power that governs the photograph in situ, that is, at the site of the event where the presentation of the image in its traditional orientation of theatrical subject, or acting object, requires an educated reverse, requires a flip of the tables, an overturning, or ideally a disappearing act, so that the psychic order of perspective itself may formally undergo the same process. This is a question of superstructure making a demand on us that we must be ready for, as always.
i. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, On Visuality, The Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 5 no 1 (2006): 53-79.
ii. I am probably wrong to make the attribution to Matthew Porter. In his Paragraphs on the Photographs (After Sol Le Witts’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art), he addresses what I imagine are my paragraphs, and makes clear that viewing is a precondition, and that a zeppelin and a cowboy represent an absurd collision, that is, they are “two things that never met.” I am taking Porter’s attestation with a marked skepticism insofar as it is printed across from a letter written as fiction by Ian Svenonius, entitled Possible Letter From John Wayne to Jane Fonda. In the letter, John Wayne tries to enlist Fonda as an icon to “would-be panthers, the Maoists, the Trotskeyites, the losers, the addicts, the beatniks, the long-hairs and the draft dodgers”. Both texts are printed in the catalog “Matthew Porter: High Lonesome” (M+8: Los Angeles, 2009-10).
iii. See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, Zone Books, 1991) and Keith Moxey, Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History, “New Literary History.Vol. 26, Number 4, (Autumn 1995): 775-786.” The timbre, to use a synaesthetic term, of words like power, symbolic, perspective, concept, visuality, comportment, etc. has the force of what was once called imperative, and was even referred to for a time as “the photographic”. The contestation, as it is called, over such issues is rich soil. For a solution we might begin with Man a Machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, written in 1748. The philosopher George Santayana, according to M. H. Abrams in his classic book The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953), called what was done in the name of the philosophy of art “shear verbiage.” That category recalls philosopher Harry Frankfurt and what he deems bullshit in On Bullshit (Princeton University Press); the bedroll of words and keywords are all boilerplate, what Blake Stimpson fears as “ersatz philosophy.”A concerned reader will benefit from Stimson’s essay A Photograph Is Never Alone from the volume “The Meaning of Photography” ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, Stanley and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2009). Other readers less agonized over the fate of photography, but interested in the regime of objectivity, or what is called “the escape of perspective,” should pour over Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (New York, Zone Books, 1999). Those seeking how ideology interacts with works of art on institutional display will gain greatly from “Public Photographic Spaces” (Barcelona; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008) and “Museums and Memory” ed. Susan Crane (Stanford University Press, 2000). Given these readings the map of any museum becomes consonant with relations worthy of public discussion. It may be argued that the notes for this essay were conceptualized prior to the fact of writing, and that is so, and it is a supernumerary function of that writing that this note is in-itself a discursive machine of seduction and revolution. A point of insertion, and a note within this note, ideally includes everything outside of the text, and reportage of the iterations that this writing underwent. One reader in particular preferred the use of “schema” as opposed to “schemata” and suggested removing “a” from “a perspective is a field wherein objects separate from themselves.” The difference is profound, and was given body in the reader’s question: “I know that you are interested in exploring multiple perspectives (and/or multiple ontologies) but I wonder if you mean “a” here, since you are talking about perspective in the “Renaissance” sense?”
iv. This is not a class or method, nor negation, this is not nothing, and it applies to everything under the sun. She says that I don’t know how her heart feels, and I try to make the argument that I do and I don’t… I have found it educating to read Hong-An Truong’s critical writing; beginning with a review of Dinh Q. Lê at P.P.O.W., see http://idiommag.com/2010/02/dinh-q-le-at-p-p-o-w/. A man on Broadway sings “and one thin dime won’t even shine your shoes…” I help him get his wheelchair across the street. What do you want from me? Blood?
Whether for it, against it or a little bit each way, all the standard positions have been staked out by now on why writer and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s most recent contribution to the ongoing David Foster Wallace publication memorial is, or is not, a welcome development. A book-length transcript of a five-day interview conducted and caught on tape by Lipsky in 1996, on the road with Wallace in the immediate wake of the publication of the writer’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is, first and foremost, a very compelling melange of two things: love letter and cash cow. On which side, you ask, does it come down more firmly? Probably the former. However, the question of whether the truth lies in one aspect of this text more than the other, of whether it is ultimately more sincere than in bad taste, is less interesting than the fact both components exist side by side in the the book together. The very fact that this book manages to so smoothly hold both of these opposites simultaneously within it, to have its cake and eat it too, thus not only involves David Wallace as subject matter but raises compositional questions of a deeply Wallacian nature.
In assessing the book’s value, reviewers have clucked their tongues and clapped their hands. Although there have been rumbles from most about the David Foster Wallace guru industry – best typified by the online circulation and subsequent gift book publication of a commencement speech he made to the students of Kenyon College in 2005 – the readers of Lipsky’s transcript, if a little leery about the whole ‘concept’, have, on balance, commented applaudingly on the execution of the thing: in particular, the true-to-life picture this unedited bumper interview ostensibly offers us of David Wallace at the height of his powers and career. Looking to retrieve from the subsequent suicide the living writer, the book has been commended for its revelation not of a dead man walking or of an infinitely gentle and intelligent genius but of a real, troubled, contradictory and very candidly confused man. Reproduced almost unexpurgated – which is to say, inclusive of peripheral trivia that accompanies Lipsky and Wallace as they travel, replete with stage directional stabs at mise-en-scène and dotted with observational notations from Lipsky of varying interest, which keep us loosely up to date on actions and surroundings as well as Lipsky’s pop-psychologizing evaluations of Wallace himself – the book gives us not just the best of the massive mind but also attaches a specific, touching profile to it: a tobacco-chewing, sexually frustrated, agonizingly involuted, strategic people-pleaser, a man who combines dizzyingly excellent discernment with the massively uncool faux pas of having a huge jones for the song stylings of Alanis Morrisette. So it is, we’re invited, apparently, to learn to love David Wallace, literary luminary, in all his living human frailty
And yet for all the corrective ‘depth’ the book seemingly offers just by being what it is, a transcript – whether it ostensibly reinvents a memory of Wallace as a valid, living person undetermined by his death (“That’s the other thing this book would like to be,” Lipsky writes, “a record of what David was like, when he was thirty-four and all his cards had turned over good, every one of his ships had sailed back into harbor””[xxiv]) or whether it outwardly works to recognize Wallace as something other than an impeccable genius, a boundlessly towering brilliance, and supplies instead, as Tye Pemberton has argued in a recent review, a portrait of “a young, expansive mind at work that was, at times, small and even a little creepy in ways that we could all recognize if we would only admit our own, similar failings, if we would only allow our geniuses the inconsistencies of being that we suffer every day” – whichever way one looks at it, what struck me overwhelmingly as I finished reading the 300 page interview was that this book was itself an almost textbook example of what Wallace means when he talks about “an entertainment”. For Wallace, an entertainment is not anything nearly as simple as a product of the culture industry, a vacuous aesthetic fetish that can be blithely counterpoised to the struggling glory and authentic universality of true art. It is nothing we can so simplistically condescend to, or disregard. Rather, an entertainment is a cultural item which – not in spite of but through content within it that is actually emotionally revelatory and even possibly of profound interest – is free to act entirely in accordance with its financial logic. Far from the absence of artistry, the presence of a very real profundity places a certain sentimental and cynical limitation upon our ability to discern manipulation in entertainment, to be seduced not only into satisfaction but into ‘doing the work’ (as Wallace was fond of phrasing it) that would allow us to reject not only that which appalls us but, more crucially, that which inspires or pleases us.
Discussing with Lipsky his intentions and hopes for Infinite Jest, Wallace explains at one point in the interview that his novel is meant to be an entertainment that fails to achieve integration as an entertainment, that uses the logic of entertainment to short-circuit its ends. In his words:
“the idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads to, I think, is the movie Infinite Jest. I mean, that’s the star it’s steering by. Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining – and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.” (79)
Wallace’s notion of an entertainment that works could stand as a critical review in itself of Lipsky’s ‘infinite transcript’. It’s not that Lipsky’s book is a bad book. Or even that it is in bad taste exactly. What’s troubling about it is that it’s an entertainment designed to pull off a certain trick – and which does pull it off, with sinister effectiveness. To begin with, take the fact that the book is almost literally hate-proof. It’s too valuable, for one thing. The look into Wallace it offers is indisputably a precious opportunity for those who have read and followed and admired his massive skill and achievements. It’s particularly intriguing also because it does not simply restate his ethos but places that ethos in a particularly personal atmosphere, an ambience of the author in the lull and whirl of his private and writerly life. Furthermore, the interview clearly archives certain significant ruminations, reflections and searching moments which would have been otherwise unavailable to us, a thing we find we can only be thankful for. Finally, as many reviewers have already noted, the conversation between Lipsky and Wallace is not exactly boring; a not unpoignant rhythm develops as the two beat backward and forward over the relationship between success, enjoyment and ingratiation.
Granting all this, however, it is precisely the superlative citability of the text (coupled with the somewhat tedious non-citability of the text at other points, as though its ‘unedited’ nature were a sort of insurance cover of authenticity for what would otherwise be its too obviously self-interested salability) as well as its pretensions to cosiness with Wallace a mere five days does not bare out that should give us pause. For while we need not doubt that this book is a well-meaning product of a true admirer’s sincere desire to share with the world all the amazement and complication of his lucky encounter with one of the titans of English language fiction of the last thirty years, such a sincere desire (and its entertaining outcome) is absolutely compatible and entirely accordant with a calculating agenda to advertise certain things. The book becomes a billboard, that is, not so much of Lipsky the writer or even of Wallace as a tragic, worthy brand (though of these things too), but moreover, and most importantly, of certain ‘challenging’ notions about art and acculturation which only end up working as a reaffirmation of (and provide press for) the very ‘cultural conversation’ with which Wallace’s own artistic ‘piety’ (his word) was so deeply at odds.
One of Wallace’s recurring – and most astute – motifs in the interview with Lipsky is his appreciation that our system of cultural exchange is not simply designed to generate banality (a now familiar, somewhat stuck-up and, of course, totally ineffective objection to contemporary product circulation) but, rather, that our culture is drained to sickness and exhaustion by its own addictive need to incessantly extract value from enjoyment, to have it and triangulate it and communicate it. Thus, as he says in his own way, “It’s never as stark as pointless or not pointless. It’s, you know, what’s interesting, what’s advanced, what’s next? It’s gotta be – right? Not what’s true, but what’s fresh and novel and whatever. It’s very difficult to get out of that.” (232) To Wallace, not just the culture industry but the cultural conversational industry turns the struggle to parse personal and social meaning of the bombardment of cultural material into what Jodi Dean has called ‘communicative capitalism’, the reduction of transformative political, artistic, intellectual and affective energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings, “the materialization of ideals and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism”. In the deep freeze of the neoliberal years, long before the exacerbation of the logic had reached the point in which it could be granted a discrete theoretical name at all, Wallace perceived the strange tie between the abundant materialization of cultural ideas and the fundamental poverty of the public communication in which they aired and changed nothing. Indeed, this is precisely why he is so keen to emphasize to Lipsky that the effort to create a meaningful art is not a fight against vacuity, as such, but, on the contrary, a battle against sapience, against the capacity of cultural objects that are fundamentally delimiting, infantilizing and exhausting to possess within them that mix of acumen and erudition and fatuity we call ‘interesting’, to thrill and soothe us with very real intellectual depths, depths in which one could spend infinity grooving. As he remarks,
“These really – the really commercial, really reductive shows that we so love to sneer at. Are also tremendously compelling. Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what’s coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything’s going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won’t in any way challenge you. It’s like being wrapped in a chamois blanket and nestled against a big, generous tit, you know? And that, OK, artwise maybe not the greatest art. But the function it provides is deep in a certain way.
That all this stuff is deadly serious and really deep all the time. I mean, it doesn’t mean that you should go around being some kind of scholar of pop culture and dismantling all the stuff. But that it’s – that we find, that art finds a way to take care of you, and take part. Kind of despite itself.” (199)
Here, as in Infinite Jest, what captures Wallace’s attention is not the absence of any aesthetic integrity or intelligence in cultural entertainment – that which would enable us to objectively identity it as trash – but rather the way in which it assimilates epiphany into itself in such a way that it is both truly deep and truly non-threatening through its structural passivization of persons. But what’s most important in this is not just the profundity but the sneering at entertainments that seem lame and how we love it. It is exactly the ability of these objects not only to enamor with their depths but also to satisfy superiority through their permission of a certain status quo cynicism that is also their great comfort, their generous tit. For Wallace, the knowingness cultural junk allows, whether in appreciation of its glimmers of greatness or excoriation of its general shittiness, is exactly what defines the actual blurring of the line between serious art and the cultural items of everyday life: this rise not of junk culture exactly, or of a culture industry, but of an entertainment industry that fuses together discernment and blindness, deepness and deprivation. And from this, Wallace insists, there arises a fundamental critical crisis for people in formulating discriminating judgments on what counts in the culture at large, as the culture easily enlists art to take care of you ‘despite itself’. So it is, then, that if Lipsky and Wallace talk approvingly in the interview of honest moments in otherwise dishonest cultural phenomena, what becomes clear from a comprehensive view of the conversation is that, for Wallace, the interest in such moments lies not so much in their self-sufficiency as artistic glimmers but in the challenge they present to the artist, the cry of an inner genius in the culture which is collaboratively indentured to circuits of capital and yet, in spite of itself, begs to be liberated. Far from a rarity, artistry abounds in our culture but in parsed doses. It sort of nourishes even as it extracts, like a depressed wage system of joy: a quotient of real, deep pleasure doled out for a far larger expenditure and effort of consumption. The problem is then that we are inundated not with extraneous information per se but a sort of inevitability within that of redeeming art, an inevitability that immunizes the system against its own overload and allows it to extend the frontiers of its essential need to extract value from culture and promulgates the denial of pleasure which is crucial to that process. And beyond that, we are encouraged to convert our immiseration by this system of glutted scarcity into productions of knowingness, of communication and transmission, which may then also be vacuumed of value.
It is in this context that one can only begin to appreciate the sources of Wallace’s deeply troubled attitude toward success, integrity and the intellect. In a recent review of Lipsky’s book, Salon’s Laura Miller takes the recent effulgence of Wallace-related paraphernalia to task (even as she goes on to confer her essential approval on Lipsky’s book itself, thus, in classic Miller-style, making sure not to throw the bathwater out with the baby). As she writes, “Wallace’s death was tragic, but the actual tragedy has been further wrapped in a mantle of hysterical pop tragedy, that process by which virtually any self-destroying celebrity is transubstantiated into the avatar of each fan’s personal misery.” All this is very well and good but, all the same, such moralizing postures about the fan are not the critical outside to such ‘hysterical pop tragedy’. They are, rather, the ideological alibi of knowingness that keeps the whole torrid pop show going. In other words, it is this method of a ‘disinterested’ mode of critical approval for books like Although, Of Course that creates the very exploitation it castigates: or, to put it another way, the commentaries that exempt themselves from involvement by directing our evaluations to their deeper core are not against the cultural defanging of David Wallace (especially in the wake of his sad and difficult death) but are at the very essence of it. Surely this is why – despite Lipsky’s attempts to channel a Monte Hellman Two Lane Blacktop vibe in his introduction as a means to frame the book – the conversation, if we’re honest, mostly comes off tonally as a sort of hip, sanctionable version of Tuesdays with Morrie. And surely this is also why Lipsky heightens his irritating persona in the book, allows us to see him play the sap deliberately. While Lipsky’s painfully superficial greenness (best evidenced in his pestering, recursive questions about how good it must feel to be famous) is evidently a real part of the exchange as it took place, there seems no doubt that Lipsky’s “wised-up, padded-shoulder” attitude (as he dubs it) is left ‘uncut’ (or, in actual fact, is invisibly finessed: cuts to Lipsky’s part of dialogue abound) precisely so as to confer on Wallace the refined sense of an elder, a gnostic centre that incites the very ‘wise man’ quality he so desperately wishes to escape and that reviews like Miller attack as self-involved sentimentalism. As such, instead of an author whose work attacks the continuum of communicative capital, we’re given a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi of the waking mind, inflicted with a myriad of tragic human foibles, to boot. It is just this which makes Lipsky’s transcript not the raw ore of Wallace but mystification of him at its most exquisite.
On this point, we might also note the way that recognition of Wallace’s genius is used not to praise him exactly but praise him through the validation of the pathological anxieties that genius had about itself. To explain more clearly, what emerges in the Lipsky interview is not merely the sense that Wallace possesses an atypical mind, worthy of praise for its errant nature, for its restive recalcitrance to the circuits of acculturation, but that he becomes a genius only insofar as he thinks the way we all do, just better. This idea of the slightly gifted average joe is, of course, an attitude that Wallace actively encourages himself, in his earnest wish not to hold himself categorically above the heads of the people around him, as a different breed of being, well aware as he is that he is placed in the same communicative conditions as they, and all too conscious of the fact that intelligence – far from an owed, insured property – becomes stupidity at the moment it mistakes the capacity to have cogent insights for an infinite entitlement to declamate, when it ceases, that is, to pay deep mind to the intelligence of others. But if there is nothing pathological about this, Wallace also stretches his self-effacement further, into a desperate desire to eradicate all consciousness of his own intelligence, and it is this act of erasure, oddly, that earns his genius such approval. Take, for instance, Laura Miller’s oft-quoted description of Wallace as possessing “the careful modesty of a recovering smart aleck”. Is not the system of values implied in such back-handed approbation precisely what Wallace found himself struck dumb before, like a deer in the headlights? Where is the critical effort to undo this tangle, to separate Wallace’s recognized genius from our antipathies toward intellect in ways Wallace himself, out of confusion, modesty and sheer finitude, could not do? In the interview, Wallace tells Lipsky that the parts of him that used to think he was smarter or different “almost made me die” (216). It would stand to reason, then, that to critically praise Wallace’s intelligence, against the pathology that plagued it, would be to speak of its absolute inassimilable quality, not as an indication of its superiority, but as a sign of its fundamental waywardness and to meet its intrepidity at refusing to consider itself better than everyone else with the critical courage to acknowledge that it was much more than a heightened version of the natural genius of everyone else.
The fact is that a certain moral antipathy is directed at anyone in this culture smart enough to want to be smarter before they speak, even when they decide they must speak anyway. It’s no surprise, accordingly, that artistic experimentalists and theoretical and philosophical humanities academics are recurrently charged with elitism, inaccessibility and obscurity by the gatekeepers of the cultural conversation, for any intellectuality that prizes precision over access, that prolongs the realisation of itself, that sits at odds with communicative capital – which fails, in short, to fall in formation with the professionalization of intellect for the widest possible market – is considered ipso facto ‘undemocratic’ – which is another way of saying, ‘unmarketable’. The brittle mediocrity of the skill set of our commentariat culture is deeply dependent on a certain anti-intellectualism so as to sustain its own inflated sense that its cultural work is the best on offer, to assure itself that what it does has a mission past its own abstraction of issues on behalf of communicative capital. And so it is that David Wallace (who was himself seduced by this demand that one needed always to speak to the public, that any intellectual withdrawal from the widest production was inherently elitist) can only be lauded from within the cultural conversation for his relatability to that conversation, not its critical aversion to its terms. As Lipsky writes in his introduction to the interview, what thrilled him (and New York lit culture generally) about Wallace, at the time that his reputation began to catch fire, was not the freshness of his insights per se but, rather, that “he’d done a thing that was casual and gigantic; he’d captured everybody’s brain voice” (xxviii). It is this, more than anything else, that is the most tragic and unsettling part of Although, Of Course: watching the man struggling to fight down the fact that society punishes a mind that manifests itself too much, even when it is mindful, even when it works tirelessly to achieve an understanding of the complexities of the most disparate lives, things and subjectivities; his confused misunderstanding that too much intellectuality must mean becoming ‘out of touch’, especially if that intellectuality should involve acknowledging itself in any way as feeling okay with being at odds with this culture’s atavistic anti-theoretical drive, if it should embrace an understanding that such an acceptance of being at odds with the cultural conversation does not entail, thereby, an arrogance that automatically puts one above the public one writes for, but, on the contrary, more commonly insists on one becoming radically in touch with the reality of the public’s management, a reality that the public too, in its everyday life, perceives and gleans and struggles against, precisely because it, too, is not dumb.
An intellectual is a person who speaks from a position of theory, not out of love of the authority of the intellect but precisely because abstraction is the most concrete form of thought. The ‘cultural conversation’ – that which appears as concrete thought, grounded and down to earth – is entirely abstracted from the matters it turns into ‘issues’. It predicates the validity of positions by their cleverness (not their acuity) and sorts them by the mark of their professional success. It is this realization – the ‘elitist’ academic notion that the conversation is itself an elitist mechanism, regimented in its duty to raise up culture up (and thus hold culture down) to a certain level of (real but inadequate) middling competency – that commentarial culture detests, the understanding that it can only think through the coercive regime of ‘free’ opinion, that it thrives on the production of mediocre interventions that turn the productive mill of recursive – though certainly entertaining – reductivity. Toward the end of the five day interview, Lipsky puts the case to Wallace that his modesty is mostly a social strategy, a kind of act in which, while he does feel smarter than other people, he holds back his hits as though he’s playing in the kid’s softball game. Understandably distressed by this flatly crass provocation, Wallace eventually responds to Lipsky’s suspicion by saying, with beautiful accuracy: “…I mean I can talk intelligently with you and stuff. But I can’t quite keep up with you.” When the question of being intelligent is collapsed into a game of how adaptive and resistive you can be simultaneously, there is no way to keep up; the very playing field is rigged. In his effort to ally extraordinary insight with intellectual egalitarianism, Wallace often became fearful of conceit and forgot that conceit, while the enemy of any broad thinker looking to connect, is actually often also a weapon used against you, a device in the arsenal deployed against emancipatory thinking, an accusation which is an ideological component of the enforced logic of cultural passivity Wallace struggled to negate. Another sad thing we can see proven absolutely in Although Of Course is that Wallace was not always privy to the answers, as he constantly and sincerely said. But that’s the thing: it is hellaciously difficult to keep track of the perimeters of a prison when imprisonment is enforced in the very form of an open conversation devoted to the dimensions and density of the bars.
If I have been fairly unkind to Lipsky in this review, it is not because I doubt the goodness of his intentions in giving us this extended glimpse of Wallace. Rather, the question is why this book needed to be a book at all: why must it exist like this? Why, that is, did it have to be packaged and sold in such a way where it could only become the very kind of cultural object Wallace found so antagonizing and distressing? The larger point here is not so much about a fidelity to Wallace’s memory as to whether his self-appointed cultural flamekeepers have even really understood the true radicality of what it was he was so diligently trying to do. Although, Of Course is an undeniably important document and I am glad I have been able to read it. But it could easily have been disseminated in an entirely different and non-commercial way – posted online, for instance, for free, in transcript form, with the original voice recordings included, at a website devoted to it, as an unceremonious phenomenon. As it exists, it is not merely an intimate document on Wallace but is an advertisement for the cultural conversation’s tiresome appreciation of its own capacity to appreciate the man’s challenge to it, to spin his critical persona into another evocative, questioning, denuded entertainment for all. Perhaps this is pious but, as Wallace argued, perhaps we need more piety in a culture given to baroque and infinitely convincing justifications for essentially self-interested, artfully sentimental, exploitatively self-reflexive, expropriational actions. The failure of this book-length interview to provide a memorial that is not an entertainment is an additional aura of loss and loneliness around the Wallace we read and, even unedited, are not permitted to know.
