Immediacy

Daniel Green is disquieted by the comments on various blogs which seem to dismiss the importance of blogging about books in the wake of Bush’s victory. Isn’t the status of reading the question you face as soon as you set aside time to read? Time says: couldn’t you do something better with me? Progress says: isn’t it more important to keep up with current affairs, or with developments in science and technology?

The old humanist insists that literature is spiritually uplifting and morally improving. The cultural critic asks: But is it really a question of putting culture together again? Or was the unity of culture, that pantheon of books and works, already a lie? The critic says calmy, dispassionately:  reading is a cultural practice like any other; through reading you amass a cultural capital, you profit from your fine education; you can show off.

Come now, I reply, the books I like never had any place in culture; they were base, disgraceful, their authors untrustworthy or wierd. The cultural critic turns to me and says: you like obscure works – but why is this surprising? True, you like narratives where characters seem to evaporate, in which nothing happens, in which events cannot come to completion. Nothing entertaining happens; nothing suspenseful. And there is nothing useful, either; nothing of relevance to understanding the world. But wasn’t this, the critic continues, since Kant, always the sign of art, of high art as it belonged to what is called high culture? Isn’t this the defining feature of what is no more than a marker of cultural capital?

I sigh and remember what Josipovici said in a recent interview:

As Bacon said, what he felt when reading Eliot was the immediacy of the poetry and he wanted in his paintings to get some of that immediacy, to break down the polite distance between canvas and viewer. I want to do the same in my work, to break down the polite intimacy that is the norm in fiction of a story being told to you, of a storyteller who knows the outcome telling the reader who doesn’t know, the reader following respectfully behind[….] Of course one can’t get that immediacy simply by using raw language, for raw language is still language, one has to come to it by indirection, seduce the reader into going along one track and then suddenly surprise him or her. And that surprise is the goal of the story or novel. 

The appeal to immediacy is not a call to the development of new fangled artistic techniques so much as to the newness inherent in a particular style, in the singular timbre of this voice or that, in the heaviness of a word or the sonorousness of a sentence. I would like to say that to read literature is not simply to imbibe improving values as the cultural conservative would have it; but nor, too, is it merely to confirm the superiority of one’s taste. What matters is shock or rawness; what matters is the materiality of the artwork, its darkness, its obscurity.

‘Culture has collapsed’, say conservatives of the left and right. But it is the idea of culture that has collapsed and this is our opportunity. An immense field has opened: that rich domain of works supposedly too ‘low’ for critical attention. Claw them back, these works and remember too those charred books which were always marginalised: Bataille’s Inner Experience, Klosswski’s The Bath of Diana, Duras’s India Song. Claw them back and attend to the transformation of the media as it opens itself to those who call themselves artists and many who do not. Let reading join that unnamed practice of attending to affects, to the great stirring of the world. Rebuild aesthetics as the science of this whirl of affects, always surprising, always raw.

I hear the great lament about the death of culture from those around me. But I know that Bataille has more in common with A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology than with Beryl Bainbridge …