Art in Wartime

I've seen two performances recently that have not only compounded and focussed my concern and agitation about our, my, complicity in this appalling war which is destroying us all from outside in and inside out-- but have also compelled me to revisit my understanding of the politics of representation and search my commitments and shelves for Lenin on aesthetics and my own ancient Menshevik and Trotskyite tendencies, once passionate then uncertain then ideological then preening; as I have squirmed in my seat and felt shame and pity and outrage and: what now?

Exhibit #1
Today I went to an East Village matinee of Taxi to the Dark Side.

Sparce audience (cold weekday afternoon); yet everyone sat still and silent through the credits, and it wasn't to demonstrate insider cred (I think imdb has historicised that behaviour by now anyway).

We have all seen the photos from Abu Ghraib. We all know that the US is engaged in an unjustifiable overt and covert war that is not only ruining the lives of individual civilians and combatants but also making mincemeat of the values, principles, cultures, civilizations by which we and our allies and enemies live and profess to live our sorry lives.

So a film like this is what, a tighter noose around our necks?

It wants a movement. We want a movement.

Exhibit #2:
Last month, I went to the preview of Betrayed with a conversation after with George Packer and Omer Salih Mahdi. The theatre was full and no one left this time either. By now there have been a lot of reviews. I don't want to rehearse the play or the responses. But Mahdi was there, on the program, with almost no explanation. On stage at the end of the performance, soft voice, soft eyes, soft body-- it emerged that he was a prototype for the characters: interpreter, journalist, friend. Some one in the audience asked if he were concerned that his appearance might jeopardize his own or his family's safety. He answered, gently, that he had already lost his father and so much more, and was left with so little to fear.

When I got home, I googled Mahdi, and discovered just how understated, and indulgent, his response had been.

I enjoyed these performances, because they were well done and the polemic neither dominated the aesthetic nor challenged my own views. Surely this is a contract on which the success of both film and play depend.

Remember the term: 'consciousness raising'? I am sure that just about everyone in the audiences of the two performances I note here would. (Except for a few younger media types and refugees). And I am pretty sure that even before the curtain went up, we had already received enough information to have been aware of malfeasance in our involvement in and conduct of this 'war on terror', and the costs in human terms as well as in terms of the principles and values the US purports to represent.

Which invests us with a greater responsibility, to act on the information, lest we become seduced by the image and complicit in the aestheticization of this horror. I can't believe I'm quoting Adorno, and I'm not such a modernist, but his analysis of the culture industry does bear consideration in this connection:

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not as it is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.... Even when the public does--exceptionally--rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult to keep people in this condition. The rate at which they are reduced to stupidity must not fall behind the rate at which their intelligence is increasing.

So: one step forward, two steps back. On the forward column, I will follow up and also offer a few suggestions:

The List Project

Center for Constitutional Rights

Tear it Down

The other point that concerns me is how the political debate--including obviously the presidential debate-- around the complex issue of our involvement and implication in the international community and Iraq & the middle east in particular is being reduced to the question of whether you're in favor of getting out now or staying in longer. Now that we're in, I think the real issue becomes what are we doing there and how are we doing it; not how many troops we should withdraw on what timetable. That really has to follow from the objectives and performance metrics. But that's a thornier question.

I heard George Packer talk about the essay and play on a New Yorker podcast and he mentioned that Hillary Clinton has been helpful in calling attention to the plight of Iraqi--collaborators (my own use is neutral but the pejorative sense is what endangers them). I was glad to hear this. Personally, I think her record on the war reflects an honest effort to pursue ideological goals (this term, too, I use neutrally, although 'ideology' is popularly used as a synonym for unreasoned prejudice) while resisting the vanity of idealism, or willful ignorance of the practical constraints on her incremental objectives. I think it reflects some honest mistakes, too.

But this is a topic for another occasion.

Expecting the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the public square?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What further laws can the Senators pass?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the principal gate of the city,
on the throne, in state, wearing his crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he engraved
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
superbly carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as usual
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why this sudden unrest and confusion?
(How solemn their faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
Some people arrived from the frontiers,
and they said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

-Cavafy

I have a terrible aversion to works in translation regardless of how masterful they are supposed, as in this case, to be; and would more than welcome commentary on the original.

experience

In the film, anyway (I haven't read the book), the turning point for a paralyzed, locked in Jean-Dominique Bauby was the realization that he had two infinite assets: memory and imagination. Julien Schnabel represents this epiphany and its aftermath with the delicacy of a watercolorist; so different a director than a painter. I have to see Before Night Falls again to see if I feel the same way about his work there.

I have long rejected arguments that treat 'experience' as if it were an epistemological category on the same order as reason.

In the era of identity politics (during which I cut my own teeth) this was a serious problem, at least among my own set. From dispatches I receive periodically from that world, I understand that it is still.

I don't despise experience altogether. I just don't think it carries an argument or sustains inquiry, except for neuroscientists. That is not to say that it is not profound and complex and just as fundamental to human existence as the exercise of reason. Such does Bauby's recognition of imagination and memory as the essential devices of a self, suggest. The nearest evidence for this in my own life is moment of (usually futile, always fleeting) decision to return to my dreams. It may be seconds; rarely, it lasts days. But I can rise to the surface and know I am waking--know, that is, that I am sleeping-- and yet be fully committed to returning to the conversation, or activity, or relationship with which I am engaged below the surface. The experience of my dream life can be as compelling, or as tedious, as anything taking place during waking hours. And no more and no less does it sustain my attention, or lose it. Qualitatively, there is no difference between my waking experience and dreaming experience. That fact has implications for all sorts of things-- reality, desire, struggle, for example. Experience is not a bedrock or foundation for action, but incoherent and creative decisionmaking.

worth

There are two films in the current swell of enthusiasm I wanted to see: There Will Be Blood and Scaphandre et le papillon or Diving Bell & Butterfly.

What with having all the time in the world and all right now, I have achieved this modest ambition.

Can I improve on David Denby's (declined) canonization of TWBB? I do wonder at his disappointment with the final scene, which thrums convincingly in my mind and imagination. It's a scene that reveals and seals the coterminous fate of god and mammon, and satisfies even my own highly calibrated sentiment detector.

I'd heard that Schnabel's film was unexpectedly uplifting. I am relieved to report that it is no such thing. As he is portrayed, Beauby was enough of an ass to persist in this tendency with as little as a blink to convey his arrogance.

Quel cool.

Think of England

Personally I think the metaphor with which she opens her Huffington Post rant is unnecessarily sensationalist (though I'm not above extending it) but I love Barbara Ehrenreich's outrage at the discourse around the hows and whys of stimulating the economy.

"The economic rationale for more a progressive stimulus package, which we hear now several times a day, is that the poor and the freshly unemployed will spend whatever money they get. Give them more money in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits and they'll drop more at the mall. Money, it has been observed, sticks to the rich but just slides off the poor, which makes them the lynchpin of stimulus. After decades of hearing the poor stereotyped as lazy, stupid, addicted, and crime-prone, they have been discovered to have this singular virtue: They are veritable spending machines.

All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being. We've seen the economy grow without wage gains; we've seen productivity grow without wage gains. We've even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life "on the ground," where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they've taken to talking about "the real economy." If there's a "real economy," then what in the hell is "the economy"?

Once it was real-er, this economy that we have. But that was before we got polarized into the rich, the poor, and the sinking middle class. Gross social inequality is what has "de-coupled" growth and productivity from wage gains for the average household. As far as I can tell, "the economy," as opposed to the "real economy," is the realm of investment, and is occupied by people who live on interest and dividends instead of salaries and wages, aka the rich.

So I'm proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are in most in need of help. Yes, when a parent can afford to buy Enfamil, it helps the Enfamil company and no doubt "the economy" too. But let's not throw out the baby with the sensual bubble bath of "stimulus." In any ordinary moral calculus, the baby comes first."