Body Heat and the uses of nostalgia

Let's stick with Jameson a while (see Part 1 if this doesn't make sense to you). He singles out Body Heat for discussion in his essay because it is a nostalgic film. That's important because, as he correctly notes, it isn't self-evidently a nostalgic film. On the surface it looked like anything but when it came out (it is now necessarily nostalgic because it is an old film).

Here is a nostalgic memory of my own. They used to sell a lighter that looked like a revolver. You'd pull the trigger and a flame would ignite at the tip of the barrel. It looked like a gun but it was something else. Jameson's point is that a lot of movies produced in the 1970s were nostalgic even though they look like they are something else.

All by itself, that's a good point but not a terribly original one; lots of people made it at the time. Nor do I think it is terribly difficult to see; as proof, I offer the fact that I saw it and discussed it in previous posts on Body Heat. What makes Jameson interesting is that he claims that the nostalgia is a form of pastiche and that this resorting to pastiche says something about the era that produced such films.

... in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in an imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. (p 18)

And you can see how this will tie to Jameson's Marxism. This sort of argument suggests that the ideology of what Jameson sincerely hopes is "late capitalism" is no longer up to justifying the existence of consumer society.

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though we were unable unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (p 20)

The key phrase here is, "as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience". If that is true—which is to say, that we have ended up in nostalgia not willfully but because of failure to be able to do anything else—then this is indeed and indictment of our culture.

One powerful hint that this might not be the case is Jameson's hesitancy in making the point. He has so hedged his argument so with the use of various conditional claims that it is easy to suspect that he doesn't believe what he is saying. Let's analyze that argument a little. The key point here, it seems to me, is that this nostalgia is just a delusion; that the sort of take it offers on the past has no rational use. If we can demonstrate that there is a willful rational activity in this sort of nostalgia, we will have an answer to his argument.

First a caveat: we cannot destroy Jameson's position. If a century of economic, cultural and political failure, to say nothing of the greatest mass murder in history, are not enough to make Jameson and others see the futility of Marxism and related types of command and control politics, nothing we can say will. The most we can hope to do is to show that there is a way to read a film like Body Heat as a achieving a meaningful "aesthetic representation of our own current experience".

Next a reminder: Jameson is not making a new point for a Marxist. If anything, his argument is a cliché of Marxist thought that can be traced back to Marx himself:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

We might say that Marxism begot modernism. What I mean by that is that modernism tries to deal with the past in an objective way just as Marx did. (This is another essay for another time, but I would argue that what Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner and modernism have in part is that they are all attempts to reform and restate the Enlightenment project in an efforts to revive it.)

Historians sometimes make a distinction between history, which can be documented, and "the past", which can only be told, that can help us here. For example, in late antiquity we find tribes in the Balkans who claim to be descended from a mighty warrior who came south from what is today Sweden. Now there is some truth embedded here and there in this sort of story. The people of the north were mighty warriors who were feared and respected by those on the European mainland. It is even possible that some might warriors did come south and establish communities. It is even possible, although extremely unlikely, that a tribal group we find moving into the Roman empire from the Balkans in the late fifth century actually is descended from a community founded by a mighty northern warrior. But, and this is the important thing, even if this extremely improbable thing were true, there is absolutely no way of tracing it in history.

In any case, it wasn't true. The story of being descended from a mighty northern warrior was a story whose value was in the telling. The telling of stories like this allowed these people to bond as a people (a process historians call ethnogenesis) and the measure of the its worth for the people who used this story was not its historical accuracy but its effectiveness; if the story inspires people to bond together and to work effectively as a people, then it is a good story, a good use of the past.

Modernists rejected the possibility that the past could have any use independent of what could be done with it objectively. Think of how James Joyce, in moving through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rejects all the mythologies of Ireland. After doing this, he returns in Ulysses with a mythology from Ancient Greece that is picked and applied in a way that is artificial. Joyce doesn't expect that you will see Leopold Bloom as Ulysses. Quite the contrary, he expects you to be jarred by the contrast and so see how little Bloom has in common with a Greek hero. He is using the mythology in an objective way; it is only because you can see it from the outside that it is of any use.

We might imagine another version of the story where a cousin named David Bloom reads Homer and chooses to embrace the manly ideal in Homer and try to become like Ulysses. A modernist would only tell that story to demonstrate how pathetically the old cuckold would fail. His purpose would be to be objective, that is outside the myth; for the modernist, the person who tries to internalize the values of the old story can only be deluded. At the very most, the modernist might admit that these stories tell us something about human psychology because they exist as archetypes in our subconscious.

What the modernist cannot admit is that these stories might serve valuable moral ends. That they can inspire and guide us to be better men. And that, I will argue next week, is exactly what the story of Body Heat proposes to do.

The Latin Mass: What is modern?

I had a pleasant tea with Eliot Girl last week. Part of the discussion revolved around modernism. It really did revolve around; despite our best efforts we never got near to anything that might be called the heart of the matter, or, to be modern about it, we never got anywhere near the still point of the turning modern world.

That isn't surprising. I've watched all sorts of people, including hundreds of academics, try to define "modern" and "modernism" over the last thirty-five years of my life and I can't think of a single one of these definitions that didn't end up feeling random. The problem is not figuring out where to go but rather where to start. You need a fact or, more likely, a solid set of facts to build your definition of modernism on. This for the simple reason that you have to be able to describe what the world was in order to say that the world has changed or must change (and modernists never seemed able to make up their minds about which of those two options would be the launching pad for their revolution). And that is just as true for the person coming along today with the goal of explaining "what modernism was" as it was for the young rebels in the early twentieth century who were trying to say "what modernism is".

There are two huge obstacles in the way. The first is that it has gotten much harder to simply lie about the past. That was what the Enlightenment figures did. They made up a straw man of a past and beat it up but good. Every movement that has sought a deliberate break with the past since then, including modernism, has attempted to do likewise. But the trick is far harder to pull off now; there are just too many people with access to media who know you are lying and will call you on it. Galileo was not a hapless victim of superstitious clerics who refused to look into his telescope, there never was a Copernican revolution, the Victorians did not cover the legs of their furniture nor were they particularly prudish about sex. Most importantly of all: there never was a period in history (ever!) when everyone shared a common and comforting understanding of the world and their place in it that was later shattered by any of the following, either singularly or in combination, science, Enlightenment, political revolution, social change, economic change, technological change, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, world wars or any of the other "revolutionary new stuff" we might want to conjure up.

The second obstacle is that there is something ridiculous about the notion of artists as self-appointed leaders of the culture. In military use, it makes sense to speak of an advance force or avant-garde because there is a commanding officer who sends the soldiers who will make up the avant-garde out. He sends them out into an area where he later means to send his main force. The artist who claims to be leading is just making their best guess about where the world either is or should be going. And the rest of us think, "Who appointed you?" Even today, a time when modernism is about a century old, you could not honestly argue that the leading figures of modernist art and literature guessed where the world was going better than the leading figures of politics or plumbing did.

And before you get all excited and start citing examples, consider just this example of non-modernist art:

That's the work of my buddy Leonetto Cappiello. Beautiful isn't it? It's also very modern. It shows a modern subject, doing a modern thing, using modern techniques. On top of which, it is absolutely brilliant. It isn't and wasn't modernist however.

Behind this work is the fascinating coincidence that two very different words, meaning very different things, that look and sound similar. The two words are "espresso", which means coffee made by forcing hot water under pressure through coffee grounds and "express", which means something for an express purpose and, more specifically, a train or bus that will expressly take you to a particular place without stopping anywhere in between. That poster sells you not only coffee but also a wonderful new world in which steam power, which drives both the water that makes the coffee and the train, makes a wonderful new life full of convenience, pleasure (espresso tastes batter!), speed and comfort.

And colour!

All this in 1922! You don't exactly get the sense that the artist was haunted by the memory of the carnage and disillusionment of the first world war do you? This poster was produced the very same year that Eliot's The Waste Land was published. Both are very modern but they portray two very different visions of "modern". And it wasn't just him, that poster had to convince millions of people who saw it that Cappiello's vision of the modern world was their world. And it succeeded.

Now we could get into a very long, and tedious argument about which vision was "better", I put the word in scare quotes because no one with their wits about them would willing choose Eliot's world over Capiello's. A huge part of Eliot's claim is that we don't really have any such choice and there he was clearly wrong.

And it's not just that. Cappiello needed  to make a living so we can't say that he made a philosophical choice in favour of capitalism and mass production. Regardless, however, of how much he did or didn't think the choice through, there is no denying that he made the better choice than did the modernist artists in those areas.

And this has what to do with the Latin Mass? Well, I think we are in a good place to look at the choices that were made and think seriously about what their real impact was and wasn't. It was ffty years ago yesterday that Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican 2 document that set out the objectives for liturgical reform was promulgated. The reformers didn't pay an awful lot of attention to what that document actually said. They, like avant-garde artists, had their own ideas about where the world was going and the inexcapable fact is that they were wrong.

I don't, as some may think, advocate returning to the Latin Mass. But I do think we should revisit it as a starting point and rethink the changes. The "modern" world that  the liturgists foresaw when they started their reforms never came to be.

The Latin Mass: Modern vs. modernism

One of the themes I keep circling around here is what is really modern.

You might tell a story like this. Once upon a time, some people decided that they lived in a "modern" world because they lived in a world that had broken radically with the past. To live in this new world, they decided to make everything new, to create a new art and culture that was better suited to this new way of life than the old ways were.

Now comes the punchline: If you are interested in this new, modern culture they created, you can learn more about it by visiting a museum.

Something went deeply wrong. And the problem at every turn is, what is the measure of "modern" art?

It's weird that this even is a problem. Some modern but not "modern" art is incredibly popular. The Impressionists, for example. Also the Pre-Raphaelites. But if you pay close attention to people who argue about what should or should be considered "modern", they have serious misgiving about both groups. They are perfectly willing to admit the Impressionists but only as a phase that was passed through on the way to modernism. The millions of people who buy Impressionist calendars, placemats and other knick-knacks or who visit the Impressionist shrine at Giverny don't see it as the first step to something else. They see it as an end in itself. The Pre-Raphaelites, OTOH, the modernists don't even want to admit are modern. That art is seen as some weird throwback that, while pretty enough, has nothing to do with what it means to be really modern. Except for the millions upon millions of modern people who love this art.

Why this need to exclude so much of what is modern from "modernism"? What is really at work here?

I found an interesting example yesterday in The New Republic by a guy named Jed Perl who has the about as impeccable modernist credentials as you can imagine. He teaches at The New School and they write him up as follows:

Jed Perl, visiting professor of liberal studies, is the art critic for The New Republic. A former contributing editor at Vogue, Perl has written on contemporary art for a variety of publications, including Salmagundi, The New Criterion, The Partisan Review, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, and Modern Painters, where he serves on the board of directors. Specializing in the history and development of post-1945 American art, he is also the author of Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis (2000), Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World (1991), Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I (1988), and the forthcoming New Art City: The Painters and Sculptors of Manhattan, 1950-1965. In addition, he teaches art history at Pratt Institute, the Philadelphia College of Art, and Parsons School of Design.

Now Mr. Perl is angry. He is angry that a pop artist like Art Spiegelman wants recognition from the art world and he is even angrier that he has gotten it. [Link fixed] But notice this, the paragraph below opens with "nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than pop culture mavens". Think about that and go read the above again. Wouldn't you say that Mr. Perl has amassed a fair amount of "high culture cred"? Too much, perhaps, for us to believe that this happened by accident?

Nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than the pop culture mavens. Art Spiegelman would seem to have achieved everything a media guy dreams of: a Pulitzer Prize; a show at the Museum of Modern Art; a retrospective that has traveled to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; a more-or-less open invitation at The New Yorker. And yet in the catalogue of “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix,” the retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, Robert Storr, who used to be a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is quite cranky about curators who won’t embrace comics with sufficient enthusiasm, and predicts that “someday soon the citadels of culture will be forced to open their gates and let ‘the barbarians’ in.”

You might think, reading that, that modernists like Perl want to keep the barbarians out but modernism has been all too keen to let the barbarians in.  They are just particular about which barbarians they want.

Perl gives us a powerful hint of who the good barbarians are:

The very first wall text at the Jewish Museum informs you that Spiegelman “has torn down the barriers that until recently separated high culture from low.” What on earth is a legitimate museum doing promoting such a ridiculous claim? Hasn’t anybody at the Jewish Museum noticed that those barriers were shaken if not torn down more or less a century ago, by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Schwitters, Picabia, and Duchamp?

We can see that Perl himself is the one being ridiculous if we ask what "low culture" is supposed to mean here? Have you seen any graffiti homages to Braques? How many Leger posters do you see on university dorm-room walls? Leaving aside Picasso, where, outside of high culture, and very high high culture at that, do you hear of anyone else on that list?

The answer is that what he means by "low" is Picasso painting his mistress with a penis imprinted on her head, or Duchamp painting a mustache on The Mona Lisa and making a crude pun as the title of this "new work". Which is to say, Perl is willing to admit what is crass, vulgar and ugly into Art, provided, of course, that this crass, vulgar and ugly is the work of the right sort of people. What he isn't willing to admit is anything that is trying to be genuinely popular.

That is an extreme example, but it is something that characterizes all "modernism". The way the new liturgy was introduced is a good example of this. One option for introducing it would have been to simply make the Novus Ordo available alongside the existing Latin Mass. If proponents had been correct in their assertion that the new liturgy better served the real needs of the modern world better than the old, then people would have experimented with the new stuff, decided they liked it better and switched. But it didn't happen that way.

Which isn't to say that it might not have worked out that way if people had been given the chance. But they were never given the chance. The efforts that were made to suppress not just the old mass but a whole lot of "old Catholicism" were staggering. And I don't say this to condemn the rather vulgar way the people who did this behaved, although that condemnation is richly deserved, but rather to point out something else. The problem is that they weren't sure the Novus Ordo would sell. They didn't trust the people to make the right choice, so they forced it on them. They mistrusted popular opinion every bit as much Jed Perl doesn't trust it.

A little heavy culture: Disengaged?

Gauis made a comment on one of yesterday's posts that got me to put so much effort into my reponse that I think I'll make it the basis of today's post.

The comment is about the insolubility  of modern arguments pitting rights against morality (and his argument is reminiscent of Alisdair McIntyre's arguments at the beginning of After Virtue.)

I think the most interesting thing is the mix-and-matching of two arguments, which you could call the "public policy" argument and the "morality argument." And this is on both sides. Neither people who feel strongly that gay marriage is wrong on moral-religious grounds, nor people who feel strongly that it is necessary for reasons of justice-rights-morality, are likely to be convinced by arguments that gay marriage is either beneficial or harmful to society. That’s both because such arguments can never be as fully scientific as they claim to be (whose society? What’s ‘harmful’? what’s ‘beneficial’? How can you prove this? Aren’t such arguments inherently ideological? Etc.) and therefore not convincing, but also because (I think) people recognize legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality, and to a degree they hold back from recognizing legal-societal norms as fully legitimate.

I think that is exactly right. and I added the following.

At some level, that [meaning seeing "legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality"] is inevitable. There is always going to be a gap between a set of legal moral principles and what we believe for ourselves. What seems to have happened lately in our culture is that we no longer even pretend to think that the morality embedded in the law is real. Somewhere on YouTube there is a video of some of the people now loudly proclaiming that same-sex marriage is a right saying that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman in an equally self-righteous tone. Liberals are fully engaged in mass morality but they think it is endlessly malleable, which is another way of saying it doesn't really exist.

It makes me think of a line originally in the Ferris Bueller script but cut from the final version, "It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"

Christians, OTOH, are more and more detached. My wife made a presentation to a group of Anglicans in their 20s and 30s on popular culture a few years ago. These were pretty typical Anglicans, which is to say pretty easy going and willing to accommodate their practices to make living in the modern world easier. The jarring discovery, as my wife put it elsewhere, was that even these easy-going types had created their own world separate from the common culture. She couldn't get them to even begin to engage issues arising from it. For them the only morality that matters is between them and God, except that you wonder how much separate existence they attribute to God as he always seems to tell them they can do the things they really want to do.

I wonder to what extent this is driven by modernism? Modernism has seen a huge revival as the generation raised on Ikea aesthetics have become adults, parents and leaders. As the Lemon Girl and I were saying just the other day, it's not as if the problems that caused modernism to collapse in the early 1960s have been solved or magically gone away. And yet modernism has seized us all by like some sort of irresistible sexual impulse might do.

I am now reading a great little book called Decadent Enchantments which is about how Gregorian chant was revived at the abbey of Saint Pierre at Solesmes. It's a fascinating story and is very well told by Katherine Bergeron. She makes two fascinating distinctions. (Fascinating to me, anyway, I suspect this may end up being the least-read post in the history of this blog.)

The first distinction is between the situation at the end of the French revolution versus the normal decline and fall of cultures. Most cultures leave some ruins. Which is to say that, however much wanton destruction takes place, there are usually ruins that become ruins through decay. The situation for a religious revival at the end of the French revolution was different. Everything thing had been destroyed or, worse, removed from its historic setting and placed in a museum. The French word "vandalisme" (the source of our English word) was coined to describe this new kind of destruction. Bergeron says that the restorers saw what was left as an era of debris rather than an era of ruins.

For the Romantic spectator, then, the violent dislocation of historic monuments offered an image not so much of decay as of debris. The sight of such fragmented remains [in a museum] could produce no meaningful "effects", to use Chateaubriand's word, because these broken pieces no longer possessed the aura of pastness. It was the very existence of debris, a vulgar index of revolutionary change, that seemed to enable this new Romantic ideal of decay. Decay emerged as a countersign, a shadowy figure of not-change imagined, by necessity, as aura surrounding the now lamented natural ruin was a haunted sign, a ghostly specter of lost presence. Decay as such, together with the past plenitude it embodied, became poetic at the moment when debris had effectively taken it's place. (From Decadent Enchantments by Katherine Bergeron, p. 4)

That should be familiar to readers Brideshead Revisisted as it is exactly the attitude of Charles Ryder. I think it needs some work as no fully sound argument will include ugly expressions like "pastness" and "not-change".

Anyway, she then goes on to distinguish between that Romantic attitude and a later Modernist understanding that saw restoration as possibly "recreating" a form of life that "may have never existed".

It is perhaps not surprising that, perched on a hinge between two centuries, the figures of Pothier and and Mocquereau should be seen to swing in such different directions, betraying historical orientations that might be called, for convenience's sake, Romantic and Modern. For Pothier, Gregorian history appeared as an the aura of time imaginatively experienced by one who, standing at the end of the historical continuum looks back—collecting the accumulated reside of the past into a single aesthetic moment. For Mocquereau, such history appeared as a new beginning, a field of possibilities so vast it's ultimate truth, though glimpsed in the present, could only be assigned to some distant future.

The odd thing about right now is that "Modernism" itself has become part of the debris that the Ikea generation has picked up and "restored". Progressives and the few remaining liberal Christians  tend to be "Romantic" about this restored Modernism—that is they see it as an opportunity to put themselves at the end of an historical continuum. The group I see myself in, which includes a lot of the younger Christians I have been working with, on the other hand, tend to be "Modernist" about a restored Romantic Christianity, seeing it as fragmented but offering a glimpse at an ultimate truth to be realized in the future.

Authenticy anyone?

The virtues of mad men
What about Faye?
If there are Don haters and Betty lovers there are also the people who wanted Don to marry Dr. Faye Miller. These don't hate him the way the Betty-lovers do because it isn't Faye herself that attracts them but what she represents.

And what she represents for them is authenticity. Authenticity is a romantic ideal. It was an idea that sprung up to replace sincerity.

A short version might go like this: the central moral problem in life is not being who you really are (sincerity) but resisting all the temptations to be something other than what you are (authenticity). People who believe in authenticity think that being true to yourself is like trying to see the bottom of muddy puddle. The more you stir the puddle, the muddier it gets. But if you just let the puddle alone, the mud will settle and the water becomes clear.

Being sincere, on the other hand, is a constant struggle be something. To say you sincerely love someone is to wake up every day and make yourself love them. Sincerity says, "You promised to clean the kitchen so now you have to do it!" Because you aren't sincere if you don't follow through. Sincerity is fresh challenge every day and defenders of sincerity might answer Trilling's arguments against sincerity by paraphrasing Chesterton and saying that sincerity has not been tried and found wanting but that it has been has been found difficult and left untried.

What does authenticity offer us that sincerity does not?
Here are a couple of examples of what the authenticity crowd likes about the Don-Faye relationship. First here is Santiagio Ramos writing on a site that promises to balance "Religion and spirituality with faith":

Faye Miller (Cara Buono), the market research consultant who becomes Don’s lover midway through the season, offers him not only the affection and stability he needs, but also the truth about what he should do. Don is able to confess his secrets to her, and she returns with calm and with reality: You need to become a normal, real person.

Here is another version of the argument from Heather Havrilesky of Salon.

"He fell in love with Faye, a woman who dared him, from the start, not to feed her lines, not to play the dashing hero, not to woo her with a façade. She wanted the real Don Draper, and when she found out that Don was really Dick Whitman, she didn't skip a beat. She embraced Dick and urged him to show the world who he really was. From her angry phone calls to her awkwardness around children, Faye always presented the upsides and downsides of the authentic life.

There is nothing stupid or ridiculous about either of those positions. Authenticity is a common enough idea and we are familiar with the moral claims that go with it. Havrilesky even opens the door, at the end of the bit I have quoted, to the admission that authenticity is not a ticket to happiness.

The people who flog authenticity don't promise that our lives will become easy. They tell us that we will always struggle but that the struggle will be impossible if we are not authentic. If we are not authentic then everything is in flux and we never know where we really are. Authenticity is one of many attempts to provide us with a still point in the middle of a turning world.

For fans of authenticity, the big selling point for their pet virtue is honesty. To be authentic, they promise us, is to wipe away the delusions and lies and live ... well to live authentically. (And it should bother us a little that arguments for authenticity are circular.)

Can sincerity do the same thing? No it can't because sincerity is tied so closely to the idea of truth telling. Faking it, even for a second, is the destruction of sincerity.

And the fact that we must tell lies—even if they are only little white lies and fibs—leaves the person committed to sincerity always to face the haunting fear that they are only playing a role. Sarah gets angry with her husband and for a few moments she hates him; forever after she must worry if maybe the real her really loves David or is she just fooling herself into playing the role.

The question, however, is not whether sincerity is a virtue (it isn't) but whether authenticity  is any better. And this is where the Faye Miller fans such as Ramos and Havrilesky fail to deliver.

What would an authentic Don Draper be like?
It's not at all clear what Don joining Faye in authenticity would mean. Would he start calling himself Dick Whitman or would he simply have somewhere to go where he could really be himself part time as Faye Miller seems to want for herself?

Just to try and state what an authentic Don Draper would be like raises problems.

Don't be the hero? But he is the hero.

He is the hero in the trivial sense that he is the hero of the show and no one would want to watch a show without a hero. He doesn't have to succeed at being great but he has to always be striving for greatness.

But he is also a hero in that he is trying to be his own hero. Yes there is part of Don Draper that is always ready to run away but that part of him is precisely the part that is Dick Whitman. It's always Dick that runs. Don Draper is the hero who deals with things not just for us but for himself.

Dick Whitman is not the solution to Don's problems. Nor is it the solution to any man's problems. A Dick is what a man tries not to be.

An authentic Don Draper would be a contradiction in terms.

Classicist modernism and Romantic modernism
The style of Mad Men is modernism and modernism, at least at first, looks like an answer to the challenges of being authentic. The problem is that modernism promptly heads off in two contradictory directions. You can see the problem if you consider that both Mondrian

and Modigliani

are modernists (both images courtesy of Wikipedia).

You could say that there is a neo-classical variety of modernism as we see in Mondrian and that there is a neo-Romantic variety that we see in Modigliani. One seems to give us formalism and the other an unabashed human sensuality. (If you don't like the pairing I give above there are others: Le Corbusier and Gaudi, Stravinsky and Schoenberg,  Francis Picabia and Max Ersnt, for example.)

Don Draper is very much in the neoclassical school of modernism. That is why he fits in the high modernist office buildings where his two offices are and not in the Colonial home in the suburbs that he and Betty owned. His whole life is about the exterior order and not some private still point that the rest of his life revolves around.

I thought the telling point this year was the conversation between Peggy and Don during the episode called "The Suitcase". Peggy tells him that everyone thinks they slept together. Although her own motives are not necessarily clear to her at the start it soon becomes obvious that part of her reason in bringing this up is to ask Don why he never pursued her sexually. Don's answer is that he has to have rules about these things. Peggy, of course, knows that he did sleep with another one of his secretaries and she challenges him on this. And Don says, "People do things."

That's an interesting answer, not least of all because it is true. A person, any person, is not a unity. We are bundles of desires, hates, fears, jealousies that don't necessarily have to add up to anything. As long as we are a living body, it matters little if we are any other kind of unity.

Unity can only exist in the thing we are trying to be. That is why authenticity is a dead end and always will be. Don Draper has to want to be the guy who has rules and tries to keep them if he is to be anything at all.

Next week, Megan!

Modern usually good, modernism usually bad

[Slight update]

That's all you really need to know to understand modern culture. Sometimes it really is that simple.

By the way, this is the 500th post since this blog began back in December 2009.



Update: That is a fib. I see that we only get to 500 here because the blogger software is counting a few unpublished posts in the total. Contrary to what I would have expected, my usual obsession with scrupulous accuracy on all factual issues is failing to kick in so this will remain the official 500th post even though it isn't the actual 500th post.

Update 2: In reasonable usage, "modernity" ought to mean social and cultural change brought on by modern capitalist economy and the many new technologies and other benefits it has produced. Looking around, however, I realize I underestimated the ability of a certain kind of intellectual fraud to subvert language to keep their tired old ideologies afloat.

Modernism

Scruton on Baudelaire:

Such is the task of the modern poet: to show consciousness, alive and judging, in a world that will not be judged.

You could say a lot—and knowing me I probably will—but the key thing here is the world that will not be judged. Will it not? I daresay most people probably continue to believe it will, which might lead us to wonder how a relatively small elite ever got off telling us that something had changed forever and that it couldn't be put back.

And what would it be like to live if you thought the world would never be judged? It would not be a world without rules. To the contrary, we'd need more rules because people who believe that the world would never be judged would need to be controlled. But that is all the rules would be about—control. Supremely evil types of control, such as the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany or Muslim theocracies, would be just as legitimate as liberal democracy in such a world. The only restraint on such regimes would be their sustainability.

And the rules wouldn't apply differently. Wealthy powerful people like Roman Polanski would still get away with rape in such a world.

Outwardly, it would resemble our world in every respect. The only difference is that everything in such a world would turn on fate. "Hope" would mean simply wishing for a lucky break.

If that is what modern is, why would anybody want to be a modernist? It's not like we have to be.

The funny thing is that much modernism consists in arguing that it isn't a matter of "what we want to be"; that it is rather that the world has changed and you either must be a modernist or live a life of illusion. But why would that be true?

In any case, the vast majority of people chose to simply ignore modernism. Today, Freud, Marx, Wagner and a host of others are just historical artifacts.

The closet (2)

I bought Roger Scruton's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture and I am enjoying it (even though I am finding some basic points to disagree about). In it he pushes the modernist argument that high culture can and will serve as a replacement for religion. I don't agree but it's a respectable argument that he makes honestly and from a perspective that is not hostile to religion. (I believe he has since changed his mind and come to see that art cannot replace religion.)

In any case, I think he has said something very wrong with regards to sex in this quote from the book:

Those things are sacred in which our destiny is at stake: as it is at stake, for example, in sexual feelings, in attitudes to children and parents, in the rituals of membership and initiation whereby the first-person plural—the 'we'—is formed. The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sex act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest.

It's not that he is wrong in the sense that someone who says two plus two equals five is wrong or that anything like the opposite is the case.

The closet

Back in the 1980s an elementary school teacher in Florida decided one day to tell his students that he was gay. It was apropos of nothing. None of the kids had asked and it wasn't relevant to anything on the curriculum. He was fired and it became a bit of a cause célèbre.

I used to teach children swimming, sailing and canoeing in the summer in those days and one of my colleagues and I had a big discussion about it. I wasn't particularly interested at first and just humoured her in her discussion of something that was obviously very important to her. And then she said that for the guy not to tell his students would be to "live a lie". That struck me as ludicrous.

She said, "It's easy for you, you're a heterosexual, you don't have to come out to your students." (This was a little odd, by the way, because she was heterosexual herself.)

And I thought, I don't want to come out to children in my care. I wouldn't want them thinking of me as a sexual being. I want them to think of me as the guy who teaches them valuable boat and other water skills. Nothing in the ensuing three decades has inclined me to change my opinion.

Ina  sense she was right, I didn't have to come out and it strikes me as tremendous blessing that I have never felt any such need. The Oxford Concise Dictionary says, Closeted means "shut away in private conference or study." And that strikes me as exactly where one should keep ones sexuality.