pynchon-l-digest V2 #2294

N Cashen ncashen at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 17 07:49:26 CST 2001



----Original Message Follows----
From: owner-pynchon-l-digest at waste.org (pynchon-l-digest)
Reply-To: pynchon-l at waste.org
To: pynchon-l-digest at waste.org
Subject: pynchon-l-digest V2 #2294
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 02:00:10 -0600

pynchon-l-digest      Monday, December 17 2001      Volume 02 : Number 2294



Re: Art and Authority

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Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 21:27:45 EST
From: Bandwraith at aol.com
Subject: Re: Art and Authority

D. Monroe:

>From Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of
  Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge,
  MA: Harvard UP, 1993), "Art and Authority," pp. 1-10
  ..

[ "The argument for the epistemologically or morally
  superior nature of art, and even for its redemptive
  value, has a more distinguished history than the
  current reductive exploiters might suggest.  It is a
  pervasive current in our culture ....  Yet ... it is
  essentially reductive and dismissive about both life
  and art.  On teh one hand, art is reduced to a kind of
  superior patching function and is enslaved to those
  very materials to which it presumably imparts value;
  on the other, the catastrophes of individual
  experience and of social history matter much less
  (thereby making active reform and resistance less
  imperative) if they are somehow 'understood' and
  compensated in art.]



    [ "The works of art we will be studying are acts of
  resistance.  They refuse to serve the complacency of a
  culture that expects art to reinforce its moral and
  epistemological authority....  We could even speak ...
  (we might have studied others: D.H. Lawrence, George
  Bataille, Thomas Pynchon), of an art at war with
  culture.  Self-divestiture in these artists is alse a
  renunciation of cultural authority." (p. 8)]

Of course, understanding any of this, or the above cited artists, requires
that one be a card carrying intellectual, not to mention elitist, with 
enough
free-time to make the effort. These authors and the artists cited are
the embodiment of "cultural authority." Maybe that's the "agitated
narcissistic concentration" angle- they are really at war with themselves.

>>>The above argument is weak. You can agree with something or disagree with 
>>>something, but you should not criticize it just because you don't have 
>>>enough "free-time" to understand it or because its complexity requires 
>>>effort. The term "card carrying intellectual" is more telling about you 
>>>than anyone else. Some of the text from Bersani and Dutoit offered here, 
>>>which I have not read in another form, is compelling. To me, your 
>>>comments are smug.



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End of pynchon-l-digest V2 #2294
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