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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