Editorial


Literature, philosophy, certain aspects and kinds of sex, and to a lesser extent the recording of history all have in common that they can be sites for the generation of expressions that are not able to be fully or naturally made in the normal course of life—statements, declarations, admonishments, sentiments, questions, etc., that are ruled out or otherwise made unspeakable insofar as we are committed, one way or another, to certain conventional ways of relating to one another, certain standards of living. To be pedantic about it and take an example from the book nearest me,

 

the lilacs, the lead, the waters’ frog green, your blouses, beloved, smelling of apples, your black underarms flashy as small black frogs, I’m confused like Talleyrand before a basket full of heads[1]

 

is not something the meaning of which can survive outside the context of literature; and even if it did, the words would not mean themselves in the same way.

I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that a language can only function as a language—that is, it only makes sense to speak of a common tongue, of our understanding one another—so long as such things are kept compartmentalized within it; that without a space marked out and designated for art, none of our daily expressions would ever graduate beyond the kind we spoke when we were very young children and made sense only, if even, to ourselves. This is not to argue that literature is crafted in the language of dreams—we are still beholden to each other in one in a way we are not in the other—but rather that only through art’s separation from the more worldly languages of transaction, commerce, negotiation, of the language of politics conceived as the daily problem of our living together, is it possible for language as a whole to do to the work of constructing the world and the subject in it, and to distinguish reality from its absence, one person from another. (This, I think, in part accounts for the sense of what’s lost when art is abducted by commerce.) Another way of saying the same thing is that we are often only fully comprehensible to each other as people who make and encounter art.

As such, literature (and philosophy and…) is committed to the belief that there are things that can be meaningfully said outside the usual course of life; that our language is not exhausted by the lives we lead or the shape of the societies we have so far made for ourselves. That it is perhaps very far from being exhausted by these things. This is, apart from being one of the avenues of literature’s succeeding, likely also one of the roots of its failure—when it does fail—to reach us: as when we don’t feel spoken to (or for) by it, don’t see what it has to do with us or our daily commitments and concerns, or haven’t been initiated into it, have sometimes been deliberately and actively shut out.

In a related sense, this is also the feature of art—its generation of unanticipated meaning and capacity for speaking beyond what is already given or taken for granted—that those with an investment in the way things are, are usually most concerned to stultify, though it’s a notable feature of the current era that, while historically conservative institutions have been inclined to treat art and literature as an open threat and react accordingly, this same animosity is now more commonly disguised as indifference, which has the benefit of not even granting to the artist the status of ‘enemy’ or recognizing their influence. An example of this is the case recently of the UK government’s slashing of subsidies for third-level arts education in the name of its economic ‘non-viability’, a move likely to affect only those students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds (somehow governments seem never to feel threatened by the art-making of the wealthy, whose tastes are easily shaped by backward-looking institutions and public intellectuals). The supposed savings derived from the cut are shown up by the paucity of funding the programme already received, and it’s hard not to feel the conservative government’s apparent inability to see the economic value of art is in fact an apprehension of its value in other terms. It remains implicit in the discussion that a UK with better arts education is one, a generation from now, with fewer tories.

This is just one recent example among others, but it was discouraging to see even many of those protesting the cuts (however well intentioned) frame their resistance in the vocabulary of the ‘art sector’s contribution to the economy’; that is, defending art in terms of its being non-threatening, its potential for upholding the economic status quo. The argument is already over if these terms are accepted—even if the protestors are correct that these cuts will negatively affect the UK’s competitiveness in the global market—because no one, not even those framing the debate, really cares if art is viable or not. That’s not what’s in question.

 

I think I inadvertently introduced some ambiguity when, in writing the public mission statement for this magazine, I stated as one of its tenets that all art is political. That this was interpreted in a variety of ways is exactly what I’d hoped for, but there was one interpretation I want to take the opportunity to counter, which is that art is only art (or a variation: art is only good) insofar as it is concerned with politics, and in particular with politics as conceived in the worldly language of the everyday, that sphere I tried above to describe as necessarily excluding certain forms of speech and thought.

This isn’t to criticize art that does work this way, but I think as a definition it underestimates the complexity and depth of the relationship—that while what is taken for ‘truth’ in a given artwork is necessarily an expression of its relationship to an ideology, this also means that what is true in art at any given time is several orders of magnitude more complex than what is true of politics at that same point in time—and that this approach sometimes runs the risk of denying what it claims most firmly to believe: that the relationship runs both ways, that if politics to some extent determines art, art retains the ability to affect politics in turn.

In any case, this was not the only thing in mind when putting together this issue of the magazine, or the most important (and this will likely be the last time I talk about the subject; I had set out to talk about writing’s relation to dance, but here we are), but it is something I think the pieces in this issue engage with in so many different and complex ways, and insofar as they are all works of art, humane and decisive.

Thanks,

 

Christopher DeVeau

 


[1] Letters from a Seducer, Hilda Hilst, tr. by John Keene (Nightboat Books 2014)

Editorial


Literature, philosophy, certain aspects and kinds of sex, and to a lesser extent the recording of history all have in common that they can be sites for the generation of expressions that are not able to be fully or naturally made in the normal course of life—statements, declarations, admonishments, sentiments, questions, etc., that are ruled out or otherwise made unspeakable insofar as we are committed, one way or another, to certain conventional ways of relating to one another, certain standards of living. To be pedantic about it and take an example from the book nearest me,

 

the lilacs, the lead, the waters’ frog green, your blouses, beloved, smelling of apples, your black underarms flashy as small black frogs, I’m confused like Talleyrand before a basket full of heads[1]

 

is not something the meaning of which can survive outside the context of literature; and even if it did, the words would not mean themselves in the same way.

I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that a language can only function as a language—that is, it only makes sense to speak of a common tongue, of our understanding one another—so long as such things are kept compartmentalized within it; that without a space marked out and designated for art, none of our daily expressions would ever graduate beyond the kind we spoke when we were very young children and made sense only, if even, to ourselves. This is not to argue that literature is crafted in the language of dreams—we are still beholden to each other in one in a way we are not in the other—but rather that only through art’s separation from the more worldly languages of transaction, commerce, negotiation, of the language of politics conceived as the daily problem of our living together, is it possible for language as a whole to do to the work of constructing the world and the subject in it, and to distinguish reality from its absence, one person from another. (This, I think, in part accounts for the sense of what’s lost when art is abducted by commerce.) Another way of saying the same thing is that we are often only fully comprehensible to each other as people who make and encounter art.

As such, literature (and philosophy and…) is committed to the belief that there are things that can be meaningfully said outside the usual course of life; that our language is not exhausted by the lives we lead or the shape of the societies we have so far made for ourselves. That it is perhaps very far from being exhausted by these things. This is, apart from being one of the avenues of literature’s succeeding, likely also one of the roots of its failure—when it does fail—to reach us: as when we don’t feel spoken to (or for) by it, don’t see what it has to do with us or our daily commitments and concerns, or haven’t been initiated into it, have sometimes been deliberately and actively shut out.

In a related sense, this is also the feature of art—its generation of unanticipated meaning and capacity for speaking beyond what is already given or taken for granted—that those with an investment in the way things are, are usually most concerned to stultify, though it’s a notable feature of the current era that, while historically conservative institutions have been inclined to treat art and literature as an open threat and react accordingly, this same animosity is now more commonly disguised as indifference, which has the benefit of not even granting to the artist the status of ‘enemy’ or recognizing their influence. An example of this is the case recently of the UK government’s slashing of subsidies for third-level arts education in the name of its economic ‘non-viability’, a move likely to affect only those students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds (somehow governments seem never to feel threatened by the art-making of the wealthy, whose tastes are easily shaped by backward-looking institutions and public intellectuals). The supposed savings derived from the cut are shown up by the paucity of funding the programme already received, and it’s hard not to feel the conservative government’s apparent inability to see the economic value of art is in fact an apprehension of its value in other terms. It remains implicit in the discussion that a UK with better arts education is one, a generation from now, with fewer tories.

This is just one recent example among others, but it was discouraging to see even many of those protesting the cuts (however well intentioned) frame their resistance in the vocabulary of the ‘art sector’s contribution to the economy’; that is, defending art in terms of its being non-threatening, its potential for upholding the economic status quo. The argument is already over if these terms are accepted—even if the protestors are correct that these cuts will negatively affect the UK’s competitiveness in the global market—because no one, not even those framing the debate, really cares if art is viable or not. That’s not what’s in question.

 

I think I inadvertently introduced some ambiguity when, in writing the public mission statement for this magazine, I stated as one of its tenets that all art is political. That this was interpreted in a variety of ways is exactly what I’d hoped for, but there was one interpretation I want to take the opportunity to counter, which is that art is only art (or a variation: art is only good) insofar as it is concerned with politics, and in particular with politics as conceived in the worldly language of the everyday, that sphere I tried above to describe as necessarily excluding certain forms of speech and thought.

This isn’t to criticize art that does work this way, but I think as a definition it underestimates the complexity and depth of the relationship—that while what is taken for ‘truth’ in a given artwork is necessarily an expression of its relationship to an ideology, this also means that what is true in art at any given time is several orders of magnitude more complex than what is true of politics at that same point in time—and that this approach sometimes runs the risk of denying what it claims most firmly to believe: that the relationship runs both ways, that if politics to some extent determines art, art retains the ability to affect politics in turn.

In any case, this was not the only thing in mind when putting together this issue of the magazine, or the most important (and this will likely be the last time I talk about the subject; I had set out to talk about writing’s relation to dance, but here we are), but it is something I think the pieces in this issue engage with in so many different and complex ways, and insofar as they are all works of art, humane and decisive.

Thanks,

 

Christopher DeVeau

 


[1] Letters from a Seducer, Hilda Hilst, tr. by John Keene (Nightboat Books 2014)

The dog in the photo above was named Daisy. Wider than she was long, she was taken in aged twelve to a home that already included four much younger labradors, and ran through them like a bus.