"It is not portrayal that destabilizes, it is praise," wrote Dave Hickey near the start of his extraordinary 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Hickey was offering an explanation for why it was the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that had attracted the persecutory zeal of the scolds and censors of the conservative Christian right rather than the work of artistic contemporaries of his who were also representing, in their art, gay men doing sexually explicit things to themselves and each other. Hickey wrote:
It was not that men were making it in Mapplethorpe's images. At that time they were regularly portrayed doing so on the walls of private galleries and publicly funded 'alternative' spaces all over the country. On account of the cult of plain honesty and sincere appearance, however, they were not portrayed as doing it so persuasively. It was not that men were making it, then, but that Mapplethorpe was 'making it beautiful'. More precisely, he was appropriating a baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution. ... There is no better proof of this, I think, than the fact that, while the Mapplethorpe controversy was raging, Francis Bacon's retrospective was packing them in at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Joel-Peter Witkin was exhibiting in institutional serenity—because Bacon's and Witkin's images speak a language of symptoms that is profoundly tolerable to the status quo. ... It is not portrayal that destabilizes, it is praise.
I've been wrestling with this idea for a long time, that it is praise rather than portrayal (or criticism, I would probably add) that most efficiently destabilizes the world, and am still not precisely sure what Dave meant by it. At a minimum, though, I'd say two things. One is that it's not simply praise in its most literal sense that he meant—not merely saying that you think highly of something—but praise enacted beautifully. It's not enough to simply tell people that you like something a lot, and they should like it too. You have to sell them on it.
The other thing is that it's connected to Dave's ideas about how small communities of like-minded enthusiasts ("non-exclusive, overlapping communities of desire," as he put it) can have an outsized influence not just on the culture, but on politics through the culture. As he wrote in his great essay on Flaubert, "Simple Hearts":
Thus, when I finished reading “A Simple Heart” that morning in Texas, I did not retire to my couch to savor the experience. Nor did I pick up the copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet that lay on the corner of my desk with its pages still uncut. Nor did I start making notes for my own story in the manner of “A Simple Heart.” I started calling my friends. I wanted them to read the story immediately, so we could talk about it; and this rush to converse, it seems to me, is the one undeniable consequence of art that speaks to our desire. The language we produce before the emblem of what we are, what we know and understand, is always more considered. This language aims to teach, to celebrate our knowledge rather than our wonder. It also implies that we, and those like us, are at least as wonderful as the work we know so much about. The language that we share before the emblem of what we lack, however, as fractious and inconsequent as it often seems, creates a new society.
As I've worked and felt my way into this newsletter and podcast, one of the things that's become clear to me that was not clear when I launched it is that in addition to being about the contemporary intellectual scene, Eminent Americans is also an effort to praise in both of the ways elucidated above. It's an effort to write and podcast compellingly about ideas and ways of engaging with ideas that animate my own intellectual, emotional, and social existence. And it's an effort to create new and tap into existing communities of desire, to live more fully in the "democracy of simple hearts," as Dave called it.
This sounds grandiose, maybe, but Dave’s point is that it in most respects it’s just an extension of what we all do when we have that experience he writes about, of reading a story or hearing a new song or watching a movie and then immediately wanting to talk to our friends about it. What can be complicated (not grandiose) is finding the mechanisms or comrades or platforms or styles with which to pursue this impulse in a constructive rather than an erosive or overly self-affirming way.
All of which is a very grandiose set-up for the first installment of what will be a highly irregular series of posts in which I just do what all the other newsletter writers do when they need to juice their frequency of posting, which is give you some recommendations of other stuff I like.
I'm going to try to set a relatively high bar for my recommendations, in that they can't just be some shit that I read or heard recently that I liked. They have to have really affected me. I'll also lean heavily, though not exclusively, on work that comes up in the course of my own recent writing and podcasting.
Enjoy!
THE GOOD SHIT
Transience and hope: A return to Freud in a time of pandemic, by Jonathan Lear
"Freud thus admits to a twofold illusion: first, that civilization is an endless progressive journey; second, that by participating in that journey one can take pride in oneself because one thereby partakes, as best one can, in something eternal and good. Disillusion thus comes as a blow to Freud’s sense of self. Shattered pride means that he was implicated in the illusion–not simply because he participated in it, but because he identified with it.
Mcintosh As Synecdoche How Teacher Education's Focus on White Privilege Undermines Anti-Racism, by the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective
"We illuminate how white privilege pedagogy demands confession fromstudents and how confession is a dead end for antiracist thought and action.We also explore how McIntosh’s conception of white privilege simplifies thecomplexities of white racial identity and can lead to dangerous misreadings ofstudent resistance."
Psychotic Disorders Do Not Respect Autonomy, Independence, Agency, or Freedom,
by Freddie Deboer
"And this is where fantasies of totally and permanently non-coercive mental healthcare collapse, will always collapse, must collapse: there is no such thing as autonomy or freedom or personal choice under the grips of a mental illness that hijacks the mind."
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
”I don't think it's an accident that 7N C Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don't mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself ( which I found to be salty as hell, like sore-throat-soothing-gargle-grade salty, its spray so corrosive that one temple-hinge of my glasses is probably going to have to be replaced) turns out to be basically one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed - rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships' hulls with barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.”
The Face of Seung-Hui Cho, by Wesley Yang
"The first school shooter of the 1990s was an Asian boy who played the violin. I laughed when I heard an account of the rampage from my friend Ethan Gooding, who had survived it. Ethan forgave me my reaction. I think he knew by then that most people, facing up to a real atrocity, as opposed to the hundreds they’d seen on TV, didn’t know how to act."
Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, by John Pistelli
"A deeper flaw, a philosophical one occasioned by Yang’s intellectual commitment to recognition, makes itself known in the concluding pages of this book, when in essays from 2017 Yang provides a detailed critique of the social justice left."
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, by Blake Smith
”There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their ‘creative’ and ‘interesting’ counterparts. The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality.”
The Class Politics of Instagram Face, by Grazie Sophia Christie
”They’re wrong, because in their focus on uniformity, they’ve forgotten the premise of cosmetic work in the first place. Distinction. Good face, like good taste, has a direction: downward. The success of Instagram Face, its ubiquity, isn’t the start of cyborg aesthetics. It’s the end of it. Because what might save us from such apocalyptic beauty is something almost too ugly to say out loud: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?”
And just for the hell of it, a music video I keep coming back to when I need a boost:
Still counts.
This is great! I think that in a lot of peoples' dismissal of, say, wokeness or other small intellectual trends (Catholic integralism comes to mind), there is a sense that this is minor, unimportant, that it'll never really affect the outside world. But I've been reading Nietzsche lately, and I think what he says is correct, when Zarathustra is like, the most powerful people are those who redefine good and evil. Most people have no opinions about beauty; they like what they're supposed to like. That's why people who can redefine beauty have the potential to exert a power over the world. They're not the _only_ powerful thing, but it'd be false to say they have no power.
The Hickey passage is a great rejoinder to another thing DeBoer likes to say: “You are not the stuff you like.” It’s scary though, to me. It’s a seduction as you say, and I think this last decade has been full of us letting ourselves be seduced when we ought to know better.