Curation and Criticism as Folk-Art.
The header image for “content curation” on wikipedia, uploaded and created by By Manskakisemiils, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
A few years back I got into Japanese cultural criticism for the summer – I wrote some pieces about it, looking at this odd use of Hegelian philosophy to describe the figure of the otaku, which has come into the western consciousness primarily as a sort of orientalized obsessive (after William Gibson) or as a parallel to the socially awkward nerd archetype (one of these days, I’m going to write about how Americans tend to construct the world through sitcom archetypes and how that connects to the image of high school in the American consciousness. Today is not that day.) However, the work of these critics – specifically Hiroki Azuma – occurs to me in relation to something I wrote earlier this summer in my pursuit of understanding how to approach AI writing: the decompositive move.
To summarize, this has to do with a strange turn in my students’ understanding of literature, categorizing things not by genres, but looking at them in terms of the tropes deployed. This is a kind of folk-Structuralism, lacking the paradigm/syntax division that was always emphasized to me in my education on the subject of Structure. While I do not wish to turn into an old man criticizing the youth, I have a certain problem with this: it’s sort of like looking at pig on the hoof and mentally judging it based on the perceived quality of the loin, the ham, the belly, the back: the animal is always-already the cuts of meat, and the story is always-already the tropes all laid out and documented. It’s the mindset that views a story as a puzzle to be solved and not a tool to answer a question.
My read on this situation is that this is a manifestation of the Folk-Art of the Digital Age: criticism and curation. Of course, this appears to me as an academic to be a bit of a problem: on the one hand, it’s good that people are dissecting the media that they experience. On the other hand, it represents the potential loss of the academic-critical apparatus that currently exists: if everyone can do it, why bother with what has already been done? What could potentially spring forth from it in the future?
Let me back up.
Folk art is, obviously, the art made by people, as opposed to the art that is made by trained artists. This is not to say that one is more valued than the other, simply that the process is different. So-called “high art” – your various symphonies and sonatas and the things that hang in galleries – is part of a different discourse than “folk art” – the things made and remade by people who simply wished to create art. Both have their experts – critics and master artists for the former, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists for the latter.
Obviously, this distinction is one imposed from the outside of the art. I would say that art-in-itself is neither high nor low. However, some is more valued and some is less valued, and this value changes as the culture assesses and reassesses the art (and if you disagree with me, look at the packaging on the first edition of any given Philip K. Dick book and compare it to the packaging on the same book now).
It is my belief that more than any other, the art forms that people engage with in the contemporary era are – as mentioned – criticism (exegesis on a work) and curation (displaying works to signal taste.) The latter is more easily proven than the former: consider the proliferation of platforms made specifically to display the media that one has enjoyed – the content that you have consumed: GoodReads, Storygraph, Letterboxd, Discogs, Musicbord, Backloggd.
Who the hell names these things?
These are all places where one can assemble lists and display one’s taste. On the platform side, this is clearly to suck up as much data as possible, but on the user side, there is social capital to be had in making yourself a tastemaker within a social circle. I only use Spotify for music (I know, I know, I need to trade it out), but one thing that always made me confused is that you can find other people’s playlists. There are people who construct and share these playlists, and it was unclear to me why they do it.
But it seems obvious to me now: there was the desire for public playlists, because that means that one can display their curatorial skills, getting the mood and the transitions just right, to be experienced just so by an audience.
Criticism is much more alive in the microblogging environment – Twitter and Tumblr, among other platforms – because those are some of the last mostly-text-based platforms on the internet, and to remain relevant in the ongoing conversation, one has to remain involved. Writing about the last thing you read or saw or watched or played is relatively easy. Your subject is selected. You can just go for it.
Of course the problem here is that writing about something is a slippery slope to trying to write well about it (some people actually achieve that, shout out to James over at If You Want the Gravy, who does it well but has taste I occasionally very strongly disagree with, but the complaint is never the writing style.)
And all of this is fine – I engage in literary and media criticism fairly often and I like to think that there’s value in it. I also wish that I could actually get people to understand how to do it academically instead of just reproducing what they see in youtube videos, but I think that what is really at issue here is that this is another manifestation of Jamesonian Nostalgia.
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We’ve talked about Nostalgia a lot as a personal experience, but it would probably be a good idea to discuss Jamesonian Nostalgia, which is an aesthetic stance. In one chapter of Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson puts forward the definition of what he called a “Nostalgia Film”, which comes in two varieties. To limit our examples to the films of George Lucas, the first variety is something like American Graffiti, which is about remembering the 1950s from the perspective of the 1970s: it doesn’t aesthetically reproduce the 1950s, but the experience of those who lived through the 1950s, who – at the time – were an older and more established demographic than they had been previously. The second variety is Star Wars, which makes no direct reference to any earthly time, but echoes the aesthetic form of the 1940s-era pulp sci-fi serial or the 1950s-era Samurai and Western films: it isn’t Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or The Hidden Fortress or anything of that sort, but it could not possibly exist without them.
It might be tempting to say that every work of art takes inspiration, but George Lucas, in that film focuses much of his energy on paying homage before anything else. He is going for a level of intertextuality more commonly found in postmodern novels and slasher movies. This, here, is really the origin point of the grand franchise tendency in contemporary films to including a pause when a character is introduced to allow the audience to cheer and bask in it (compare this to the way that cameos are handled in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which I listened to a very long podcast episode analyzing earlier today. I should watch it again – I love Bob Hoskins.)
My worry is mostly that I feel like the shift towards Curation and Criticism as our dominant modes of folk art comes principally from a depletion of the rest of our culture. We live in the detritus of prior cultural eras and end up constructing meaning-making apparatuses from what we manage to salvage.
Azuma using the work of his forerunner, Alexander Kojève, describes Japanese culture in similar terms: in the post-war period, the Japanese have been put in a position of rebuilding their cultural landscape out of the material given to them by American culture:
Lurking at the foundations of otaku culture is the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan once again from American-made material, after the destruction of the “good old Japan” through the defeat in World War II. (p. 13)
In this way, the Otaku is not exactly a peculiarly Japanese figure, but a kind of inversion of snobbery into animality (hence the title of the book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals.)
On the other hand, snobbery is best understood as the harshest rejection of this:
On the other hand, snobbery, instead of having any essential reason for denying the given environment, is a behavioral pattern that denies being “based on formalized values.” Snobs are not in harmony with their environment. Even if there is no chance whatsoever for denial, snobs presume to deny, to manufacture formal opposition, and to love the thrill of opposing nature. The example Kojève gives is ritual suicide (seppuku). In ritual suicide, in spite of having no reason to die, suicide is committed in essence because of the formal values of honor and order. This is the ultimate snobbery. This way of life is certainly not “animalistic” in that there are moments of negation. However, this also differs from the human way of life in the “historical” age. For the nature of snobs and their oppositional stance (for instance, the opposition to instinct at the time of ritual suicide) would no longer move history in any sense. No matter how many sacrificial corpses are piled up, ritual suicide, which is purely and courteously executed, certainly would not be a motivating force of revolution (Azuma, p. 68).
To oversimply, though perhaps in a productive fashion: Animality is to accept without reason and snobbery is to reject without reason. Both start from a certain stance and then create a reason after the fact.
The best example of snobbery in American culture is not, I would say, the academic, but the self-conscious and hyper-orthodox manifestation of black metal fandom, of the “TRVE CVLT” variety. This, I will admit, is based on second-hand reports, as I do not tend to encounter such people. Academics, especially in the humanities, tend to have a strange kind of Animality to them: everything is worth study and examination, but it is the style of the analysis that matters most. That’s where the snobbery enters into the equation.
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My gut reaction on this is that Snobbery manifests as a tendency towards critique: judging something and analyzing it with the gaze of the vivisectionist, while Animality comes out in curation: there is a place for everything, and we will find it.
However, the reverse can also be true. Critique can take on an animal dimension when it exists to justify the presence of something, when it exists to redeem a work that might otherwise be rejected due to snobbish excesses. Curation, on the other hand, can become snobbish through the exercise of censorship: what’s in, what’s out, what’s real, what’s punk, what’s metal?
It might be best to think that, in American culture, which has for so long been marked by a tendency towards animality (if we accept Kojève’s read of things) there is a war between this and snobbery – a sign that the animal is reversing into the snob, just as the Otaku marks a mirror reversal of the snob into the animal.
Both moves, though, skip over the middle term: the human, according to Kojève and Hegel. The snob and the animal are just the conditions of Homo Sapiens in a purported “end of history” – and it feels like a lot of history is attempting to happen right now.
So, how does one become human, in the Kojèvean and Hegelian sense?
I don’t know. I’d have to have done it to really tell you.
But both Edgar and I have our suspicions.
I’ll give mine first, because I think Edgar’s might be more well-thought out.
The overful cup may represent plenitude, but in both Christianity and Zen Buddhism, one must empty one’s cup before it can be filled. [Image is a sculpture in the Shetland Islands, called My Cup Runneth Over, uploaded by Colin Smith, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.]
In our culture, you can easily have the TV constantly going, a game pulled up, a book open in your lap, a podcast blasting in one ear and an audiobook of the Bible [Chinese] going in the other ear. This is something you must resist. By this, I mean, you need to “consume” less media, so that you have more space in your mind for your own thoughts, for your own creation. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read, shouldn’t listen, anything like that, but it does mean that you should probably make the time to have your own thoughts.
How many of us, over the last decade, have avoided going an hour without some kind of media? Some kind of content?
Take a moment.
Get empty.
See what happens.
Edgar, on the other hand, suggests that it’s more an act of translation (surprise, surprise). If you’re going to write, you need to engage as an audience member with non-verbal art forms; if you’re going to draw, you need to engage as an audience member with non-visual art forms; if you’re going to make music, you need to engage as an audience member with non-musical art forms. These things stir up thoughts that wouldn’t be present otherwise.
It’s a very translation-focused sort of thought on this: we constantly engage in acts of translation, from one thing to another, so we need to engage in that constantly.
In any case, I think that a big part of what one needs to do to become a more fully realized person – a better artist, a better audience member, however you frame it – is that you need to forgo “consuming” media, because it’s not about consumption. It’s about being engaged with a work of art, about thinking through the whole thing.
Which, honestly, might be the first step.
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