Depolarisation (3). Allen! Hilton!
I was enthusiastic about the depolarisation project in around 2002. 18 years later, no-one else has got involved in it, to my knowledge, so I don’t think we can still see it as charged up with high potential. Incidentally, my personal contacts with poets from the mainstream or other factions except the old “Underground”, have been minimal. Correspondence with one notably mainstream poet was an exception, rewarding though it was from many angles. I am sorry that writing ‘Council of Heresy’ didn’t bring any response from people eager to advance the depolarising project. I should note that much of my knowledge of poetry came from people who were never polarised, for example Peter Porter (whose reviews I didn’t appreciate properly until I read through them all in an on-line newspaper archive, sometime in 2020), and Edward Lucie-Smith, whose 1970 anthology was an education to me. More recently, magazines like Terrible Work (Tim Allen) and Fire (Jeremy Hilton) were firmly anti-polar and provided a whole stream of new poetry, unfiltered. This was healing the waters, and it certainly did a lot for me. (Did Steve Spence co-edit T Work? I can’t recall at this point.) Terrible Work from Plymouth and Fire from somewhere near Worcester. I am not sure that the polar split was operative until about 1972, things just seemed to get a lot more tense around then, and people became more high-handed. It was connected with the generation gap, and with academics being paranoid about their students’ attitudes and lack of respect, but it wasn’t a reproduction of that, more a sort of side-slip of certain energies.
The key moment in my project on British poetry 1960-97 (the Blair-era Grand Project, or BGP) was realising that mainstream poets were just as oppressed by the mainstream gatekeepers as the Underground poets. I had assumed that the business presented the best poets for public consumption, and that poets who offered no difficulties to a reader were going to get fair treatment. But no, the people in charge are arbitrary and not especially honest. So any number of gifted conventional poets are more or less invisible and needed research effort to locate them. (The problem was also that anthologies can focus on new poets, so that if someone has a long career then they will not appear as new poets and may be only in older anthologies, from previous decades. The retailing world wants new poets, all the time.) So the work I had done reading “showcase” anthologies was inadequate, you have to venture well beyond the showcases. This was beneficial, it did me good, but I had to add an extra volume to my project – The Long 1950s, covering poets who had not gone along with the key innovations of the 1960s. Innovations are not compulsory. I was irritated that the history of the mainstream was so neglected – big surprise. So, anyway, between roughly 2002 and 2010 I went through a long course in depolarisation.
While doing that, I was focussed on mainstream books, especially obscure ones, because that was where I could score wins. A question of search patterns – my search pattern was leading me to ignore anything Underground. Strange how powerful those patterns are! It’s all a kind of collectors’ game, where most assets don’t win you any points, but you get points by finding the ones which fulfil the pattern. It’s like searching a second-hand bookshop to find crucial books whose names you don’t know. I was pretty happy doing this. Admittedly, after a few years I hadn't really got anywhere, but I won in the end. “Depolarising means reading poetry you dislike all the time” – not quite that simple, comrades!
Writing about poets in the conventional realm, when you have a reputation for being an advocate of the Underground (which amounts to calling someone a Mafia lawyer in some circles), has a credibility problem – why would anyone take opinions about conventional poets from you? This brings us to the problem of consensus. Clearly, if you write criticism in any extended way, you believe that you are speaking for other people and expressing a consensus; even if it isn’t the consensus in 1992 it may be by 2010. I am presenting myself as a depolarised critic, someone who has completed the course and who can speak to all factions. This is where I want to be. Of course, it means I fail several kinds of loyalty test.
The title “Council of heresy” refers to a desire to find a zone of critical orthodoxy, a set of points which unifies the most people and allows the most discussion to take place before dialogue breaks down in mutual delegitimation. The wish to stand on consensual ground is risky if there is no such ground. If there is nothing that people agree about, then you can't take a stand on that shared ground, to get your verticals and horizontals. A starting-point for my BGP was an email from John Hartley Williams looking at two anthologies of recent poetry, released at more or less the same time, which had dozens of poets but no overlaps. This just brings us back to the problem of polarisation. Do we have to address it? and, if so, how can we do that if not by getting into depolarisation?
Wednesday 29 July 2020
depolarisation, 2: mutual respect
Depolarisation (2). Where did I put those blocks?
The urge for premature definition sweeps aside vagueness at the cost of introducing fundamental error. It is fitting for critics to struggle with areas of art that haven’t resolved yet. It is fitting to devote time and effort to artists who, in the end, turn out to have been a waste of resources.
My guess is that what people want from cultural critics is to locate the watersheds, the lines where one faction divides from another. This location would expose unconscious blocks to understanding and allow us to debate and perhaps eventually remove those blocks. It seems likely that Rosenberg has identified one of the blocks. See blog of 31 May 2020 for details on this.For Rosenberg, the avant garde wants to consign every part of existing art to landfill.
Rosenberg describes the institutionalisation of the avant garde, and wrote about it even in 1964. This institutionalisation, at one level, justifies the vangardistas in thinking that they are Superior Beings. But, at another level, it points to problems with claiming political status for innovative art. This is a different problem from the battered chronology of the modern vanguard. So, if you want to promote the new poetry of the 1970s as representing a breakthrough, it is surely a problem that this poetry is now almost fifty years old (and that its poets are hoary and venerable, if not decrepit). In fact, dealing with the collective estate of “modernism” is like trying to get agreement from a board of directors of whom some date to the 1920s, some date to the 1970s, and some to 2020. They barely understand each other, but any statement has to accommodate the relationship between those three areas. So in fact futurist art is dominated by the past. It is produced by people who have succeeded in the academic world by demonstrating expertise in the art of classical modernity. Their ability to start from zero is effectively nil. (That Partisan Review symposium on a "new conservatism" supplied one of the ideological bases for PN Review, when it was starting out.)
Arrogance is a factor in the scene subject to reform. But the problem may be in defining the splits as “blocks”. From another point of view, they are not “blocks” but “components of my personality”. You can’t have some poet say “the reason you don’t like my work is that your personality is defective and you have unconscious blocks which prevent you from realising how brilliant I am”. Because the next step is “a brief and inexpensive course of surgery will modify your personality so that you DO realise how brilliant my poetry is”. Rather, everyone has to concede that disliking a volume of poetry is everyone (else)’s civil right, and that it is not subject to being defined away by the PR of some faction or other.
Quite a lot of the discourse around culture these days is based on a deficit theory, whereby someone you disapprove of is suffering from unconscious blocks, and you can see what these are (although they’re invisible), and offer a cure. It’s great to feel that you are culturally healthy and everyone else has terrible disabilities. There is no better feeling. But this whole domain may be based on a fallacy. Just because you have a goal, of promoting the artists you approve of, does not mean that you have a valid theory of why other people find them uninteresting and not worth laying out money for in a book-shop. Indeed, if there are a thousand poetry titles on the shelves of the Waterstone’s in Nottingham (I didn’t count, so it could be fewer), then leaving almost all of them behind is going to be a feature of most trips to the book-shop. Cultural customs are going to be based on that physical fact, if on nothing else. You do have the right to say no.
I am really doubtful that you can see inside someone else’s mind and produce structures which they aren’t consciously aware of. I know a lot of “legitimated knowledge” depends on that, but it seems flawed and risky as a concept. In reading a poem, you have easy access to the conscious intent, the strands or paths which the poem is organised around. Other levels are a puzzle and may not actually be there. Under the surface, there is no light and no sound and you effectively don’t have access. All this may be a conjuring trick to cover the fact that you are suppressing the conscious message of the other person. By defining their desires, pleasures, preferences as a “binary myth” you are effectively saying that you have the right to speak for them and they don't have the right to speak for themselves.
Five thousand poets have an investment in saying that part of the market has an unreasoning block resisting their excellent work, and critics are motivated to follow in line and search for those blocks, and turn out sketches of them. But perhaps the breakthrough is in recognising that these blocks don’t exist. The reasons for not reading a volume are many, most likely that it is hidden behind all the other volumes on the stand, but may also be rooted in cognitive preferences which are part of how someone deals with the world. (5000? could be more!)
Let’s say that people's consumer choices in art are guided by the memory of past pleasure. This gets away from “deficit theory” and also identifies a domain where criticism can be useful: I record my pleasure, in a verbally explicit way, and people who read what I say then have an “acquired memory” of pleasure, and this extends their aesthetic range. Most proposals about depolarisation offer to wipe out divergence in a malign way. But we are only going to get closer to each other by being friendly and respectful.
The urge for premature definition sweeps aside vagueness at the cost of introducing fundamental error. It is fitting for critics to struggle with areas of art that haven’t resolved yet. It is fitting to devote time and effort to artists who, in the end, turn out to have been a waste of resources.
My guess is that what people want from cultural critics is to locate the watersheds, the lines where one faction divides from another. This location would expose unconscious blocks to understanding and allow us to debate and perhaps eventually remove those blocks. It seems likely that Rosenberg has identified one of the blocks. See blog of 31 May 2020 for details on this.For Rosenberg, the avant garde wants to consign every part of existing art to landfill.
Rosenberg describes the institutionalisation of the avant garde, and wrote about it even in 1964. This institutionalisation, at one level, justifies the vangardistas in thinking that they are Superior Beings. But, at another level, it points to problems with claiming political status for innovative art. This is a different problem from the battered chronology of the modern vanguard. So, if you want to promote the new poetry of the 1970s as representing a breakthrough, it is surely a problem that this poetry is now almost fifty years old (and that its poets are hoary and venerable, if not decrepit). In fact, dealing with the collective estate of “modernism” is like trying to get agreement from a board of directors of whom some date to the 1920s, some date to the 1970s, and some to 2020. They barely understand each other, but any statement has to accommodate the relationship between those three areas. So in fact futurist art is dominated by the past. It is produced by people who have succeeded in the academic world by demonstrating expertise in the art of classical modernity. Their ability to start from zero is effectively nil. (That Partisan Review symposium on a "new conservatism" supplied one of the ideological bases for PN Review, when it was starting out.)
Arrogance is a factor in the scene subject to reform. But the problem may be in defining the splits as “blocks”. From another point of view, they are not “blocks” but “components of my personality”. You can’t have some poet say “the reason you don’t like my work is that your personality is defective and you have unconscious blocks which prevent you from realising how brilliant I am”. Because the next step is “a brief and inexpensive course of surgery will modify your personality so that you DO realise how brilliant my poetry is”. Rather, everyone has to concede that disliking a volume of poetry is everyone (else)’s civil right, and that it is not subject to being defined away by the PR of some faction or other.
Quite a lot of the discourse around culture these days is based on a deficit theory, whereby someone you disapprove of is suffering from unconscious blocks, and you can see what these are (although they’re invisible), and offer a cure. It’s great to feel that you are culturally healthy and everyone else has terrible disabilities. There is no better feeling. But this whole domain may be based on a fallacy. Just because you have a goal, of promoting the artists you approve of, does not mean that you have a valid theory of why other people find them uninteresting and not worth laying out money for in a book-shop. Indeed, if there are a thousand poetry titles on the shelves of the Waterstone’s in Nottingham (I didn’t count, so it could be fewer), then leaving almost all of them behind is going to be a feature of most trips to the book-shop. Cultural customs are going to be based on that physical fact, if on nothing else. You do have the right to say no.
I am really doubtful that you can see inside someone else’s mind and produce structures which they aren’t consciously aware of. I know a lot of “legitimated knowledge” depends on that, but it seems flawed and risky as a concept. In reading a poem, you have easy access to the conscious intent, the strands or paths which the poem is organised around. Other levels are a puzzle and may not actually be there. Under the surface, there is no light and no sound and you effectively don’t have access. All this may be a conjuring trick to cover the fact that you are suppressing the conscious message of the other person. By defining their desires, pleasures, preferences as a “binary myth” you are effectively saying that you have the right to speak for them and they don't have the right to speak for themselves.
Five thousand poets have an investment in saying that part of the market has an unreasoning block resisting their excellent work, and critics are motivated to follow in line and search for those blocks, and turn out sketches of them. But perhaps the breakthrough is in recognising that these blocks don’t exist. The reasons for not reading a volume are many, most likely that it is hidden behind all the other volumes on the stand, but may also be rooted in cognitive preferences which are part of how someone deals with the world. (5000? could be more!)
Let’s say that people's consumer choices in art are guided by the memory of past pleasure. This gets away from “deficit theory” and also identifies a domain where criticism can be useful: I record my pleasure, in a verbally explicit way, and people who read what I say then have an “acquired memory” of pleasure, and this extends their aesthetic range. Most proposals about depolarisation offer to wipe out divergence in a malign way. But we are only going to get closer to each other by being friendly and respectful.
Depolarisation, 1
This is a revisit to an old theme. I more or less staked the
farm on depolarisation – it was the theme of two books I wrote, The council of
heresy (2009) and The long 1950s (2012). The response from the hypersensitive
poetry market was less “now we see!” than “you didn’t just say that so don’t
pretend you did”.
If you say “people’s taste is scattered over a vast landscape”, that sounds great, but if you then say “I do a reading in some town and most of the audience dislike the way I go about a line or a poem”, that is what the scattering actually means and that doesn’t sound so great. I am willing to read to a hostile audience. I just want to be honest about what is dividing us.
The lecture series Binary Myths (in Exeter, in roughly 1997, and published in two volumes under the same title, while a volume 2 was comments by editors on how to edit) identified the problem of polarisation. The idea was that people crudely divided the poetry world into two parts, the part which likes me and the part which doesn’t. And that individuals seldom read anything outside the area which they, factionally, identified with. This was worse for people who had been polarised for 40 years than for people who had only suffered from it for, say, five years. A corollary is the suggestion that constantly following habits in choosing what to read may lead to a decision-making paradox in which the most pleasurable sensations are to be found by challenging your own orthodoxies. If you have spent 40 years ignoring mainstream poetry, it is likely that the most exciting poetry that you aren’t aware of is hidden within the mainstream. You will find it by discarding your principle of never reading such books – a preference which was once an asset and has become a dogma. Another corollary is that a zone of dry ground from which deviations of taste could be measured is missing. That is, an anthology like “Conductors of Chaos” may in fact represent one extreme of taste, but the claim that it is not central is unprovable unless you can find what the centre is. Editors or historians who span all the factions are needed by the scene, but do not exist just because they are needed. (“We cover all kinds of music – Country and Western.”)
What do we expect from depolarisation? A large number of poets would see it simply as the proportion of the market which favours their own poetry expanding from 2% to 98%. This is banal, and by the way unlikely. It seems like a fantasy project, and is not the right answer. We might mean an abandonment of stylistic research, so that the poets who do not write like everyone else give up and start writing like everyone else, with a convulsive collapse of a differentiated landscape into one without features. This is heavily undesirable. In sum, no one expects the diversity of poetry to decrease, which would be at odds with the whole Western way of life. When we spoke (in Council of heresy) of balkanisation, the problem there was not that poetry has become so much more diverse since 1960, but that groups (or perhaps just vocal individuals?) were spreading disinformation, no doubt as a result of misunderstanding – and of malice. Depolarisation is therefore most significant when we are talking about the instruments which provide access to poetry – for example reviews, publication in books, selection for anthologies, selection for magazines, mention in surveys.
Just behind these, we find a very small number of people, a rather homogeneous group called cultural managers. Few people would disagree that in Britain modernity has been rejected and driven underground in poetry, whereas in visual arts it has strode to the forefront – in the same country, in the same period. Most probably, then, the occlusion of modernity is a debt we owe to the cultural managers. I am arguing that the poetry infrastructure has structural failings. Certainly some people who like modern poetry have also reached managerial positions; the story of how editors were dramatically removed from those positions at Stand, and at Poetry Review (in 1977 and again in 2004) may well explain why the others conform, and the story is the most important one to understand even though it is not in the public domain. I said the managers were homogeneous; this is apparently less because of a shared artistic sensibility than because of the need for alliance with each other. The absence of accountability or media interest in poetry leaves a vacuum in which these alliances become unnaturally important – and the ability of a clique to subvert and exclude deviants such as innovators is unchallenged. When we speak of depolarisation as a force that could shift the landscape, what we usually mean is the collapse of the ability of the conservative cultural managers to exclude anything but the mainstream from visibility in shops or the media. The proposal involves a second stage in which the same people are still in charge but are the cultural officers for a diverse and modern offering of poetic styles – with no more trouble than other officials experience at the Tate Britain or the Whitechapel Gallery. The corollary, of the intellectuals (the “alternative”) reading mainstream poetry, is less important because the intellectuals cannot block the mainstream from access to the market, and never have had such a capability. It is a desirable corollary but would not change the landscape. The further shifts in the multipolar geometry which the end of balkanisation would imply – Scottish poets reading English poetry, to mention one of the unlikely ones – are also desirable, but do not have revolutionary potential. These polarisations are not easily defensible, and should not just be left to rust in place, but they are not as influential.
The binary project is compatible with closing down individual wishes and imposing conformity from above. You don't have to start liking what you dislike. I was very taken with the idea of depolarisation after reading Binary Myths; but in practice a lot of people just wanted to abolish people who disagreed with them! Nobody involved intended to leave their own comfort zone. You can’t get from 20 kinds of poetry down to one kind. That is an illusory goal. The initial drive seemed to resolve into the wish of cultural managers to have a unified market, which meant that people’s preferences had to be invalidated. This was very authoritarian. So if you have someone who goes into a CD shop to buy a jazz CD, it may be that they walk straight past the rock and folk sections, but it’s authoritarian to change the labelling so that they can’t tell what the CD is until they have paid for it, and to deride their wishes. People have preferences and this is the accumulated knowledge of the market; if you try to erase it you are destroying knowledge. If people are wary of unfamiliar poetry, it’s because they have had bad experiences.
(The use of the word balkanisation could be viewed as racist, or geographically biased, but we will leave it in because it is at least a clear concept. If there are twelve factions and any single fact has at least 11 different interpretations and the area of consensus is nil, that is what we mean by balkanisation. This is the term used for the British (or English?) scene by Eric Homberger in 1972, in his classic The Art of the Real. Reading Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans is recommended and we do admit that other Europeans are probably more unrealistic about Balkan politics than Balkan intellectuals, taken as a group. Peter Handke tried to spread cultural understanding of the South Slavs in the West, and people vituperated him pretty thoroughly.)
If you say “people’s taste is scattered over a vast landscape”, that sounds great, but if you then say “I do a reading in some town and most of the audience dislike the way I go about a line or a poem”, that is what the scattering actually means and that doesn’t sound so great. I am willing to read to a hostile audience. I just want to be honest about what is dividing us.
The lecture series Binary Myths (in Exeter, in roughly 1997, and published in two volumes under the same title, while a volume 2 was comments by editors on how to edit) identified the problem of polarisation. The idea was that people crudely divided the poetry world into two parts, the part which likes me and the part which doesn’t. And that individuals seldom read anything outside the area which they, factionally, identified with. This was worse for people who had been polarised for 40 years than for people who had only suffered from it for, say, five years. A corollary is the suggestion that constantly following habits in choosing what to read may lead to a decision-making paradox in which the most pleasurable sensations are to be found by challenging your own orthodoxies. If you have spent 40 years ignoring mainstream poetry, it is likely that the most exciting poetry that you aren’t aware of is hidden within the mainstream. You will find it by discarding your principle of never reading such books – a preference which was once an asset and has become a dogma. Another corollary is that a zone of dry ground from which deviations of taste could be measured is missing. That is, an anthology like “Conductors of Chaos” may in fact represent one extreme of taste, but the claim that it is not central is unprovable unless you can find what the centre is. Editors or historians who span all the factions are needed by the scene, but do not exist just because they are needed. (“We cover all kinds of music – Country and Western.”)
What do we expect from depolarisation? A large number of poets would see it simply as the proportion of the market which favours their own poetry expanding from 2% to 98%. This is banal, and by the way unlikely. It seems like a fantasy project, and is not the right answer. We might mean an abandonment of stylistic research, so that the poets who do not write like everyone else give up and start writing like everyone else, with a convulsive collapse of a differentiated landscape into one without features. This is heavily undesirable. In sum, no one expects the diversity of poetry to decrease, which would be at odds with the whole Western way of life. When we spoke (in Council of heresy) of balkanisation, the problem there was not that poetry has become so much more diverse since 1960, but that groups (or perhaps just vocal individuals?) were spreading disinformation, no doubt as a result of misunderstanding – and of malice. Depolarisation is therefore most significant when we are talking about the instruments which provide access to poetry – for example reviews, publication in books, selection for anthologies, selection for magazines, mention in surveys.
Just behind these, we find a very small number of people, a rather homogeneous group called cultural managers. Few people would disagree that in Britain modernity has been rejected and driven underground in poetry, whereas in visual arts it has strode to the forefront – in the same country, in the same period. Most probably, then, the occlusion of modernity is a debt we owe to the cultural managers. I am arguing that the poetry infrastructure has structural failings. Certainly some people who like modern poetry have also reached managerial positions; the story of how editors were dramatically removed from those positions at Stand, and at Poetry Review (in 1977 and again in 2004) may well explain why the others conform, and the story is the most important one to understand even though it is not in the public domain. I said the managers were homogeneous; this is apparently less because of a shared artistic sensibility than because of the need for alliance with each other. The absence of accountability or media interest in poetry leaves a vacuum in which these alliances become unnaturally important – and the ability of a clique to subvert and exclude deviants such as innovators is unchallenged. When we speak of depolarisation as a force that could shift the landscape, what we usually mean is the collapse of the ability of the conservative cultural managers to exclude anything but the mainstream from visibility in shops or the media. The proposal involves a second stage in which the same people are still in charge but are the cultural officers for a diverse and modern offering of poetic styles – with no more trouble than other officials experience at the Tate Britain or the Whitechapel Gallery. The corollary, of the intellectuals (the “alternative”) reading mainstream poetry, is less important because the intellectuals cannot block the mainstream from access to the market, and never have had such a capability. It is a desirable corollary but would not change the landscape. The further shifts in the multipolar geometry which the end of balkanisation would imply – Scottish poets reading English poetry, to mention one of the unlikely ones – are also desirable, but do not have revolutionary potential. These polarisations are not easily defensible, and should not just be left to rust in place, but they are not as influential.
The binary project is compatible with closing down individual wishes and imposing conformity from above. You don't have to start liking what you dislike. I was very taken with the idea of depolarisation after reading Binary Myths; but in practice a lot of people just wanted to abolish people who disagreed with them! Nobody involved intended to leave their own comfort zone. You can’t get from 20 kinds of poetry down to one kind. That is an illusory goal. The initial drive seemed to resolve into the wish of cultural managers to have a unified market, which meant that people’s preferences had to be invalidated. This was very authoritarian. So if you have someone who goes into a CD shop to buy a jazz CD, it may be that they walk straight past the rock and folk sections, but it’s authoritarian to change the labelling so that they can’t tell what the CD is until they have paid for it, and to deride their wishes. People have preferences and this is the accumulated knowledge of the market; if you try to erase it you are destroying knowledge. If people are wary of unfamiliar poetry, it’s because they have had bad experiences.
(The use of the word balkanisation could be viewed as racist, or geographically biased, but we will leave it in because it is at least a clear concept. If there are twelve factions and any single fact has at least 11 different interpretations and the area of consensus is nil, that is what we mean by balkanisation. This is the term used for the British (or English?) scene by Eric Homberger in 1972, in his classic The Art of the Real. Reading Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans is recommended and we do admit that other Europeans are probably more unrealistic about Balkan politics than Balkan intellectuals, taken as a group. Peter Handke tried to spread cultural understanding of the South Slavs in the West, and people vituperated him pretty thoroughly.)
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