|
The Minority
Within
 ....What
many multiculturalists overlook in their attacks on the canon of European
and American high art is that the supreme works of genius in the Western
tradition are, in the defamilarizations and dislocations of their styles,
often more hospitable to minority sentiments than works with explicitly
minority-oriented themes and characters. From Chaucer's poetry and Shakespeare's
plays, to Henry James' novels and Sargent's paintings, the most stylistically
ambitious works within the Western tradition cherish and bring back to
consciousness the lost, forgotten, and unexamined impulses that are in
all of us. These works call us to an awareness of the minority within.
The presence of racially- or
sexually-based characters, settings, and references is no guarantee of
minority imaginative content, in this sense, and is in fact irrelevant
to it. That is why Spike Lee's films can be judged to be far more mainstream,
middle-class, middlebrow, and "Hollywood" in their point of
view than Cassavetes'. While Lee merely recycles standard Hollywood melodramatic
conflicts, formulas, and clichès (in Minstrel Blackface, as it were–suburban,
Yuppified versions of Cabin in the Sky), the stylistic experiences
of Cassavetes' or Burnett's works provide the viewer with the opportunity
to participate imaginatively in truly alien and unconventional forms of
knowledge.
The presence of minority characters
is not what is revolutionary about Shadows (or Killer of Sheep
and To Sleep with Anger); the styles are. Cassavetes' and Burnett's
styles represent breakthroughs into new ways of thinking and feeling about
life, something that the presence of no number of minority characters
or politically correct themes guarantees the other sort of film....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney's
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies
(New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
* * *
....Cassavetes was more interested
in marginal feelings than figures in marginal social situations. He was
determined to give voice to the "small feelings" that he believed
American corporate values, in life and in art, ignored or suppressed.
His entire oeuvre was an effort to honor lost or forgotten impulses–the
tiny pulsings of emotional confusion or discovery that most other films
gloss over. In his opinion, to bring them to consciousness, in a film
or a life, is to begin to resist the vast forces of denial, homogenization,
and blandification deployed throughout American culture–which is why
his films involve breaking characters down by forcing them to recognize
their own lost or forgotten feelings. There is no filmmaker more willing
to make time and space for the registration of these tiny, unspoken impulses
and emotions, or who more resoundingly demonstrates that film can honor
minority imaginative flickers in its style whether or not it deals with
minority groups in its plot....
That why his so-called "actor's
cinema" goes far beyond being a mere actor's cinema. The goal is
to make room, in the cracks of the plot as it were for the expression
of non-systematic impulses of the sort that are squeezed out of other
movies....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney's
The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies
(New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
* * *
Excerpts from:
Persons and Systems
....The difference between
the two kinds of criticism is the difference between emphasizing systems
or individuals, structures or structure-breaking impulses. It ultimately
comes down to whether you focus on systematic aspects of experience that
are larger than the individual and that constrain individual performance
or on individual movements of feeling and imagination that figure possibilities
of free performance within the system. Unfortunately, nonsystematic expression
is simply written out of most academic criticism. The scholar invariably
chooses to devote his attention to the abstract, the structures and systems
over individuals and eccentricities. The repetitive aspects of a work
of art and the generic expressions within it are treated as being of far
more importance than the nonsystematic aspects, personal expressions,
and singular moments.
The structuralist vision is
basically an attempt to inflate the "importance" of what would
otherwise be felt to be merely "aesthetic" or "emotional"
inquiries. Artists' and characters' expressions are treated as being sociologically
or ideologically representative (or as failing to be) in an attempt to
make the inquiry matter more; whereas unique, individual emotional states
are viewed as not being important enough to merit study in themselves.
Needless to say, such a critical bias has serious ramifications. It radically
skews the definition of experience. The inside drops out of life. When
experience is understood in terms of its external qualities (its sexual,
social, and ideological dynamics), it becomes its outsides. Characters
are reduced to external relations of power, dominance, control, and their
position in a system. Their individuality disappears. Their merely private
concerns, feelings, dreams, and aspirations–everything that makes them
unique and not representative–ceases to be accounted for. (In fact, if
the private, internal realm is acknowledged at all, it is treated as being
a reflection of yet one more general, abstract system of power relations.)
In a word, identities are skin-deep for the ideological critic.
Leigh's focus is on the inside–though,
as I have mentioned at several points, the inside is only visible in his
work insofar as it is expressed in visible expressions. He is less interested
in superpersonal structures of knowledge (the bureaucracies and cultural
systems that surround us) than in individual forms of knowing. For Leigh,
all of the traps that snare us are internal ones, and all of the important
battles in his work are fought within the individual heart and soul....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney's
The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (New York and London:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
* * *
Trends and
Demographics
The appreciation of great art
requires three things that seem to be increasingly uncommon in our universities:
First, a profound humility in the face of the work; second, a willingness
to engage oneself in a sustained act of attention, an intimate, personal
encounter with the most complex form of expression known to man; and third,
an acknowledgment that the artist might have things to tell us that we
don't already know.
Most contemporary academic
criticism is the opposite: It is not humble, but superior, skeptical,
smug, and knowing. The critical stance does not involve intimacy with
the text in all of its particularity, but flying 50,000 feet above it
in a realm of ideological abstractions, swooping down on it only occasionally,
for selected evidence to bolster a predetermined position. Most importantly,
it does not involve lovingly opening oneself to the work, learning
from it, but more often than not, debunking it: exposing its
so-called "complicity with the reigning ideology," and, as far
as possible, reducing the work to its political, social, and material
origins.
Academic criticism is basically
a mirror of the rest of society. We live in an age of cynicism and doubt,
so its probably not that surprising that our criticism should be the same.
We live in an era in which the social sciences are triumphant–in which
all of life is understood in terms of trends, averages, audiences, and
demographics–so it shouldn't be that surprising that most academic criticism
unconsciously imitates the social sciences. It has sold its soul to our
century's three idiot village explainers–sociology, psychology, and ideology.
The only problem is that the greatest art is precisely what won't be
reduced to such terms. The most complex aspects of our minds and feelings
are not reducible to generic, impersonal, average forms of understanding.
That's why most academic criticism
doesn't even deal with real art. It is most comfortable talking
about average expressions: kitsch and pop culture. Like the other social
scenes, it specializes in the study of average authors, average expressive
effects, and average viewers.
Genius will never be accounted
for by generic explanations and sociological causes. The slipping, sliding
complexities of art-speech are what are inevitably lost in the translation
to generalizations about race, class, and gender. Great art is the eccentric,
personal expression of unique–and uniquely precious–states of awareness.
–Excerpted from (the unedited
text of): "A New Look at John Cassavetes," The Christian
Science Monitor, Tuesday, May 10, 1994.
* * *
Non-Systematic
Expression
The cultural studies folks
just don't understand art–how it is made or how it is appreciated. All
valuable art is the expression of an individual vision. It is personal.
Unique. Eccentric. Distinctive. Not generic. Not sociological. Not the
reflection of a trend or demographic. It comes out of one person and goes
into another person. It's not a group phenomenon. It isn't something in
the air that magically appears when a certain number of people gather
together with a shared set of beliefs or understandings. That's advertising
or religion or politics, not art.
The appreciation of a work
of art similarly is the result of an individual effort of understanding.
You don't just breathe it in. It takes work, knowledge, experience, effort.
The understanding of art is not natural or inevitable or effortless or
mindless.
A concept like mass culture
does not apply to art. In fact, in the deepest sense of the word,
there
is no mass culture. All culture is individual culture. It is your culture
and mine–somebody's not everybody's. You can't inherit it. You
can't be born into it. Everyone–you, me, and Henry James–starts
from zero. That's the fun and challenge of working with students.
Everyone has to
start at the start and go over the whole ground. There are no shortcuts.
And no one can do it for you. You can't get it out of Cliff's
Notes.
You have to live into it slowly and unsurely, in space and time. You
have to earn your right to it.
Our age is the age of the social
sciences. Social science understandings have triumphed in almost every
realm of human endeavor. They are the dominant forms of understanding
in our culture–on television, in the newspapers, in classrooms. Virtually
everything is understood sociologically, ideologically, or psychologically.
In a sociological understanding the undergoings and efforts of individuals
are forgotten. The precious uniqueness of individual consciousness is
forgotten. You become your group: your gender, your race, your social
and economic status. Characters in movies are rich-poor, Black-White,
men-women, bosses-secretaries, etc.
Now, any dominant language
passes for nature and not culture, so that may sound perfectly neutral
and unobjectionable, but the problem is that art's ways of knowing effectively
begin where sociology's ways of knowing end. Sociological knowledge is
a form of group-thinking, the understanding of the experience of
a group, by a group. Art is the opposite. It represents the understanding
of the experience of an individual by an individual. It is about unique
and personal ways of experiencing.
Sociological understandings
may be of use in interpreting census figures or compiling actuarial tables,
but they are almost completely irrelevant to understanding the ebbs and
flows of consciousness embodied in the greatest works of art. The language
of the greatest art is not translatable into the language of sociology.
Almost everything is lost in the translation from art-speech to sociology-speech.
That's why almost all sociological criticism is doomed to be bad, and
why the works sociologists can account for are the weakest works
of art....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney's,
"A Chilly View of Hollywood–Part 2," MovieMaker, no.
14, July/August 1995.
For a more positive view
of the functions of art and criticism, see the Independent Vision section,
and especially the essays on Charles Burnett and Mark Rappaport.
To read more about fads
and fashions in criticism, click on "Multicultural Unawareness"
and "The Functions of Criticism" in the Carney on Culture
section, the essays "Sargent and Criticism" and "Eakins
and Criticism" in the Paintings section, "Day of Wrath:
A Parable for Critics" in the Carl Dreyer section, "Capra
and Criticism" in the Frank Capra section, all of the other
pieces in this section, and the essays "Skepticism and Faith,"
Irony and Truth," "Looking without Seeing," and other pieces
in the Academic Animadversions section.
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing. To
obtain the complete text of this piece as well as the complet texts of
many pieces that are not included on the web site, click
here.
|
