August 19, 2008
Reconsiderations of a canon-less world
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
The idea of a "canon" is in tatters. A canon needs an established cultural authority, and there is no guiding authority in culture anymore. There are no real gatekeepers. The barbarians aren't merely at the gates — they long ago passed through the gates and are comfortably strolling around town. They are ordering lattes at the museum café right now. More honestly, perhaps, it should be said that we're all barbarians. We are them and they are us. This is a terribly bothersome situation to some people, usually to the very people who still think they can show a difference between themselves and the barbarians. They don't want to be barbarians. The most succinct response to such people is: tough shit. The task at hand is to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were.
Once you stop complaining and start getting back to work, it becomes clear that the barbarianization of all things affords some interesting opportunities. There are benefits to having a canon, of course. For one, you've got standards by which to measure yourself and others. But one of the most troubling things about a canon is the way it becomes unquestionable. You're never able to ask the canon "Why?" It is the standard by which one asks why. This is meant to prevent infinite regress. If the standard can itself be judged, then there must be a more primary standard, and so on, ad infinitum. The canon stops all of that cold. It answers those disturbing questions before they can even be asked. You learn from the canon in order to understand what the rules are and then you go out and apply them. What you cannot do is turn back and start asking questions about the canon itself. A canon doesn't work that way.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:51 PM | Permalink
Comments
Your canon is still intact as far as scientists are concerned. Though the currency of selected works may change over the centuries you philosophers are still mired in the actively anti-science theories from people who were so ignorant that they didn't know that blood vessels pumped blood.
Keep that cave nice and dark. Is your red my red? Oh noes, we have an answer now.
Philosophy and religion are so anti-rational that the only way to defeat the centuries-long grip of religion against science was to counter the infallible superstition of religion by contradicting it with integration with infallible ancient superstition of philosophy.
The logical thing to do would be to ????, but the canon persists, and the same works are taken seriously today as by the esteemed and learned pseudoscientists who fought germ theory.
Posted by: Joe Biden | Aug 23, 2008 4:27:16 PM
No pain. No gain.
No gates. No Barbarians.
No pain. No pain.
Hey Joe;
I don't know if your red is my red and I don't think it matters much except if we both show up at the same stop light. But I know this; my read is not your read with regards to this essay. Do yourself a favour and read it again. I did and that's why I'm writing this...
Hey Morgan;
Good one. This essay has been bugging me, not because I have any big disagreement with it but because it's been sitting in the back of my thoughts for awhile now. Informing them, so to speak.
It was your later posting of Adam Kirsch's take on the critical reception about the Met's Turner exhibit that really got it going for me. In the visual arts canons are made and abandoned at a very high rate. The ascendence of a current artist has a kickback on the value placed on anyone that he or she claims as an influence. The art world looks after it's backlist. It's very aware of it's canon and puts a flat out dollar value on it's contents. That the value varies is just all part of the nature of being in a market. Back when everyone was doing sprawling colour field paintings, Turner was a touchstone lion. Now; he's just some guy who painted landscapes and had a big ego.
So when artists speak of a canon they are using the term in the sense of a model. They openly acknowledge the influence that previous work has had on them. There is no shame in looking over one's shoulder.
Architects use the term canon in the stricter sense of "rules" as they must because they want their buildings to stand up and the canons of their art are the buildings whose survival attest to that simple principle.
In music there's a curious take on the concept. Of course the Western classically trained musicians have a canon running from the School of Paris around 1550 to it's willful collapse sometime during the last century. You're allowed in this game to function within a certain range. If you're a sackbut player, you have a basket of works that you can draw upon but I've known players of even the most outdated instruments and practices to get dewy-eyed while listening to the Quartet for the End of Time. Let's face it, even the folks that work as historical re-enactors at heritage sites go home and watch The Wire.
More restrictive and puritanical with regards to canon are the jazz and blues people. Here we see the clearest example of the idea of there being a canon as a claim to a history and in turn legitimacy. Maybe it's almost a pedigree; a bloodline. Who played bass on which session on what album? Who taught whom what song or chord progression? "Whose your daddy?", seems to be the great question after all that jazz.
So we make canons; as I believe you were pointing out. It's part of what practicing artists and critics and fans just do. In the field of letters, poetry and philosophy the project is fraught with contention which it must whenever someone makes a list. It's a logocentric thing.
When someone mentions The Canon in literature (and I'm tossing philosophy in here too) I can't help but think of the Blooms; Harold and Allan. With Harry you get a more playful approach, he accepts The Canon but can't resist playing with it (The Book of J) whereas Al is trying to stem the tide of civilization's collapse with bricks made from Plato's Republic (The Closing of the American Mind). Let's go back a bit further to two modernist poets and their response to The Canon. You've got Pound in "The Guide to Kulcher" telling you exactly what to read and why. And yet that's not enough, outside of The Canon lies The Other which couldn't possibly have any bearing on it and yet it has it's own legitimacy; namely Chinese poetry and Pound's fascination with Fenollosa's translations.
Finally there's Eliot carrying,"These fragments I have shored against my ruins". He saw himself as holding up these bits of the past against a future which would not sustain them. The irony and, I guess for Old Possum,"The horror...the horror", is that every September hundreds of thousands of first year English majors, many of them descended from classes of people that Great Tom wouldn't give the time of day to, are introduced, through the references in his works, to key elements of The Canon. How many first read Dante in the Waste Land or Marvell in "The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock". I did not think that an elitist could teach so many.
I agree with your stating that canon's contain a "Why?" but when it comes to practicing artists I think they also contain a "How?"
So in a roundabout way, thanks for writing that essay about canons, Morgan.
Oh and Joe;
One more thing. Ask yourself why Heisenberg found Heraclitus inspiring and you will understand that progress doesn't just go forward.
Posted by: PeteChapman | Aug 27, 2008 5:00:17 PM
Post a comment