[T]he arbitrariness of art careers, or were they really arbitrary? Who gets to speak and why?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (164)
[I]sn't sincerity just the denial of complexity?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (181)
These letters're the first time I've ever tried to talk about ideas that I need to, not just to amuse or entertain.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (192)
"[D]on't forget you live by compromise and contradiction cause those who don't just die like dogs."--Chris Kraus I love Dick (240)
A few weeks ago, when I was a bit low after a bruising encounter with fierce, confident philosophically trained minds, I wrote a friend how much I admire her uncompromising ability to combine being a philosopher and being, well, her. She wrote me back that while my fine thoughts reflect well on my image of her, the real, more fragile her was struggling with suicidal despair through the Summer. It's not that the despair as such that caught me by surprise—all the people I admire let their fragility and despair into their lives, and it's their capacity to do so that gives their words, professional and informal, an urgency that I treasure—but I had always half expected her to reach out to me if she would hit bottom. Upon reflection I consoled my wounded vanity with the thought that, of course, she had sunk so low she had become incapable of reaching out to me; my conscience answered, in turn, 'maybe she expected to be pushed further down by Professor Schliesser?' 'Would she think me really capable of such cruelty?' 'Who isn't?'
Around the same time I noticed that a young scholar listed Chris Kraus's I love Dick in a top-10 book-list that have been popular on Facebook. I had never heard of it before which I decided spoke in its favor. Despite the book's humor, it makes for uncomfortable reading—the deformation of the moral reflexes of pretentious academic men (you know, like me) and their impact on (to quote) a Serious Young Woman are exhibited in eerily familiar fashion. The deformation is captured in many scenes, but this passage presents it in a nice one-liner:
Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (196)
Kraus here holds out to the possibility of disciplined emotion. We might say an analysis in which the head is coupled to our feelings. The idea that emotion can be terrifying resonates with my experience; it need not be yours, of course. When I was a teenager I was cautious about letting anybody get close to me intimately. (I still prefer baby-steps.) And so now I wonder if I prefered the company of books because they kept me distant from my feelings (and other people's).
Even so, Kraus's book is not anti-intellectual. In fact, it offers a remarkable defense of the idea that books can offer a life-line to those capable of grabbing it:
Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly can ever fulfill—getting larger cause you are entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (207)
(Insert sexual joke about becoming larger here, if you will.)
The quote from Kraus (207) is, upon reflection, also optimistic about sex. I can easily imagine that rather than dwelling on this fact I would have been willing to believe Kraus, if I had stumbled across her work way during my teens, that some sex is not just about orgasm, but a physical transformation heavy with meaning. Most artsy French films in the 80s pretty much said as much.
But while the book does not shy away from sex, it is more focused on charting the birth of a writer. The core of the writing life is summed as follows:
So in a sense love is like writing: living in such heightened state that accuracy and awareness are vital.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (130)
Not many writers are capable of sustaining accuracy and awareness for more than a few lines. (It is an open question how capable folk are of love.) Love and writing are both treated as a kind of discerning hyper-sensitivity, or receptivity. Kraus does not say so, but such receptivity could easily lead to a kind of perceptual overload or meltdown ("anyone who feels too much...gets very lonely" (227)); such meltdown is sometimes prevented, the novel suggests, by a principle of selection: need (see the quote from p. 192).
Need also drives the compromises that professional philosophers accept in our lives; we say we value independent even autonomous thought, but in practice we prefer if two of our peers and an editor sign off on our writings. Writing to garner approval of others, if only concerning the form, is what sophists and the playwright Agathon do in Plato's dialogues. We professors, we pursue careers in which luck, hard work, and social canniness are rewarded, but in which necessarily let our judgments be shaped by others—in such a world a flicker of public integrity becomes a political posture to be deconstructed-not-in-Derrida's-sense-but-deconstructed-in-the-plain-gruesome-enough-sense by those in the know.
Yet, despite or, perhaps, because of the compromises and contradictions in our lives, we professional philosophers are fond of sincerity (see, e.g. Spinoza TTP, chapter 7 or common extensions of Grice). But as Kraus's narrator remarks, sincerity and direct speech can also be a denial of complexity. The remark is not, necessarily, advocacy of insincerity (although it could be necessary sometimes); it is also compatible with the thought that one can be sincere about simple things like bits of mathematics and a show-tune that one hums in the shower.
So, if I had allowed myself to know something about life I would have realized that my friend's uncompromising way of being philosophical-and-in-the-world, entails a permanent teetering over the abyss. I keep my distance.
Comments