lil shorterish for once - is there any good pandemic art?
Hello again correspondents,
Before I forget - the thought struck me that I could do a something like a letter to the editor kind of thing in this little newsletter. A couple of you occasional email me in reply, and I greatly appreciate it - it’s nice to think together! Side bar: Thinking is enriched by direct community and dialog. Thinking even in apparent isolation remains fundamentally collective and as a mediated form of togetherness it’s also a respite from apparent isolation, because to think is per se to be in a kind of community. Not to say it’s necessarily enough community, but I digress. Anywho, thanks for writing in. And if anyone has a thought they’d like to bounce out to the network, let me know. This may also be a stupid idea, I dunno.
Alright so last time I rambled about some movies and leftist stuff both from Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. In that post I mentioned that I feel funny typing about anything that’s not covid related - not in general but in this blog/newsletter thing. Why? I don’t know. I am a man of mystery, an enigma opaque even unto myself. Well, in that case, get ready me because I’m in luck, you’ve got an idea for a post connecting those movies and lefty shit from the Brits to covid! No need for I to thank me, I’m welcome. (Reader, please forgive my failing sense of humor. By the way, I stole this riff.)
Right, so, I continue to watch those old movies and enjoy them. I can’t remember the exact reason now - I prove once again that Open Mode Industries’ fundamental value proposition in today’s crowded media market place is precision - but British New Wave Cinema led me down a rabbit hole of reading a little Raymond Williams. Williams has been on my list to read seriously for ages, and he remains there - who has the time to seriously read?! - but I did read the 6 or 7 page extract that’s in the book Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures, edited by Scott MacKenzie. The extract is from a short co-authored book Williams did in 1954 called Preface To Film, which I can not find in electronic form and am too lazy and cheap to buy. That book is where Williams first used his term ‘structures of feeling.’ I’ll be blunt, I’m not entirely sure I get it - I prove once again that Open Mode Industries’ fundamental value proposition in jockeying for position among the thinkfluencers queueing up to shape the hearts and minds of today is perspicacity [note to self: look up perspicacity] - but despite not being sure I get it, I think it’s super interesting.
As far as I can work out, ‘structure of feeling’ is part of the there-ness of a social and cultural location in a specific time and place. By analogy: what is uniquely you about you? There’s something, and it’s hard to specify. This is true of everyone. (Repeat after me: we are all unique individuals.) We’re all singular, so to speak, and that scales upward. Families, bands, friendship networks, etc, small groupings are singularly themselves. It scales further: places are themselves, cultures are themselves, etc. That can sound silly. (There’s a great Stewart Lee bit where his director or producer or whoever argues with him about whether he can claim about his show Comedy Vehicle “this is this.” There’s a short excerpt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78IXMIChPN8) But it’s not a silly point so much as a serious point that’s hard to state adequately. For Williams, at least the Williams of Preface to Film, based on the whole six or so pages of it that I read quickly tonight - I prove once again that Open Mode Industries’ fundamental value proposition in staking out a distinct line of thought amid the buzzing, blooming confusion of post-postmodern life is a thorough literature review - a structure of feeling is part of what makes a lived collectivity in a place and time be itself.
He writes that “[a]ll the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly believe, essentially related, although in practice, and in detail, this is not always easy to see. In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life, the general social organization, and, to a large extent, the dominant ideas. It is not necessary to discuss here which, if any, of these aspects is, in the whole complex, determining; an important institution like the drama will, in all probability, take its colour in varying degrees from them all. But while we may, in the study of a past period, separate out particular aspects of life, and treat them as if they were self-contained, it is obvious that this is only how they may be studied, not how they were experienced. We examine each element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every clement was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole. And it seems to be true, from the nature of art, that it is from such a totality that the artist draws.”
Structure of feeling, then, is a holistic category, oriented toward appreciating and trying to understand the big picture of an object of analysis, in relation to its context, with that context also to be understood in a big picture sense. This is what artists do as well, as that final line indicates. Artists, at least dramatists and scriptwriters and filmmakers, who Williams is talking about in this short book, but presumably he means other artists or artist more broadly. This is part of why art can resist theorizing in some degree - artists are experts in and practitioners of holism, of finding the this-ness in its big picture of their subject matter and expressing it via the various techniques that compose the craft element of their artistry. At least some art and artists anyway.
That final line goes on, I broke it in half, to make the claim that provides me a bridge to covid. Williams writes, “it is in art, primarily, that the effect of the totality, the dominant structure of feeling, is expressed and embodied.” (This is all on page 611 by the way.) Art gets pride of place in the kind of holistic knowing of a person, place, way of life, etc. A little later Williams amplifies the point. “The structure of feeling, as I have been calling it, lies deeply embedded in our lives; it cannot be merely extracted and summarized; it is perhaps only in art—and this is the importance of art—that it can be realized, and communicated, as a whole experience. (...) the artist has not only to feel; he must to the extent that he is an artist, find ways of realizing and communicating, wholly and definitively, the moving experience. Only when he has found such ways can the personal vision be confirmed in the public view.”
When I read it this reminded me of a point in a book I read on music, I forget what one or the exact wording - I prove once again that Open Mode Industries’ fundamental value proposition within the network of quasi-public para-academic discourse proliferating with the speed of the decay of the university system is acuity of memory and assiduousness in note-taking - but it was something to the effect that to a significant degree music trains listeners’ ears. Broadening the point, art is training skills and dispositions of perception and reflection on specific subject matters or facets of natural/personal/social life. That is, art doesn’t just reflect, in reflecting, and doing so from a specific angle of view, it constructs. So when Williams stresses the importance of artistic communication of a structure of feeling - art being for at least the Williams of (these six page of) Preface to Film the only way that the structure of feeling can really be expressed - it seems to me that this means in part that artists help audiences think holistically as well, think about the this-ness, the singularity of what’s depicted.
And now here’s the covid thought. Thoughts. Whatever.
This pandemic life and pandemic-in-denial life fucking sucks so fucking bad, holy shit! I wrote a bit of my experience of this in an essay at Peste a while back. The link’s currently broken because they’re redoing their site design but here’s a link via the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20230623082658/https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality and if it’s any interest I chatted with Patrick on his podcast about it here: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/nate-holdren I think the nightmarishness of all of this exists as a sort of feedback loop connecting the brutality and cruelty of what’s happening with the difficulties of processing this, making it make any fucking sense and being able to do anything other than either stare in horror or dissociate. Sarah Jaffe had a great essay on the challenges of pandemic grief interrupted/deferred/not allowed to begin, here: https://archive.is/BcNN1 I believe her new book on grief will be out later this year and I look forward to reading it.
It occurred to me reading the Williams tonight that I think part of what cranks up the volume knob so hard on that nightmare feedback loop is lack of good pandemic art to express the structure of feeling of pandemic life - the awful fucking this-ness of this awful fucking living nightmare. I don’t mean that trivially, I think there are huge psychic costs and harms and reverberating traumas because of the difficulty processing - even fucking perceiving, let alone comprehending, let alone actually working through - this shit. Obviously the most important political priority is to address the killing and disabling and the harms and all, but on the list of what we should be outraged over is the lack of cultural, intellectual, aesthetic, whatever-the-adjective materials with which to make sense of (or really, in important ways, actually have) this experience we’re being subjected to. Not to reduce art to therapy or whatever, so much as to say we need bread and roses too, and this is a case of those roses being lacking, even if they’re likely to be ones that prick our fingers, pardon the belabored metaphor. So yeah, know any good art for making sense of the pandemic and pandemic-in-denial structures of feeling? If so, hit my inbox, I need it.
Keep on keeping on,
Nate
ps- apparently ‘perspicacity’ means insight or discernment. The more you know.