Bogged Down

...If the work of art is to become a part of our lives," Kamp writes, "if our lives themselves are thereby turned into works of art, and if, following Nietzsche, we recognize that our historical awareness has transformed all modern moralities into artistic creations, then literature will need to transform us, it will need to exploit the psychology of affect in order to perform its persuasive task, thereby assuring us of the reality of our connections" Is this seriously meant7 Does Kamp really think that art can "transform us" when politics—anod I am referring to radical, critical politics —sseems to have so signally failed7...

...Professor Kamp tells us in his new book On Modernism (MIT Press, 338 pp, $ 10 00) "I had no doubt that I would be approached by a peddler any moment ". Ah, yes indeed, there aren??t many thrills left m our jaded world, and it pleases me to know there are anarchist professors at MIT who can still run a temperature at the mere thought of being approached by a "peddler " It only proves all over again that if a play sets out to shock people it must depend on a shock able class, of whom professors form an important and always available contingent Yet one wonders why, before writing this long, incredibly involved, and rather murky book on the problem of modernism—anod all of it is founded on the delicious thrill of that moment a few years ago in the Living Theatre's loft—whay Professor Kamp couldn't for even an instant imagine someone who would not react the way he did to Jack Geber??s play I know a cultivated drug addict, for example, who detests such phrases as "human values, supports the Biscuits and voted foe Goldwater in 1964 He told me of having sat coolly through the Geber play, mildly tickled to see his boring routine made even more boring on the stage Unlike the professor, who expects every member of the audience to go out of the Geber play questioning not only society but also himself, my friend the cultivated drug addict felt the play was a typical piece of pseudo-avant-garde sentimentality...

...From his description of the experience, I got the impression that he was somewhat in the position of a housewife listening to an afternoon soap opera, who has momentary glimpses of a familiar reality wrapped in the commercialized cocoon of received notions...

...The truth is that all this gabble about epistemology has almost nothing to do with the present crisis situation in modern art, or with the critical problems that the situation gives rise to Epistemology was born at the dawn of science, when philosophy was still trying to form hypotheses about matters which science would later systematize without its help There is no one epistemology since the advance of science, but any number of epistemologies, depending on the subject of discourse and the field of knowledge In art and esthetics, the writings and thoughts of the artists themselves, their reflections on their art, constitute the epistemology If one wants to know what the traditions and problems of modern art are, one does not go to the philosophers or scientists but to the artists themselves Joyce, Valery, Proust, Kafka and others of that rank have in fact been more influential in determining the climate of philosophical opinion than the philosophers themselves A work, for example, like Being and Nothingness owes more to Sartre's readings m modern literature than to any specific philosophical source It is a work of style and emotion before it is a work of philosophical reasoning...

...The bog has spread alarmingly in recent years Kamp??s book supposedly would offer us a causeway, built of good solid brick, to traverse it and reach more salubrious regions But he is bogged down too, and his alibi is to lay the blame on philosophy At the same time he is quite snooty about criticism—we do it all the time and never get anywhere—anod quite toplofty and vague about politics—he is an anarchist and has a great contempt for Establishment experts I had the impression that Kamp??s political doubts were all handed over to the artist, who, he hopes, will somehow straighten them out for him He obviously has not confronted them with anything like the intensity he reserves for underground plays...

...One gets the impression that something is rotten somewhere It seems that Geber wrote his play with the ghosts of Descartes, Hume, Herten, Swift and Gibbon peering over his shoulder Particularly Descartes, who, as we know, tried to solve the epistemology-cal problem by conceiving a new kind of God to underwrite his feeling of inner perfection Then all the trouble started Hume tried to rearrange matters but tailed, and so we poor moderns are condemned to eternal doubt and eternal criticism Kamp, of course, dislikes the necessity for doubt (after all, he does teach at MIT) and presents any number of cogent reasons for the criticism In the process, however, not much is learned about modernism which helps us form judgments on what Kamp himself admits is a confused, even dizzying, artistic situation, a kind of chronic disease afflicting both our artists and their audiences He also does not tell us how, if the foundations of our knowledge have been permanently undermined by WRITERS WRITING Cartesian doubt, he can so blithely refer to "humane values " On what grounds7 With what authority7...

...It never occurs to Kamp that The Connection may be constructed of just as many received ideas—mmodern received ideas, if you will—as any third-rate avant-garde novel His amazing overestimation of this kind of play has more to do with his own limitations, middle-class m origin and rather touching for that reason, than anything he adduces from the long and troubled history of modernism Epistemology and The Connection* The breakdown of artistic form and The Connection1 The uncertainty of the foundations of our knowledge and The Connection* Baroque art, the Council of Trent and The Connection* The situation of modern art and The Connection* It goes on and on tor pages, all of it written in a style which, as someone once said of another writer, is incapable of telling the bare and simple truth Sentence by sentence, one can figure out vaguely what he is driving at, but when the sentences mount up to form paragraphs, when the paragraphs become chapters, it is almost impossible to establish a coherent meaning to the whole...

...Given his concern about form and tradition, his seemingly sincere interest in the survival of "humane values," such an approach would have enabled Kamp to provide us with a better set of critical concepts than the ones he has set forth It is hardly enough to condemn Happenings in one breath and praise Geber??s play in the next, solely on the basis of one's dislike for spiteful destructiveness In fact, Kamp admits the literary weakness of The Connection, but regards it as a virtue, whereas the unplanned confusion of a Happening mobilizes all of his scorn The reason for this is far from clear Modernism may be a permanent condition, as he claims, yet there has been a break in its continuity and works like The Connection with their blind espousal of a private, dun,untested set of underground values, are almost emblematic of that break The great moderns were all both neo-classicists and romantics, but the essential difference between them and the present-day variety is that they were unwilling romantics If one reads T S Hot or Wyndham Lewis one can see the process at work Both regard romanticism as the disease and classicism as the cure "We are all sick to some extent," Lewis said, meaning that all the artists of his generation —the crucial, 1914 generation—were tarred by the romantic brush, it was a fate which he saw as implicit in the social and political situation Lewis felt that the artist's real values were in some way superhuman, even inhuman, and that when he succumbed to the pressures of modern society he was bound to fall back into the bog, the "bad lands," of decadents and romanticism...

...Bogged Down By Raymond Rosenthal Rather meek professor of the humanities at MIT named Louis Kamp goes to a play named The Connection and has what amounts to a revelation He is a special kind of professor, however, who hates the social and political implications of his job (he considers the universities breeding grounds for Establishment bureaucrats and experts), objects to the way in Vietnam, the Atom Bomb, racial inequality and social injustices, and proclaims himself an anarchist and the upholder of "humane values " Well, this particular man goes to this particular play and all sorts to terrible things beg to happen inside his heart and his head—especially his heart He is shocked, thrilled, depressed Imagine' Real addicts on the stage who even solicit you in the men's room His voice cracking with emotion...

...The real difficulty can be traced to the fact that Kamp dates modernism almost from the time of Shakespeare and Montaigne, after all, Descartes' doubt was preceded by Hamlet and the Essays From a rather diffuse, historical viewpoint, this is perfectly valid and understandable, but it turns On Modernism into a plodding textbook summary of ideas that have been more entertainingly and suggestively presented in Valery or Wyndham Lewis And going back that far does little to settle current problems in the arts It would have helped considerably if Kamp had dropped all that stuff about epistemology, doubts and unrelenting criticism forgotten his thrill at The Connection, and tried seriously to understand what the important modern artists said about their work...

...If we are to remain human," Kamp concludes, "if we are not to become slaves of the necessity for transference [which he regards as the essential psychological virtue of effective art], we shall have to make the attempt, and make it constantly, at moral and esthetic judgment—tHough there be no grounds for judgment " We don't know what's happening to us but it's happening and, as he says, "with unheard of intensity " But there's a fly in this ointment, since "the results have proved a mixed blessing, confounding our hopes with the prospect uncontrollable disorder??both in our arts and m our lives " And, let me add, also in "our" thoughts...