I fraværet af egen læsning af bøger, har jeg i stedet læst om bøger. Her til morgen læste jeg eksempelvis – med en vis antiintellektuel skadefryd – artiklen ‘What Was Literary Fiction? The strangely short history of a publishing niche’, der erklærer den smalle og ‘finkulturelle’ skønlitteratur for død (eller døende).
Nu er selve det at erklære et fænomen for dødt jo en ædel disciplin i sig selv. Noget man skal gå en anelse skeptisk til som læser. For på varierende tidspunkter indenfor de sidste par år har jeg læst nekrologer over alt lige fra fremskridtet, kapitalismen, religion, socialisme, Trumpisme, liberalisme, den judæo-kristne tradition over det industrielle landbrug til maskuliniteten som vi har kendt den hidtil. De var alle skrevet af indsigtsfulde og reflekterende mennesker. Og alligevel, til trods herfor, virker det på forunderlig vis til, at fænomenerne enten stadig lever eller eksisterer i en uhellig og udød zombietilværelse.
Den indvending forhindrede dog ikke at jeg – en uironisk og (føler jeg) ugleset læser af genrelitterær eskapisme i form af genrer som science fiction, fantasy og horror – opnåede en smålig (men ikke nødvendigvis lille) glæde at læse om den palliative tilstand indenfor ‘fiction that privileges art over entertainment’. Og dog. Måske alligevel ikke helt. Dels er essayet er mere nuanceret end som så (læs det nu bare, ok?). Og i princippet har jeg ikke noget imod, at forfattere udforsker nye, orginale, smalle og krævende måder at skrive på (jeg ville bare ønske, de ikke så ned på min lurvede smag i processen).
I virkeligheden vil jeg jo bare gerne have et elskovsbarn mellem genrelitteratur og Literary Fiction. Ganske vist er jeg en sjasket læser, der til enhver tid vil prioritere plot over sproglige excesser. Men jeg sætter også pris på at en overlegent skrevet genrelitterær bog. Nu er jeg ganske vist sørgeligt bevidst om, at min yndling Emily St. John Mandel kategorisk nægter at hun skriver science fiction – ;-( – men det ændrer ikke på, at hendes litterære evner er grunden til at ‘Station Eleven’ er den bedste science fiction roman nogensinde. Kunne jeg blot få mere af det, så ville jeg være lykkelig.
Narrativet om kulturens forfald og stagnation bindes sammen i andet essay jeg læste i denne uge, denne gang i New York Times: ‘Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill: A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years’.
Det er et af de der lange, episke, fejende essays, man nærmest kun kan skrive fra en ophøjet og priviligeret position (skrevet, forestiller jeg mig, ved et skrivebord fyldt med lærde bøger (kun Literary Fiction!), alt imens man af og til kaster et blasert og lidenskabsløst blik ud af vinduets pragtudsigt over Central Park) som kulturkritiker ved den måske eneste fortsat globalt relevante avis. Jeg har ikke selv læst det grundigt nok endnu til at forfatte en kommentar, men bed mærke i denne:
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more
diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
Skribenten taler mest om finkultur, men følelsen af stasis, stagnation og den uendelige mimetisk reproduktion af tidligere generationers kultur slår også igennem i populærkulturen. Jeg vil – for tankeeksperimentets skyld – opfordre til at du selv overvejer, hvad du mener at 2020’ernes kultur vil blive husket for. Eller blot 10’erne, for den sags skyld. Hvilke sange, bøger, digte, skuespil,l film? Når de om føje år vil holde temafester, hvad er det så helt præcist folk vil erindre de senere årtier for? Jeg har ingen gode bud selv. I essayet er der også et bud på en (hold nu fast) makroøkonomisk forklaring:
I have a few theories, but one to start with is that the modernist cultural explosion might very well have been like the growth of the economy more generally: not the perpetual forward march we were promised in the 20th century, but a one-time-only rocket blast followed by a long, slow, disappointing glide. As the economist Robert Gordon has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and 1970 — the “special century,” he calls it — was an anomalous superevent fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation, the combustion engine) whose successors (above all information technology) have not had the same economic impact. In the United States, the 2010s had the slowest productivity growth of any decade in recorded history; if you believe you are living in the future, I am guessing you have not recently been on United Airlines. In this macroeconomic reading, a culture that no longer delivers expected stylistic innovations might just be part and parcel of a more generally underachieving century, and not to be tutted at in isolation.
Jeg tror, der er meget rigtigt i den analyse. At økonomisk stagnation nødvendigvis må smitte af på den kulturelle kreativitet og dynamik. Hvilket vel egentlig er et urovækkende perspektiv, hvis vi de kommende årtier skal degrowth’e og være cirkulært økonomiske hele tiden. Det er en uskik at citere alt for meget, jeg ved det godt, undskyld, men de her afsnit ræsonnerer meget med min egen tænkning:
Since the start of the 21st century, despite all recent digital accelerations of discovery and transmission, no stylistic innovations of equivalent scale have taken place. The closest thing we can point to has been in rap, where the staccato nihilism of drill, deeply conversant with YouTube and SoundCloud, would sound legitimately foreign to a listener from 2000. (When the teenage Chief Keef was rapping in his grandmother’s Chicago apartment, he was following in the tradition of Joyce and Woolf and Pound.) In fact, the sampling techniques pioneered in hip-hop and, later, electronic dance music — once done with piles of records, now with folders of WAV files — have trickled down into photography, painting, literature and lower forms like memes, all of which now present a hyperreferentialism that sets them slightly apart from the last century’s efforts. In the 2010s, hip-hop alone seemed to be taking the challenge of digital progress seriously, though it, too, has calcified since; having switched from linear writing and recording of verses to improvising hundreds of one-verse digital takes, rappers now seem to be converging on a single, ProTools-produced flow.
There have also been a few movies of limited influence (and very limited box-office success) that have introduced new cinematographic techniques: Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016) was the first film shot at an eerily lifelike 120 frames per second, while at the other extreme, Steven Soderbergh shot all of “Unsane” (2018) with an iPhone 7 Plus. Michael Bay’s “Ambulance” (2022) included first-person-view drone shots, flying the viewer through the windows of exploding cars the way your dad shot your last beach-vacation memory reel. But by and large the technologies that have changed filmmaking since 2000 have stayed in the postproduction studio: computer-graphics engines, digital tools for color grading and sound editing. They have had vanishingly little influence on the grammar of the moving image, in the way that lightweight cameras did for the Nouvelle Vague or digital kits did for American indie cinema. Really, the kind of image that distinguishes this century is less the spectacular Hollywood image than what the German artist Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image” — low-res compressed pictures like memes, thumbnails, screenshots — whose meaning arises from being circulated and modified.
It may just be that the lexical possibilities of many traditional media are exhausted, and there’s no shame in that. Maybe Griffith and Eisenstein and Godard and Akerman did it all already, and it’s foolish to expect a new kind of cinema. Certainly that exhaustion came long ago to abstract painting, where every possible move can only be understood as a quotation or reboot. (Kerstin Brätsch, one of the smartest abstract painters working today, has acknowledged that any mark she makes is “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference.”) Consider last year’s hit “Creepin’,” by The Weeknd: a 2022 rejigger of the 2004 Mario Winans song “I Don’t Wanna Know” with no meaningful change in instrumentation in the nearly two intervening decades. It was hardly the only recent chart-topper to employ a clangingly obvious sample, but it’s not like the endeavors of the 1990s, when Puffy and family were rapping over “Every Breath You Take.” Back then the critic Greg Tate could still celebrate such sampling as a motor of cultural progress; by “collapsing all eras of Black music onto a chip,” a new generation had new tools to write a new chapter of sound. Twenty-five years later, the citation and rearrangement have become so automatic as to seem automated — as our recent fears about artificial intelligence and large language models suggest we already know.
Trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to make, a growing number of young artists essentially pivoted to political activism — plant a tree and call it a sculpture — while others leaned hard into absurdity to try to express the sense of digital disorientation. You saw this Dadaist strategy in the hyperpop of 100 gecs, in the crashed-and-burned “post-internet” art of the collective Dis, and above all in the satirical fashion of Virgil Abloh.
It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just own our static position; who cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful? But that pesky modernist conviction remains in us: A work of art demonstrates its value through its freshness. So we have shifted our expectations from new forms to new subject matter — new stories, told in the same old languages as before. In the 20th century we were taught that cleaving “style” from “content” was a fallacy, but in the 21st century content (that word!) has had its ultimate vengeance, as the sole component of culture that our machines can fully understand, transmit and monetize. What cannot be categorized cannot be streamed; to pass through the pipes art must become information. So, sure, there are new songs about texting and ghosting; sure, there are superhero movies about trauma and comedies about climate change. But in privileging the parts of culture that can be summarized and shared — the narratives, the characters, the lyrics, the lessons — digital media have bulldozed an autonomous sphere of culture into a moral terrain that Aristotle would find familiar: We again want our “content” to authentically reflect the world (mimesis) and produce healthy feelings in its consumers (catharsis).
Very unfortunately, this evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st century has been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women, people of color and out sexual minorities into the culture industry — conflated, not least, by its P.R. departments. A gay rom-com is trotted out as “the first”; a Black Little Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market except the very people they once systematically excluded. If resisting such market essentialism was once a primordial task of the artist — “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism,” Césaire made clear in 1956 as he forged a French poetry that could span the Black Atlantic — today identities keep being diminished, brutally, into a series of searchable tags.
This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital requirements for communicability may help explain why so much recently celebrated American culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist forms: oil portraiture, Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics, operettas barely distinguishable from musical theater. “It scandalizes progressive sensibility to think that things were so much more complex in this domain a generation ago than they are now, but there you have it,” said Darby English, the art historian and author of “How To See a Work of Art in Total Darkness,” when asked in 2021 about the recent efflorescence of Black American art in museums and the market. “Because the core project is communication,” English said, “anything that resists the art-communications apparatus fails to leave a mark. Form has become increasingly irrelevant during these 20 years.”
Allerførst: tænk hvis man kunne få mulighed for at skrive sådan, altså til daglig, i ens day job. Jeg vil også gerne være kulturkritiker ved New York Times, og blive betalt et helt ublu beløb for at causere over den vestlige kulturs sidste dage.
Dernæst: der er (for) mange argumenter her at pakke ud og forholde sig til. Jeg ved ikke helt, hvor jeg selv skal begynde, så jeg vil egentlig blot opfordre til at læse det hele (der er MERE).
Måske det bare mig, der er fanget i det modernistiske tankesæt, men jeg savner at blive … begejstret, overrasket, fascineret, betaget af noget kulturelt. Eksempelvis musikalsk. Bevares, jeg holder da af at nørde rundt i mine playlister på Spotify og opdage ny musik. Men det er svært ikke at se gentagelserne. Alle The Cure-klonerne (lige fra musikken til æstetikken); alle de minimalistiske technosange, der lyder som noget Aphex Twin lavede for 30 år siden. Og selvom jeg elsker Blondshell-albummet fra 2023 (lytter til ‘Kiss City’, ‘Tarmac’, ‘Sepsis’ og ‘Joiner’ på repeat), men kan jeg med nogen større troværdighed sige, at hun ikke lyder præcis som Belly gjorde på ‘Super-Connected’ i 1995? Nej. Igen: man skal passe på med de store generaliserende teser om kulturel stagnation og fænomeners død. Men jeg synes det er stimulerende at tænke over de her ting – og hvad de fortæller om samfundet generelt. Og personligt går stagnationen og de manglende (nye) følelser mig på. Vil gerne have fejet benene væk under mig snart.