Aaron Kunin Points to the Aesthetic Ground

"Would Vanessa Place Be a Better Poet If She Had Better Opinions?" asks Aaron Kunin at Nonsite. Kunin posits that Place's work might just be "poorly written," particularly in Place's Gone with the Wind Twitter project, rather than indefensibly racist. He recalls VP's profession of antiracism in Artist's Statement (noting meanwhile that "[i]t may be objected that anyone can profess antiracism"), considers structural racism and its relation to subject position, and invokes essays by John Keene, Trisha Low, Cathy Park Hong, and Kim Calder. "In the end, Low and Keene repeat the accusation of racism, and so does Hong, albeit in more ambiguous terms. My point is that the aesthetic judgment is a stronger intellectual position than the moral judgment."

As well, there are other ways to explain the fact that people enjoy representations of ugly and painful things. Some people might not think these things are painful. Some people might be drawn to Gone with the Wind because they want to own slaves; others, because they want to learn about slavery, or about the mind of a person who likes slavery, in order to resist its oppressive legacy. Others might be interested in judging the artist’s skill or lack of skill, or patterns of sound, or the structure of the plot. All of these people still belong to the aesthetic tradition following Aristotle, in which people take pleasure in representations. What doesn’t fit into this tradition is the judgment (on which, again, both Place and her accusers concur) that some subjects are too ugly or too painful to be represented in art. By virtue of its subject matter, art becomes a carrier for ideology, no longer art but blasphemy or obscenity or propaganda or hate speech. Judgments where the frame of representation does not contain the violence of what is being represented might seem to patrol the boundaries of art, but actually reject the foundations of aesthetic value. They are all ways of not liking art.

Aesthetic judgment involves making discriminations between values within works of art. Some representations are more enjoyable than others. Many readers have enjoyed Citizen, where [Claudia] Rankine meditates on varieties of racism in American history. Many readers have been pained by Tweeting Gone with the Wind. Readers are responding to the strategies that Rankine and Place use for representing racism, but both poets are representing racism, which means that they are aestheticizing racism, turning it into an object for readers to enjoy.

I want to stress this point. Any antiracist art worthy of the name needs strategies for the depiction of racist language and images. This is different from the problem of having the right attitude. It’s a problem for an artist who already has an antiracist attitude. That is to say, it’s an aesthetic problem. The failure to find an effective strategy is an aesthetic failure.

Kunin also looks at "masterpieces" of conceptual writing, including Caroline Bergvall's Via, in which she transcribes English translations of the opening tercet of Dante’s Inferno; Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Insomnia and the Aunt, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Christian Bok’s Eunoia. Kunin also sees agreement between Place and her critics (yes, that includes Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo): "This year we have seen waves of denunciations of the racism of a writer whose ideas about race are pretty much identical to those of the writers who are denouncing her."

For the calls to denounce Place are also not a discourse of aesthetic value. No one is saying that the poor quality of her work makes it undeserving of the resources and attention it has received. Instead people are saying that these honors are undeserved because they are a function of her white privilege. Nor is anyone saying that these honors should be given to artists who are doing better work. Instead they are saying that these honors should be given to oppressed artists in the name of justice. Place and her accusers seem to agree that no one is doing better work than Place, and that there is no such thing as better work. The notion of values specific to art seems inconceivable.

If Place wants social recognition, poetry is a strange place to look for it. Her accusers seem equally misguided. If justice is what they want, aren’t there more efficient ways of getting it than writing and criticizing poetry?

And he goes on to consider the use of Elvis in his friend CAConrad's work, while acknowledging that Elvis "as an agent of literary history in Advanced Elvis Course has been particularly important to [Kunin's] writing and thinking"; and questions whether or not Conrad's call to put aside Walt Whitman and instead read Dawn Lundy Martin is a choice that will not only serve to "devalue Whitman’s abilities as a poet, but also Martin’s."

Read it all at Nonsite.