This is fantastic. Well done.
Josh, I think you might really dig Matt Madden's book *99 Ways to Tell a Story." It's being marketed by the publisher as a comix how-to, but it's really a ou-ba-po experiment, based on Raymond Queneau's *Exercises in Style.* LINK
That looks excellent, Shanna. I'll order it for the bookstore.
thanks, as usual, for a very edifying post. much to think on!
Good to see the always thought-provoking Mr. McCloud appreciated. I had the good fortune to see him speak years ago, and it was a real pleasure.
"(though can one really be passionate about pluralism?)"
Every small-town boy or girl who found happiness in NYC answers "Yes."
Touché, Ray. Your example makes me translate "pluralism" into "cosmopolitanism," which I find more congenial somehow. And yet does either translate into an aesthetic stance? Those provincial boys and girls all find their own tribes to belong to, don't they, even if they celebrate the existence of others?
I go back and forth. On the one hand, tribalism seems like the primary evil of our times, if not all times. On the other hand, there's tremendous energy in the pride of the particular, and identity politics sometimes seems like the only politics that isn't completely bankrupt. There's no necessary opposition there: why should passionate identification with one's tribe (of whatever stripe) necessarily mean fear of and hostility to others? Just because it's usually played out that way doesn't mean it must always be so.
In the arts, and poetry in particular, what I find most exasperating is one tribe's attempt to appropriate the whole of the territory to itself. And yet why take it seriously? I read Billy Collins' intro to the new Best American Poetry, and the endless stream of articles on the death of poetry (meaning the death of a particular kind of poetry, Animist-Classicism), and they just seem like desperate rear-guard actions. At least Collins comes partway out of the closet by being forthright about his predilections and prejudices (he admits to judging poems on their "manifest content"). Paradoxically, claiming membership in one's own tribe may be the first step toward a genuine pluralism, because you are no longer pretending to be universal.
Apologies if this comment double-posted; HaloScan's being wonky.
Nice -- I see what you mean by translation. Personal passion arises more quickly from a felt personal ethic than from an understood social need. Cosmopolitanism is to pluralism as disgust with short-sighted selfishness is to a progressive tax.
And that makes me realize that a lot of the poking and scoffing directed at "pluralism" (philosophically, politically, religiously) is a matter of loss in translation. Someone who pledges sole and everlasting allegiance to one identity and death to all others isn't "cosmopolitan". But a _series_ of sole-and-everlasting allegiances (like self-help and diet and faith faddists, or the guy who "used to be a punk") doesn't describe the state either; neither does toggling them on and off in rotation (one life for the office, one life for the spouse and kids, one life for the church); and neither does touristy appropriation ("I _am_ blaxploitation," says the geek video clerk). And all those could be said to be allowed by pluralism. Pluralism enables cosmopolitanism (and, given modern technology, human survival); it doesn't enforce it.
Similar translation problems come with any ethical desire, though. Enabling may be the best that politics or philosophy can aim for.
What's the ethical desire? In cold abstractions, something like: Open dependence on one's own contexts while needing contact with other contexts and knowing the sometimes deeply awful effects of _any_ context. On the aesthetic side, that doesn't necessarily mean standing outside every given tribe of artists -- which would be difficult if we loosen the definition of "tribes" past the immediately social to include post-facto distinctions like McCloud's -- but it does imply exchange with tribes outside one's own. And I know it can be felt passionately, even if the passion isn't always apparent as such to home-team fanatics.
(By happy coincidence, I'm currently reading Lytle Shaw’s _Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie_....)
Hi Josh,
I just happened to stuble on your post here. I like your analysis on the "Four Tribes" theory. What particularly caught my eye was the comparison to Personality Typing, since I just posted a commentary about that very comparison last week. Anyhow, thought you might enjoy the link. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!
I loved the "Four Tribes" bit.
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