Jokūbas Andrijauskas: Let’s renounce the fear of heights Culture

1.

Conversations in which you might have said more, but maybe the conversation was rushed, maybe you didn’t grab and extract the main idea, usually don’t come to mind.

When we met with a friend, we discussed regarding great personalities, or rather, regarding the possibility of their existence. I was prohe is contra. He tells me: “following all, French philosophers have long established that the author is dead. The author is only a result, an effect of the conditions of society, he does not have any autonomy in himself, so to seriously talk regarding the canon of genius authors is like repeating overly naive fables of romanticism.” He said something like this, only more detailed, more suggestive and in such a manner, as if he were preaching the unmistakable Sermon from the Mount. This conversation undermined my efforts to resist, and I returned home empty-handed, disappointed in my impotence, but the discussion now continued in my mind, and was fueled by the realization that I was fighting not only a friend, but also an intellectual tendency, not limited to a single individual.

When I felt that I had mentally matured a strong enough response, I jumped out of the shower, sat down at the computer and wrote this:

“first, it is not true, as R. Bartas claims, that the writer is just the scriptor of the text dictated to him, and not the author. It is true that the author depends on the various cultural, historical and social conditions that pervade him. It is not true that these authors are completely and totally determinesas if he were a snowflake that melts into a puddle or an exquisite melody that gets lost in a symphony.

Proponents of the author’s death lack the sincerity to admit to themselves and others that they are just chooses in culture we see what is general, anonymous, supra-individual and anti-individual – that is, the lowest level of the cultural world. But to take this view is to ignore what makes any work of art and author great. Artists in particular, on the contrary, distinguish and exalt their Self by overcoming this stage.

The writer is precisely defined by the fact that he, using various pre-prepared meanings for his creative act, rises above them – this is dictated by the elementary logic of subordination. It subjugates external conditions to itself, not the other way around. Therefore, Sartre rightly said that Flaubert wrote The Bovari pony not because he was bourgeois, but because he was Flaubert. A writer is not a scriptwriter, but a blacksmith – a creator of new styles, new clichés, new worlds of meaning and sensations.

Let’s talk matter-of-factly and frankly: if we sincerely doubted the author’s existence, then there would be no difference in what to read. Therefore, the terrible irony starves the eyes – we read Bart, M. Foucault, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, and not some Antoine from the French province, because we not only believe in the author, but even believe that there are better and worse authors.

2.

The theories of French intellectuals regarding the death of great personalities are the fruit of a late stage in the development of culture and thought. To speak of the deaths of the great is the privilege of a nation which, following long toil, can relax by criticizing its greatest achievements, and at the end of its journey let go of the reins and sink into too uncommitted reflection. It’s like an old man who now spends his days critically reflecting on the passions and follies of his youth.

However, culture does not have to serve the intellectuals, and if a work of art primarily contains content digested by intellectuals – be it meaning structures, social antagonisms, patriarchal ideas, or anything else that is currently fashionable to talk regarding in literary studies – then this view must be understood as politicized, but the revenge of people lacking talent and taste once morest the cultural heights in relation to which they feel estranged, like beggars at the door to a banquet. What elevates the work to the heights is not perceived by the analytical efforts of the dissecting mind, but by taste, instinct, intuition – call it what you will, but in general – the body, which is the only one capable of feeling the differences between different degrees of intensities, the high degree of which is marked by the greatest works.

Kafka Metamorphosis – I take this work as an example, because every intellectual theory seems to feel the need to translate it into its own language and at the same time hide it under a bundle of rationalized interpretation – is a great work not because it skillfully conveys a critique of a profit-motivated society, but because it creates a specific , an intensity that cannot be reduced to any theories, manifested in an exceptional, physically experienced affect. The analysis of the mind, which dissects this affect, plays a secondary role here, like the mystic who tries to convey an intense religious experience through crude, stilted communication.

3.

When we talk regarding ideas as influential as the death of the author, it’s not just what they say, but how they’re used. The death of the author as a theory is simple in its aims – it is an attempt to free the text from the tyranny of the author’s intentions and prepare it for creative interpretation. But this noble intention of Barth’s does not matter when we look at the practical application of this theory, which is clearly politicized in its opposition to cultural hierarchy.

I mean, French postmodernism justifies and serves a democratic sense – a sensitivity to any hierarchy – one of the dominant expressions of which is typical French rebelliousness.

Therefore, when, for example, French theoretician P. Bourdieu reduces aesthetic taste to a symbol of social status, I cannot help but see in it a democratic feeling in a rationalized form – everything is here: from the sensitivity to privilege, the reduction of the aesthetic phenomenon to an intellectually chewable content, to the demotion of the high culture phenomenon to the lower culture tier.

I want to ask, weren’t the French intellectuals a bit comical in their sham revolutionaryism, when they constantly declared symbolic death to everything they understood as oppression? The death of the author, the death of the subject, the death of the person, the death of metaphysics, the death of history… Let’s ask ourselves what is behind it: a neutral intellectual choice of topics? Or is it rather French culture characterized by cheap sensationalism? In any case, one should not ape them, because imitating props runs the risk of dangerously moving away from reality.

4.

My father, who served in the army, surrounded by mountains, constantly told me regarding his first experience of encountering a mountain view – how he experienced an indescribable feeling of majesty when he was overwhelmed by this mountain massif. When I stood in front of the mountain for the first time, I had to be disappointed and admit that I was in the presence of a dumb, idiotic massif. I am reminded of this every time I encounter an instance of the cultural canon that in my experience evokes nothing but a sense of disappointment.

It is quite different in other people’s unmediated relationship with culture – I remember well when I read it as a teenager Metamorphosis, when the absurd, immanent horror conveyed in this book made me feel as if I had come across something filthier than pornography, perversely comical, yet tragic at the same time. And how pale the interpretations later appeared, compared to this affect.

French postmodernism, with the bite of Mr. P. Bourdieu, seems to me – among other things – useful in that it teaches us to be suspicious of tasteless worship of cultural authorities and great personalities. After all, there is a huge threat here – to consider a person great not because of his talent, creativity, but only because he is socially recognized, just because others consider him great. This is how mirages of cultural peaks are born, simulating the real experience of the heights. Even the feeling of alienation in relation to such a “canon” is a positive symptom, an expression of health, life, the ability to discriminate productively – that is, taste.

5.

If we allowed ourselves a thought experiment, we would set in our minds the promotion and cultivation of high culture as the highest value – what ideas, values, individual and social conditions would be favorable to this and what would be harmful?

6.

Today’s aping of French intellectuals is in many respects understandable, but not justified, because it directly conflicts with the trend of the growth of high culture. If we want to satisfy our desire for imitation, then let us imitate a society that trusts its sensibility, its instincts, that understands culture as the future, not the past, that responds to the desire to see the highest talents of man as a social priority – I mean, of course, ancient Greece. In this respect, it will always be an unceasing rebuke to societies that neglect the interests of high culture.

There is no better antidote to the anemic rationality, the atrophy of physicality, and the delicacy of feelings prevailing in modern culture than Greek agonistics. Greek poets, dramatists, philosophers, pedagogues competed with each other with such ferocity that we can see nowadays only among athletes. It was obvious to the Greeks what the top and bottom of culture meant, what the winner and the loser meant. It is the struggle that allows the real, unsimulated individuality and greatness to crystallize, the struggle that allows the individual to emerge from the anonymous chaos that names everything in the field of culture. In this context, such ephemeral concepts as “high culture”, “great personality”, “genius” take on a vivid, tangible form.

Struggle mobilizes creative forces, innovation, but also envy, hatred, revenge, resentment, ambition – struggle, in the best and worst sense of the word, motivates, awakens everything high and low in a person’s body. “The modern man in the artist fears nothing more than the outbreak of a personal struggle; while the Greeks know the artist only in personal combat” says F. Nietzsche, commenting on the Greek culture and adding that envy and hatred were the essential elements from which the Greek high culture emerged.

It is worth noting that even the mentioned French intellectuals – the last bright flash in the philosophical sky – grew up in an environment of harsh personal competition among themselves. One only has to remember Derrida’s relationship with M. Foucault, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari with J. Lacan, finally, even the friendship of such friends as Foucault and Deleuze – they were all imbued with suspicion, hatred, envy, feelings of honor . Despite their rigid intellectual posture, all of them, much like the typical ancient Greek, competed for the audience’s attention.

Following this idea, it would be useful and expedient to consciously promote the idea of ​​competition in culture in Lithuania, by organizing tournaments where representatives of various cultural fields might compete with each other for a prize. Now such contests happen as a happy accident, but they never existed wanted as a cultural policy priority.

7.

More than being happy, a highly cultured person wants to be motivated. All those hyper-intellectualized, skeptical theories do not meet this basic need for high culture. They do not encourage the growth and spread of the highest talents of man, whose created worlds are what the term “high culture” denotes.

There are demanding and indomitable individuals whose need for development cannot be met by contemporary intellectual debate, because this discourse is largely a critical discourse – producing nothing, providing no motivation and enthusiasm, rather, on the contrary, seeking, at worst, everything, including any manifestation of greatness. , covered with mud, blackened, and best of all suspended in the limbo of uncertainty. In today’s intellectual background, I consider P. Sloterdijk an exception, a critic of the fear of heights, who eloquently urges us not to give in to the blackmail of democratic sentiment. In one text he says: “prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, prove that achievement is cool, arete, virtu – you are no stranger to the word, don’t trust the philistine in you who thinks you are good just the way you are! Don’t resist the urge to get in shape! Take the opportunity to train with the god.”

After I finished writing this text, I felt inhuman fatigue and realized that it was getting dark. I fell into bed and dreamed of a little girl and a giant white dog standing side by side on the banks of the Neris River, their hair blowing in the wind.

The event is sponsored by the Goethe Institute. The winner of the competition was Rasa Alė Petronytė.