summary in easy language

Fighting in Las Vegas, I thought the fight on the ground was

boring. Gradually it revealed itself to me in all its subtle urgency.

One night, I realized that, like Glengarry Glen Ross, the fight on the

ground is the true metaphor of how we live today. Down at the

office, the university, or the plant, we rarely have the opportunity

to stand up and punch it out. On the job, in the bureaucracy,

we grapple forever on the ground, seeking tiny advantages, bits

ofleverage, and the occasional clean shot. Herein lies the true

satisfaction of the standing knockout.

So why fight this kind offight now? I attribute it to the

enormous tectonic forces alive in America today, where we have

never been so safe and in so much peril. We live in a filigree of

perfectly interconnected safety nets with helmet laws, seat belts,

infant seating, low cholesterol, no-smoking signs, playdates, cell

phones, and e-mail. All this coddles people trying to work on the

precipice of absolute disaster. One merger, one outsourced job,

one bad decision, one deceptive mortgage, one religious idiot,

one accident, one gun nut or illness, and we are falling forever,

and we can't even scream lest we disturb the peace. So you

ask: Why fight? I say, Why not? Don't we need a little space, an

octagon, perhaps, where no self-serving lies need be spoken,

where we know exactly what's going down?

1 Sam Sheridan, A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey through th e World

o/Fighting, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, NY, 2007.

82 FIRST WE FIGHT

Formalism

SAW my first Chinese opera in the early 1970s, in

Manhattan, on a whim, because a Blue Oyster Cult

concert had been canceled. I loved the whole thing. l[t The performers were beautiful. The makeup was

beautiful. The costumes made Liberace look like Dick Cheney,

and the music sounded like Blue Oyster Cult falling down stairs.

I didn't understand anything, but I walked out ofthe theater very

excited. I told my companion that ifI saw four more Chinese

operas, knowing nothing more than I did then, I could tell which

was the best one, once I identified the parts. Four was optimistic.

There are 360 regional forms ofChinese opera, according to

one playbill I read, and they can only be understood against the

backdrop ofChinese history, so, in my case, it took six or seven.

I saw my last Chinese opera in April 2006 at La MaMa down on

4th Street, The Dragon-Princess and the Scholar.

I still knew nothing beyond my experience ofseeing six or

seven performances, but even so, in 2006, I could feel the shape of

the piece, the logic of the spectacle. I recognized infelicities and

corners cut. I reveled in bravura moments and exquisite details,

and, most critically, I felt in tune with the predominantly Asian

audience, most ofwhom, I suspected, were hardcore New Yorkers

no more erudite about the 360 forms than I. This was important

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to me because, during the period of my Chinese Opera Project,

modernists like Picasso and Degas were being called to the bar

for "plundering" Asian and African sources and exploiting the

cultural integrity of these sources. This tribal proposition, as

I pointed out at the time, neglects the fact that Velazquez and

Ribera lived in the wake ofa Moorish culture. Spain was awash

in North African influences and that the French Rococo, thanks

to plantations in Indochina , was inundated by Oriental tropes,

thus an Oriental predisposition was already part of being French.

Africa was already a part of being Spanish. Scolding Picasso for

grooving on Yoruba artifacts and degrading Degas for his Oriental

tropes, is like indicting me for speaking English instead of Zuni.

The fatwa against cultural borrowing, however, was only a

tactical feint. My real adversary was the escalating jihad against

formalism in contemporary art criticism. At that time, professors

were attacking formalism at the very moment that iconic theorists

like Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, and Gilles Deleuze were

arguing in its defense . This seemed a willful turning away from

difficulty-as if the American art world, given the chance to watch

Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, had opted for Elvis Presley's

Blue Hawaii. So I started calling myself a formalist critic because

everyone was calling Clement Greenberg a formalist critic. He

wasn't. He never really addressed the shape ofanything and was,

I suspect, color-blind. He was a literate Marxist, so, obviously, the

formalist job was still open.

When people asked me why I was embracing the f-word,

I would ask them this: " When Jacques Derrida asserts that

there is no meaning outside the text, do you think it's a fact

or a problem? If you think it's a fact, you're a formalist. If you

think it's a 'problem' that might befixed, you are a reactionary

idealist." I would always remind my inquisitors that human beings

do not express themselves telepathically. Everything goes Out

into the physical world in tangible patterns. It comes back in

84 FORMALISM

through our hard-wired capacity to detect patterns and report

any anomalies to our consciousness through blips or floods of

emotion. So a lot comes in of which we are not consciously aware

that JUSt stays in storage, at the ready, awaiting its cue. Chomsky

proposes that human beings express themselves by manipulating

a finite vocabulary of tangible signs through a finite number of

transformations to create an infinite array of utterances.

These patterns are internally meaningful-color to color, word

to word, mark to mark, noise to noise. Their relationship to the

world beyond is always flimsy because, as Deleuze argues, the

meaning and reference that we derive from any utterance or text

is inextricable from the tangible "logic ofsensation" that governs

our expression and perception of it. How else could we enjoy the

atmospheric nonsense of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," which is

rife with hints but otherwise devoid of real-world referents?

My first conscious experience with the logic ofsensation

took place in the Ransom Library at the University ofTexas in

Austin where I sat, wearing white gloves, in a beige carrel and

read a fair copy manuscript ofD. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

straight through, foolscap sheet by foolscap sheet. By the time

I had finished, the steady, curving logic of Lawrence's insistent

handwri ting [no mark OutS, no interlinear revisions] had so

totally infected the narrative that, even today, I can't look at

a printed page of Women in Love without feeling the terrible

absence of Lawrence 's brown cursive, drawn across a page nearly

a century ago. This experience [especially with the white gloves],

contributed to my becoming an art critic and set me offin search

of the intimate bang of The Dragon-Princess and the Scholar, which

I enjoyed as a child delights in the/abberwocky.

If Chomsky's overarching theory is anywhere near right [and

he is wrong sometimes, about personal pronouns] the whole of

human utterance can be experienced without translation-ifwe

can identify the finite number of tangible "parts" in an expression.

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Formalists analyze events that have already happened. They don't

teach us how to "enjoy" art. They investigate the consequences of

parts [words, notes, colors) that usually remain un-recognized to

us. If we tease out the finite sums of each part and the proportion

of each part to another, we are on our way to having a shape.

When we learn the curves-the frequencies with which the parts

and their redundancies occur-we have some sense of its various

tempos. [In literature phonemes, go faster than sentences.) When

we know enough about the genre ofexpression to recognize the

parts and frequencies that don't occur, we know a great deal.

The problem is that most critics are more fluent in philosophy

than arithmetic, Boolean algebra, and calculus, but the numbers

are there. We usually know them before we even count, but we

should count. The triumphant formalist study of music, I should

note, is Leonard Meyer's The Rhythmic Structure ofMusic. To analyze

a literary text, we should begin with a total vocabulary-a list of

units and sums oftheir redundancies. We should know how

many parts are important-the proper nouns, verbs, phonemes,

consonants, tenses, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, demon­

stratives, and their redundancies. Ifwe know what doesn't

occur and the frequencies at which the parts that do occur

occur, we have a great deal ofapplicable information about the

conformation of the object's vocabulary.

Ifwe learn the frequency at which new information is fed

into the work, we have another usable curve. A text with mostly

"new" words is virtually unreadable, so the curve of new words

invariably flattens then rises at the volta. To cite a couple of

instances: The proportion and redundancy of adverbs and

adjectives should remind us that even their appearance in literary

prose is problematic, that synonyms ofany son rarely appear

in memorable writing except as jokes. We learn that a flat line

of sentence lengths is euphonic suicide. We learn that the

redundancy of, say, Hemingway's prose, improves its velocity.

86 FORMALISM

We learn that his routinely incorrect usage of"which" over "that"

makes his art more eloquent by suppressing subordination.

Clement Greenberg always insisted that one's sense ofa work's

quality, virtue, or intensity is as instantaneous as the mind's

ability to sense patterns and to infer their "on-purpose-ness"

without knowing that purpose. For once, I agree with Clement.

We can processes massive arrays of patterns [as in a Chinese

opera], without being able to sort them out, define them, isolate

them, or even identify them. This ignorance does not impair their

effectiveness, however. Stochastic patterns and sequences ofany

sort elicit responses. Total ignorance of thoroughbreds does not

mitigate the pleasures ofthe horse race, although eventually one

learns that art, music, and literature are founded on obbligatos

of redundancy and moments ofeccentricity. These make the arts

memorable. They live in memory. Sorting out the parts that make

the whole is what formalism does. In music we start with the parts

and adduce the whole; in art we start with the whole and adduce

the parts to our satisfaction.

In art criticism and music criticism, there is no dictionary,

and in literary prose there shouldn't be. The virtue of not having

a dictionary is that patterns present themselves to us that are

unaccounted for in "correct" readings, and this increases the

works' longevity, because all expressions contain secondary and

tertiary patterns that contribute to the work's conscious purpose,

but the parts can change. First we love the picture, then we love

the paint, then we love the arrangement. The primary virtue of

formalism is that it allows you to see and hear patterns that were

not put there-that only ended there as a side effect ofsome other

pattern more urgently desired by the artist. Formalist readings can

reverse their hierarchy. Because ofthis, Jackson Pollock could look

at Thomas Hart Benton'S folksy murals in Jefferson City, Missouri,

upon which he was assisting, and see Autumn Rhythm (1950).

Jerome Robbins could look at Autumn Rhythm and see a dance.

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Sadly, the attacks against formalism in the early 70S had little

to do with fact or philosophy. The jihad was a radical maneuver

designed to "Iiberalartsify" contemporary art. Professors needed

a way of talking about contemporary art that was adapted to their

Clockwork Orange (eyes-clamped-open) classroom procedures.

They needed something to say while student brains were washed

with "art history." In these chambers of horror, children were

coerced into looking at pictures of pictures they did not care

about and to which they did not respond. Pictures ofart provided

the texts. Professors provided the dictionary. This evil practice has

been long since discontinued , I'm sure, but I want to emphasize

the fact that formalism doesn't do dictionary, darling; it doesn't

do answers; it doesn't do pictures of art; and it doesn' t do coerced

looking. Formalism speculates on the intensity and possible

longevity of tangible art that elicits an instantaneous visual or

emotional confirmation.

We try to isolate the critical frequencies, ask the right

questions, and never gain knowledge or truth. Sometimes, we

come up with little Aesopian morals, but nothing major. Jasper

Johns's flag suggests that its value derives from the people who

salute it, not from the man who made it. Richard Serra's work

reminds us that we never stand alone, that we muSt lean against

the world, against one another, or curve to abeyance to the god

ofgravity. My favorite moral is found in Joan Mitchell's painting.

Joan reminds us that she can do it and we can' t. She is the Monica

Vitti of art, pure neurosis. So formalism doesn't do answers

because answers, would conclude the endless dance of inquiries

that keeps the work alive.

I remember looking at Jasper Johns's Target with Faces (1955)

in his retrospective at the Museum ofModern Art in New York

thinking that a half-century of intelligent speculation had brought

us no closer to decoding its mysteries-and that this didn't matter

at all. It had been a long romance, and we always had Paris, or

88 FORMALISM

wherever Jasper's Target first became the target ofour gaze. This is

a testament to Johns as an artist but also a reminder that art leaves

questions unanswered, and I could not help but feel, standing

there in the MOMA, that we might do well to stop mooning over

the targets for a while and let them freshen up. Then, one day

in the future, in Brussels or Newport Beach, some youngster

might come upon them, and the song would begin again. That

mysterious aura ofon-purpose-ness would take hold, and offwe

go into the sunset.

So formalism begins with an instantaneous sense ofalien,

patterned complexity. We stand before a work ofart with no

hope of understanding it and no choice but to try. We reenact the

primal cosmopolitan moment-the first time a human being stood

face to face with a stranger from a strange place with a strange

language, "sizing things up" without a dictionary. I met my first

genuine strangers of this SOrt in the 1960s, when I had the benefit

of taking courses from the great writer Jorge Luis Borges, the new

journalist Tom Wolfe, the French avant gardiste Nathalie Sarraute,

and the great classicist Bill Arrowsmith. I don't remember a word

they said. I remember that Borges wore a cape and fedora, that

Wolfe was a smartass, and Arrowsmith a show-off. I remember

that Nathalie Sarraute had a mind as exquisite and strange as a

Chinese opera. What I learned from these strangers was something

like what I learned from D. H. Lawrence's manuscript. I learned

just exactly how high eloquence manifests itself, what it feels like

to be around, how it moves in its mortality. This turned out to be

a good thing to know.

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