Naked Criticism

“But is it possible to write criticism—or even to write critically—while at the same time refusing the critic’s authority? Can a work be coherent, meaningful, and precise without its author dressing it as a piece of art criticism—or as an interview, a short story, a book of photos, a psychoanalytic case study, an autobiography?”

“In 1980, Michel Foucault gave an anonymous interview for Le Monde because he was, in his words, “nostalgic for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard.” Calling himself the “Masked Philosopher,” he suggested that the unknown author has an “unrippled” “surface of contact” with the reader, and that the book without an author might “land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of.” He temporarily shed the authority of his name, because “a name makes reading too easy.””

“Genres, too, make reading easy. Genres are information-bearing: like a kind of literary meta-data, a text’s genre tells you what discourses regulate it and what counts as knowledge within; it says who the author is and where her authority lies.”

“The psychoanalyst does not reach for hard-numbered sociological data, and the quantitative researcher cares nothing for his subject’s dreams. Genre is therefore, as the good Masked Philosopher taught us, an apparatus of power. Ask any high school student, journalist, grant writer, or PhD candidate, and she will tell you that the things she writes must offer up certain kinds of observations, arguments, and evidence. The modes in which we write determine what we’re able say. Even the art critic lacks permission to dream.”

“Some of us waste whole paragraphs and/or lives squeezing into the clothes of art critics and sociologists and psychoanalysts, fumbling with all those expensive, complicated buttons. Even Foucault’s Masked Philosopher declared his profession. Rutkoff doesn’t. Rather than wear a mask, she writes in the nude.”

“IN a sense, The Irresponsible Magician is a book about authority. It flashes brightest when it throws into conflict different ways of knowing: when, as in one episode, a former analysand reads her analyst’s book and scoffs, “This is bullshit.” Rutkoff stands in solidarity with the analysand and the magician rather than the analysts and anthropologists who study them.”

“The book doesn’t lack sympathy for the famous names who parade through it: Rutkoff dissects the powerful’s power with an almost tender fascination. But that is just the point. Authority produces blind spots and excesses. As such, it’s a form of eccentricity. We all hold some tattered scrap of authority, and there is no version of it that is not somehow distorted or compromised.”

“These anecdotes appear in an undressed, matter-of-fact way. But in their unfolding they build an account of the culture industry as a kind of dreamscape, one that elaborates all our fears and fantasies about power.”

“The culture industry puts its underclass and its power-players in such close proximity that, in brief but charged moments, the hierarchies that organize them seem to flip. The famous designer needs affirmation from a TV production assistant. The curator needs his prose tidied and neatened. The actor attempts awkward small talk while waiting for his drink at the bar—and the unpaid intern ignores him.”

“Surrounded by important people at MoMA, Rutkoff recalls feeling a certain power in being nobody. “I wore a long carmine silk top over black pants and it was the last night I experienced the rewards of not knowing who I was in such a clean, bubble-like way. I drank so much that I insisted on taking the subway home, and woke up when the D line terminated at Brighton Beach.””

“There are rewards in not knowing—or in temporarily forgetting—who you are. A firm personal and professional identity often comes with the sorts of rules and imperatives that end adventures before they start.”

“Take the case of Claude Levi-Strauss, who appears in the second half of The Irresponsible Magician. The anthropologist deplored the use of color photography in ethnography, stating that he refused “be the dupe” of color photography’s “magic,” which promises a false access to reality. Rutkoff explains his position with characteristic frankness: “He wants to keep magic for himself,” she writes, “on the interior of an ethnographic escapade, guarded by the boundaries of his professional expertise and sensitivity.” Yet neither color nor magic will stay where the great anthropologist tells them to. When Levi-Strauss encounters a riotously colorful sunset and attempts to describe its progress in painstaking detail, confesses that his expertise has limits. There are connections he cannot draw and categories he cannot circumscribe. His description, Rutkoff argues, momentarily “topples” his sense of professional identity. “He no longer needs anthropology.” To transcribe a sunset, he has to leave his ethnographer’s uniform behind.”

“If Rutkoff’s prose takes on any sort of authority, it is the authority of the dream. Its evidence is punctual, brief, incontrovertible: even when we cannot understand it, it yields thoughts we can’t un-think and images we can’t un-see.”

“Like Schneeman, Oprah has a professional interest in making the interior exterior. In Rutkoff’s book, she appears as Schneeman’s mirror image, and perhaps even her evil twin: whereas Schneeman politicizes female vulnerability, Oprah capitalizes on it. If she discusses matters of the heart, it is to suggest one might manage them with aesthetic and professional acumen. If the mysteries of heterosexuality interest her, it is because they impact her public image. Her love for her viewers is fierce, true, and touching: she wants each episode she produces “to be worth a year of therapy.” Rutkoff conjures an Oprah who long ago anticipated all the ways you might critique her. When it comes to the establishment she supports, she’s an agnostic—but she stands by every compromise she’s made.”

“Keeping the wound moist, the body vulnerable, and the blood visible protects the brand. Oprah’s genius is to turn her wound into a uniform: to take the weak, soft part of the self that an authority is supposed to protect, and to turn it into the sign of her authority. No wonder Rutkoff, who performs a similar trick in her prose, cannot help but admire her. Yet when she attempts to compares Oprah to the patient on the psychoanalytic couch—with the analysand who lies vulnerable on the couch—Oprah objects. “No.” Her work takes place in “the phallic swap-mart of TV. In the chair.” The most chilling thing about Oprah is that she knows exactly who she is. She is always in control.”

“The Irresponsible Magician offers a critique, it is of just this fantasy of uncompromised self-possession. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has argued that a fascination with “associations, word plays, and unconscious events” animated Freud’s time; by contrast, “there is widespread contempt for unconscious life in modern culture.” That is, we live in a world that is increasingly hostile towards aspects of human life that cannot be quantified, towards impulses we can’t control by willpower or explain through science.”

“Rutkoff’s book works in a mode that staves off this nascent world: a world of curators without artists, critics without books, analysts without patients, consciousness without dreams.”

“To describe all this in my critic’s way may reduce its potency. It feels a bit like explaining a joke—or like describing a chemical reaction, instead of breaking out the beakers and creating one. I have judged, and judged positively.”

“But The Irresponsible Magician reminds me of a different kind of criticism, one Foucault’s Masked Philosopher anticipated eagerly:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep . Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”

“MY dreams do not have the paradoxical snap of Rutkoff’s. They are boring. I dream, sometimes, that I am reading—just reading—and as I approach the lower pages of a long PDF, my computer’s battery flashes an urgent red. My more exciting dreams lead me on quests to find some precious object or escape some nefarious force. It’s the normal sort of dream-stuff, but for one crucial thing: my dreams always unfold in cavernous and deserted buildings. In my dreams I navigate endless corridors, traverse indoor gardens, and paddle through underground canals. The landscapes I dream up resemble nothing more than malls. Run-down, or even abandoned malls”

“As a child, I thought Oz was a mall: having never, at five, seen or heard of such a thing as a walled city, I’d thought the giant green door Dorothy and her friends argued their way through in The Wizard of Oz led indoors, to streets and plazas all sheltered under one roof, and lined with businesses not unlike our world’s Gaps and Cinnabons. When I re-watched the film as an adult, I gasped upon seeing the good pedestrians of Oz look up to read the Wicked Witch’s sky-writing: SURRENDER, DOROTHY. Such an obvious visual cue, designed to construct a virtual space in the mind of the average viewer, and it failed to register with me. I was a child whose only brushes with public life, and whose main encounters with sweeping vistas, took place in the malls of suburban Detroit. To suture the gaps in Oz’s cinematic space, I used what I knew.”

“Our minds map the world in the intervals between shot and countershot, between sleeping and waking. Commerce snakes its way into each dream-mind’s working—snakes in, loops round fragments of sensation and assembles them as sense. It urges us—as do family, society, language, and law—towards an inner consensus. Most of us never reach that consensus. It’s a form of being purpose-built for a certain kind of white bourgeois, usually male; and most of those guys only fake their certitude, anyway.”

“The unconscious is made of stronger stuff than all that. It remembers everything: both the forces that form our sense of the world, and the blunt facts we cannot fit to our world’s familiar shape.”

“Each dream reveals a foundational lie—that, for example, the world is a mall—while at the same time revealing there is a truth in the lie—that the structure of the mall commands the world and that the world is falling apart. Our job is to hold tight to these contradictions, to refuse to resolve them but instead to harness their dialectical heat. The result will not be dream-interpretation, but dream-criticism.”

“The most striking thing about The Irresponsible Magician is the fact that dreams function within it as real, legitimate evidence—not just about the author’s inner life, but about the world writ large. This is the lesson we ought to draw from it. We’re used to treating dreams as belonging to the individual; analysts treat them as signposts on the hero’s journey out of neurosis and into an uncertain truce with the-world-as-it-is.”

“But dream-data is not just individual. It’s also social and historical.”

“Wander the halls and map the fault-lines that cleave them. Notice the roof. Notice the moment your ally and your enemy switch faces. In every inconsistency, there is a message. And beneath the pond scum that floats in every broken fountain’s basin, there shimmer uncountable, useless dimes.”