On Kindness and Hipness as They Relate to Cultural Production

By Gabriel Gudding

Part 1: Why Not to Join a Literary Movement

There is a grammar of feigned collectivity that is in fact a grammar of attention and power.

A school is advertised as a group in affiliation, a group allied by mutually stimulative aesthetics, when in fact a school is a contract for gathering and distributing attention.

A school is defined as a group who seeks to have its boasting done by others.

In short, certain literary movements are ways of inviting little wars and little frames of wars.

Not to advocate playing the island. There is a happy middle path between this and that: collaboration, even genuine friendship; amity,conspiratio, affiliative relation; kindness. These are qualities that replace the fear of not being read. Certain literary groups arise out of an irrational fear at the inevitable lack of regard. In short, this is about the fear of not being read.

This: “I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.” (G. Stein)

Poetry, in its most common negative manifestation, can become a distorting aggregate of purposefully limited emotional and intellectual responses to a cultural “field,” the tendency of which is to draw listeners and readers away from an alive and affiliative sense of interconnectivity and equanimity, toward a feeling of “lack”--and into a reliance [see penultimate paragraph] on the school or the school’s poet.

The result being that listeners and readers in effect hand their ability to feel and articulate to a cultural proxy, the school, the school poet, an icon (whether that's Ginsberg in yr estimation or some other delusive cultural actor or collection of actors), or even to an abstraction as broad and ambiguous as a canon.

One sign of a group invested with these distorting aggregates: the cultural actors in each group promote their group as a group; they tend to be camera friendly and interview-prone; members may begin availing themselves of the economies of spectacle and the manufacture of scandal; the cultural actors isolate themselves with others of their kind; these groups are not socially porous, and are marked by socio-emotional boundaries that range from rage, snideness, shunning, coolness, invitation. See the photographs of Larry Keenan.

Most writers however renounce these kinds of groups. Poets in fact can be grouped along a continuum: those of renunciation (Stein, Harryette Mullen, Whitman) and those of arrogation (Ginsberg, R. Lowell, J. Berryman), the latter being more inclined to think the poet a special being and, interestingly, more inclined to form, join, or affiliate purposefully and strategically with high-capital groups, as all such movements are in some way based on a poetics of lack and othering, rather than a poetics of affiliation.

Stein: I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. (Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten, Random House (1946). The Making of Americans (written 1903-1911), published 1925.)

Mullen: I write for myself and others. An other is anyone who is not me. Anyone who is not me is like me in some ways and unlike me in other ways. (“Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded”)

As with liturgies or poetry schools, a “habitus” of poetry (of poetry as a felt system of power) will consist of a few well-played vocabularies of emotional/conceptual “moves,” which can serve much like a contract with an audience (and a school is its own principle audience). Such groups tend to cease innovating, quickly developing a shtick. These aggregates of emotional-conceptual moves (sometimes called poems) operate, inside a habitus, as transactional games whose purpose is to serve as scripts that can be reproduced as a means of acquiring (for the actor or school) and distributing (for code-aware audiences) cultural capital. These are often, for instance, variants of the nostalgia poem, the self-pity poem, the rage poem, the revolution poem (the rage-nation poem), the name-drop poem.

Poetry in this way can become, in the hands of some, a pathetically distorting force whose function is to destroy affiliative and responsive citizenship in favor of a self-conscious and reactive audienceship (self-conscious in the sense of aware of own hipness). This can happen most especially when the habitus in which this is occurring is invested with celebrity culture, which is a variant of the economy of scandal and spectacle. So if celebrity culture arises from the entraining of a felt supposition that “I” am not being enough, it continues with the acknowledgement by celebrities, celebrity-aspirants, and celebrity-culture supporters, that “others” are not being enough--the pity is that these others were once citizens and have become mere readers. All literary movements tend toward celebrity culture.

The Larry Keenan photography website is a great example of the emptiness of “enough” making.

Part 2: Why is Kindness Not Hip?

I guess I’m trying to talk about a kind of affiliation that in part works through a purposeful arrogation of group stature and contains a particular and peculiar emotional signature -- a kind of groupiness that's not really affiliative. One based more on a group being “hiply-not-that” and less “us-happily-all.” Is the latter yoked to an ideal, and the former to a brand?

These are purposefully goofy, stark categories -- utilitarian abstractions whose purpose is heuristic: kind of like how setting an east opposite to a west will allow someone to receive directions to a place they might like to see.

So we get yoked to one another through friends, networks, editors, or by anthologies or magazines, blogs, presses, reading series, universities.

We get labeled by reviewers or journalists, we get read this way, that way. Put into that group, category, or this one. We grow affiliated. We grow unaffiliated.

My point is there is a constant level of given flux, a tao if you will of hello/goodbye. And if kindness is the ability to live in that flux with equanimity, I'm inspired by those writers who seem to exercise a thoroughgoing kindness and empathy, at least as it arises in their writings. This is why I have so admired the work of Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Tom Raworth. Whether they self-identify as belonging to a defined group is immaterial, I guess. My sense is, and perhaps I'm completely off, empathic writers tend to be more renunciative and less arrogating, and as such less inclined to groupiness per se--but if groupiness inheres in them is it the "us-happy-all" class?

The Lucipo group, eg, is a very warm and kind group. It is "us-happy-all."

The historian and sociologist Ivan Illich remarked on an interesting distinction in his study of the early church. He called the first effect, when a group gathers together, conspiratio: it is when a group has an almost benjaminic (sorry, walter) aura, in which the members retain the capacity to be surprised by one another and their world. The effort however to “fix” that aura in place can lead to a brittleness Illich calls conjuratio: the attempt to conjure an aura feared to be lost or soon to be lost, to recapture and formalize, the attempt to find it again, codify it, and cast it into a law. The former is characterized by a kindness in its members, the latter by a hardness.

The difference, according to Illich, is that those groups invested with conspiratio work at retaining the capacity to be surprised by one another and their world -- the essential condition of kindness; whereas the conjuratio group tries to regulate its boundaries in an effort to keep what it has already lost or fears as lost. It swings away from affiliation and surprise and is marked by disassociation and hipness.

So I suppose in poetry terms, a group in conjuratio resorts to a tiny conceptual/emotional vocabulary (its code) -- which in its aesthetic manifestation is known as a shtick? Its ethical manifestation is probably known as hipness. Is hipness associated with shtickness?

It's interesting to me how hipness isn't really kind -- despite its being a species of apparent affiliation. Hipness is an apparent social glue, but is in fact marked more by disassociation than affiliation, and as such it is just a more extroverted form of possessive individualism. It functions as above, I think.

In any case it is lovely to meet someone working in an overtly hipness-prone ("aesthetic") field who cherishes kindness.

O renounce this hipness. We are here trying to be happy. Most of us get confused while doing so. This is perhaps the chief source of confusion going: the confusion that results from trying to be happy. It arises because we define happiness as an association with the liked and a disassociation from the disliked. This is a harmful definition of happiness, though, because we are inevitably going to be separated from that which we like and love, and inevitably associated with that which we dislike. It is precisely there that crankiness occurs, conjuratio occurs, hipness occurs, shtick occurs. O retain this capacity to be surprised -- even when the lollipop is gone. Your lollipop, as with mine, is here for a time then gone.

In any case, three things in human life, said Henry James, are important. The first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. I'm not sure he said much about, or thought much of, being hip.