I love this headline, without ever hearing of the singer before today: ‘It’s impossible not to have contradictions in a contradictory world’: Catalan pop visionary Rosalía on critics, crisis and being ‘hot for God’ (The Guardian).
I always knew I had contradictions. I would play them up, and ride them like a surfer on a wave; they let me laugh at myself and the world. At the same time, I did compartmentalize my life. Those separations began to crumble, I was trying to be only one thing without knowing what that one thing was. Depression took over, then nihilism.
Recovering from my crack up took me through to the place where I saw life seemed to be too multifarious for being just one thing. That life cannot be constrained into ideologies and stereotypes that other people demand of one's self.
The Orthodox Church helped with this change - that we are a mixture of good and bad, not creatures hated and condemned by an angry God.
Eleven years away from the internet, and, particularly, Yahoo Chat, may have helped, too.
But it seems that what I went through before my arrest, has become commonplace. That is my observations from being out, working (although, restaurant workers will always be a strange class of people), watching politics, and the group session, seem to support this thesis.
Reading The Decline of Deviance - by Adam Mastroianni contains what I have felt into a rational, thought out, essay.
I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:
a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before
b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and
c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.
When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.
***
Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing.
A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.
I guess my monitoring software cut off the author's conclusion as to cause. His argument up to that point was persuasive as to its existence. Do give it a look, please.
And consider this, Alexander Stern Qualities Without Men: Is inner life on the way out? (Commonweal).
Why? And why now? Cultures break down all the time, of course. Roy offers as examples the rise of Christianity and Islam in once-pagan cultures, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the cultural destruction wrought by colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. But in all these cases deculturation was followed by acculturation—the rooting of a new culture, whether by contingency, persuasion, or force. What’s happening now is different, Roy argues. There is no successor to the cultures currently breaking down. Nor is globalization simply replacing unique cultures around the world with an American (or any other) monoculture. The version of English used in international contexts, which Roy calls “Globish,” is not a sign of Anglo-American cultural dominance. International English is merely the stump of a language, necessary for functional communication in a decultured global environment. It is language emptied of its cultural baggage and reduced to a bare-bones instrument of communication—a code.
***
Globalization is just one of four drivers of the deculturation that Roy traces back sixty years. The others are neoliberal financialization, the internet revolution, and the “individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s.” All of these developments tend, for Roy, toward a leveling that both tears up roots—denying the relevance of history and tradition—and cuts down references to transcendent value above. Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form (consider the difference between friendship and Facebook friendship); and hedonic individualism flattens identity into desire. The result is human societies that exist more and more on a banal, sanitized, and explicitly coded middle tier, without depths to plumb or heights to scale.
Take, as another example (though Roy does not mention it explicitly), the life-hacks, self-help suggestions, and consumer assistance so prevalent online. The implied audience of these countless articles and videos is an isolated individual looking for the best ways to fulfill their desires. The life-hacker is productivity-obsessed and desperate to optimize; he appropriates whatever cultural resources seem effective without concern for their origins or deeper significance (yoga, Stoicism, the Mediterranean diet); and he tends to evaluate personal relationships through the lens of his own “wellness.” This is life lived out of a cookbook. As with a cookbook, the instructions must be as clear and explicit as possible: they must, in Roy’s terms, be “coded” by a “system designed to make all forms of human communication and relationship unequivocal and linear.” Roy’s contention is that a culture “transmitted” through explicit instructions like this, with no implicit values that bubble up from practice, is no culture at all.
***
Kornbluh argues that this disintermediation and “flow” in work and communication has also influenced culture, even when it is relatively insulated from the economic demands of the market. Twenty-first-century art, even “high art,” she argues, is increasingly characterized by the same immediacy. Kornbluh cites “exhibitions” like “Immersive Van Gogh,” where the painter’s works are technologically enhanced and projected to create environments that can either wash over us or accompany practices like yoga. She also mentions the Safdie brothers’ film Uncut Gems, which uses claustrophobically tight shots, constant motion, and a saturated color palette to create an atmosphere of severe, inescapable anxiety. Persisting throughout the film, these techniques don’t just convey the Adam Sandler character’s state of mind, they force the viewer to inhabit it. Like horror and melodrama (though without the mediating genre conventions), Uncut Gems produces a visceral, unmediated experience. Kornbluh finds a similar immediacy in Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA exhibit The Artist Is Present. A highbrow staring contest between artist and viewer, Abramović’s performance artwork offered a profound emotional experience to many critics and visitors. But the work’s “relational aesthetics,” Kornbluh writes, did “not produce a contoured or commodified object so much as a happening that defie[d] representation.” Immediate art eliminates interpretive distance.
Another place Kornbluh sees this is in the rise of autofiction and novelists’ increasing suspicion of literary devices like plot and fully imagined characters. She quotes the writers Sheila Heti—“it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story”—and Karl Ove Knausgård—“[j]ust the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous.” For Kornbluh, the turn to unapologetically autobiographical fiction is a sign not that authenticity has vanquished artifice, but that mediation is in crisis. The distance between an author and his or her characters creates ambiguities and invites readers to reflect on both the author’s intentions and the wider social context that gives the work meaning beyond the author’s strict control. Without that mediation, we are left with the production and consumption of personal, emotional impressions—sophisticated doomscrolling.
Even in literature that is not in the strict sense “autofiction,” Kornbluh finds the increasing dominance of first-person narration a sign of the same disdain for interpretation, mediation, and depth. (A recent viral tweet suggested that young readers have trouble even reading third-person omniscient narration.) To put it in Roy’s terms, it is in the space between expression and meaning that culture can actually breathe. In a culture of immediacy, where meanings (or codes) exist only on the surface—completely explicit and legible without need of interpretation—the depths and ambiguity of genuine culture are lost. Immediate art like autofiction rejects that space, forecloses interpretation, and suffocates both culture and individuality at the same time.
Is polymathy the answer?
I felt it was while reading Cody Glen Barnhart's In Defense of Polymathia: Recovering an Ancient Intellectual Practice (Antigone). And I know this post has gone off on a long tangent, but too much of what has been discussed in these article, of which the quotes are only the highpoints, impacts on what I have been trying to do since 2011 and my future. I think it also is relevant beyond merely my own ventures. I will only give the briefest of outlines to his argument.
Despite these differing stances on the intellectual practice of polymathy, however, a common sentiment emerges when we compare the positions of all three. Ancient conversations about polymathy are noticeably in service of the larger social truth that virtuous learning invites what is distant and diverse to come together as one, not in an act of conformity but one of harmony.
***
If we take seriously the voices of the Classical past, and if we take inventory of the academic and social climates of the 21st century, we must concede how often we have failed our philosophical forebears in committing to a rightly guided, healthy polymathy. In the age of hyper-specialization, ideological siloing, and cut-throat vocational opportunities, the challenge is simple: the humanities could use a liberal dose of polymathy if they genuinely want to survive.
I wish to suggest that we would do well to appreciate the polymath’s inefficiency. The polymath takes us down winding turns through off-topic discussions and fills their volumes with needless verbosity – and we may better understand how to situate our own disciplines in the world if we develop an appetite for the tangential.
***
To recover polymathia doesn’t entail picking one’s place on the spectrum from “fox” to “hedgehog”. Rather, becoming a polymath entails recovering a vision for humanity that is infrequently found within the grounds of the academy. It entails pursuing charity in public discourse. It entails letting go of the desire to master anything, forcing us to recognize how limited our own lived experiences are in the face of truth’s breadth. And, above all else, it entails recognizing that each one of us are only bees tasting from the sources of our lives, synthesizing what we learn into the greatest product we can muster: the nectar of a lasting knowledge that we may, in turn, pass on to friends, families, students, and colleagues.
If nothing, else it has made me think of how harmony and conformity are not the same thing. But if I can tie Stern's flattening to Barnhart's siloing, they are then coming at the problem of cultural stagnation from the same direction. Likewise, Stern's culture of immediacy would be undone by Barnhart's polymath, which may lack depth also eschews immediacy. Tangentiality is, for me, creatively associating disparate ideas.
One might also find some insights into this problem in The Decline and Fall of Classical Rhetoric (Antigone).
Do with this what you will, but try to be more creative.
What else I have been looking at this afternoon:
‘I took mushrooms before my audition’: Smiths drummer Mike Joyce on wild gigs, Marr’s jim-jams and Morrissey’s genius - yes, I was a Smiths fan. Less so of Morrissey as we have both gotten older.
‘Sinners was a blast’: Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram, the blues prodigy serving up electrifying riffs in the year’s biggest film (The Guardian) - if I had known Kingfish and Buddy Guy were in the movie, I'd have made a lot more effort to see the movie.
Movies, I want to see: Die My Love movie review & film summary (2025) and All That We Love movie review (2025) (Roger Ebert)
KH called, and I took a pause in putting this post together.
‘I thought ‘Bond girl’ was such a demeaning term’: Famke Janssen on acting, ambition and Woody Allen (The Guardian) - a better actress who deserved better; the article mentions my favorite of her movies, City of Industry.
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon - review by Kathryn Murphy
David Lean: New biography explores filmmaker's work and philosophy
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