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A review by jdscott50
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
People used to use the word canceled jokingly. Meaning they are over, or some minor infraction resulted in cutting all tries with a person. Lately, people have been using the phrase cancel culture to refer to a person of prominence getting their access to resources revoked. Of course, those advocating for this rarely have the power to do so. Typically, when someone commits a wrong act, they must atone. Some people don't feel as if they need to do so. Furthermore, there are those whose behavior created a stain on their art. What should be done for those who create great art but are bad people?
Clarie Dederer decides to weigh in on the issue. Her main conflict that brings her to the topic is that of Polanski. She loves movies like Chinatown but worries she can no longer enjoy these films due to his criminal acts. She attempts to justify it, but she is conflicted. How can she deny herself something that she enjoys so much due to the artist's failure? She makes comparisons with Polanski, Picasso, J.K. Rowling, and others. Her general conclusion is the same as environmental action: you cannot individually hold artists accountable for their sins. If you enjoy their work, continue to enjoy it. There is no force that can change that.
I feel that if you like art that may insult your friends, you might want to reconsider your tastes. Some art doesn't hold up. Some artist crimes outweigh their greatness. Ultimately, it feels like an excuse to like Roman Polansky films. Go ahead and watch them, but I can expand my enjoyment to less problematic art. In fact, it forces one to expand one's horizons and to look forward instead of continually looking backward.
Favorite Passages:
Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.
But of course giving a group of white male fancy-pantses all the breaks for years is the ultimate social engineering. Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look different from them.
Our feelings seem—they feel—sovereign, but they’re tethered to our moment and our circumstance; and the moments and past circumstances that came before. I might well add: what response, what opinion, what criticism do you have that is not tied up with history? We are subject to the forces of history and the biography we ourselves are living out in the conditions of that history. We think of ourselves as ahistorical subjects, but that’s just not so.
All of which is to say, the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.
The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.
Clarie Dederer decides to weigh in on the issue. Her main conflict that brings her to the topic is that of Polanski. She loves movies like Chinatown but worries she can no longer enjoy these films due to his criminal acts. She attempts to justify it, but she is conflicted. How can she deny herself something that she enjoys so much due to the artist's failure? She makes comparisons with Polanski, Picasso, J.K. Rowling, and others. Her general conclusion is the same as environmental action: you cannot individually hold artists accountable for their sins. If you enjoy their work, continue to enjoy it. There is no force that can change that.
I feel that if you like art that may insult your friends, you might want to reconsider your tastes. Some art doesn't hold up. Some artist crimes outweigh their greatness. Ultimately, it feels like an excuse to like Roman Polansky films. Go ahead and watch them, but I can expand my enjoyment to less problematic art. In fact, it forces one to expand one's horizons and to look forward instead of continually looking backward.
Favorite Passages:
Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience.
But of course giving a group of white male fancy-pantses all the breaks for years is the ultimate social engineering. Listen, I’d rather watch the Pythons than Gadsby any day of the week, but the point is this: None of these guys has the bandwidth to even entertain the idea that a woman’s or person of color’s point of view might be just as “normal” as theirs, just as central. They seem incapable of understanding that theirs is not the universal point of view and that their own comedy has left people out. That exclusion is not necessarily a problem for me, it’s just a fact. As lifelong excluders, they shouldn’t use their own (ridiculous) feelings of exclusion as a critique of the work of people who look different from them.
Our feelings seem—they feel—sovereign, but they’re tethered to our moment and our circumstance; and the moments and past circumstances that came before. I might well add: what response, what opinion, what criticism do you have that is not tied up with history? We are subject to the forces of history and the biography we ourselves are living out in the conditions of that history. We think of ourselves as ahistorical subjects, but that’s just not so.
All of which is to say, the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.
The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.
Fisher’s book asks us to understand ourselves as isolated consumers, and from there it asks us to accept the amorality of our own consumption. In other words, we keep looking to consumption as the site of our ethical choices, but the answer doesn’t lie there. Our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle; more complicit in what Fisher calls the atmosphere of late capitalism.
Art does have a special status—the experience of walking through a museum is different from, say, buying a screwdriver—but when we seek to solve its ethical dilemmas, we approach the problem in our role as consumers. An inherently corrupt role—because under capitalism, monstrousness applies to everyone. Am I a monster? I asked. And yes, we all are. Yes, I am.
In other words: There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
As I said earlier, consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art. I repeat: this occurs in every case.