Denneny's Dissertation, Chapter 2

what is florid and glittering charms him

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the gay editor/publisher Michael Denneny’s graduate student work under Hannah Arendt and Harold Rosenberg, trying to show how his early papers on aesthetic life (1966-8) and unfinished dissertation on the pre-Kantian concept of taste (1968-1973) are both provocative in their own right and important for his influential work in gay culture and politics—which I’ll be examining more in turn later.

I’m quite serious in saying that Denneny should be studied with as much attention as people study the originally no less fragmentary, occasional, unfinished and dispersed work of Walter Benjamin, and that Denneny’s intellectual contributions to Gay/American Thought ought to be as or rather more familiar to homos than those of Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick or the canon of gay male queer theory (Leo Bersani, David Halperin, Lee Edelman, Tim Dean), all of whom I’ve profited from and critiqued.

These latter thinkers all draw on, in various ways, (Frenchified Lacano-Laplanchian lineages of) psychoanalysis and deconstructions of post-Hegelian philosophy, to which the sources of Denneny’s thought (Arendt and behind her a double engagement with the Greeks and Kant; Rosenberg’s post-Marxist existentialism; Arendt and Rosenberg’s joint commitment to eschewing philosophy, even critical philosophy, in favor of political and cultural critique) offer useful alternatives both for seeing gay history anew and for thinking new gay futures.

There’s to be sure something in his thinking about aesthetics for straight people as well, but y’all will have to figure that out yourselves. It’s not my job to educate you (unless you’re a paying subscriber)!

Well, on with Denneny. Chapter Two of his dissertation begins with a quick recap of Chapter One, and then turns from Gracian, who invented the early modern concept of taste, to the first of a series of later French critics whose use of the concept Denneny will analyze:

Dominique Bouhours adds to Gracian’s notion of taste the notion of a je ne sais quoi as the not quite fully conceptualizable but nevertheless real particular something that gives us pleasure, displeasure, and whatever other possibly correct feeling on the basis of which we express a judgment of taste. Denneny discusses this concept briefly in philosophical terms:

The ontological and epistemological status of the je ne sais quoi, however, is not supremely compelling for Denneny. He’s interested in Bouhours, in large part, because the French critic saw an important connection between 1) taste as a matter of real pleasure responding to real qualities, and thus not merely subjective (i.e., arbitrary, ‘irrational,’ meaningless, not permitting anything of sense to be said about it), but also based on inclination rather than universally valid rules 2) friendship, which we might recognize as having the same features (and, in practice, as often arising from the exchange of tastes):

At this point let’s look at an early modern English translation of the dialogue by Bouhours Denneny has been discussing, so you can get a sense of how it is indeed not a philosophical text, but a kind of model for how exchanges of judgments of taste can help us 1) become better friends 2) improve our taste 3) understand, within the limits of the possible [because it’s after all not something that permits of full comprehension] what taste—and friendship—is.

Two tasteful educated friends with different tastes (one prefers the sober and classical, the other more outlandish Italian Baroque literature) talk about authors they like and don’t like. In the course of their talk they discuss various literary qualities, such as sublimity and subtlety. They for a bit about what the essence or nature of these things might be, but always through specific examples that they play against each other, and never so long as to either get bored/boring or as to actually arrive at precise definitions (which is neither the point nor possible). They’re showing us how judgments of taste, as exchanged among friends, can help us be a bit more intelligent about what we enjoy, how and with whom we enjoy it:

Taste improves itself through examples, discussion, and reflection that includes as an ancillary element the clarification of concepts but does not take arrival at clear concepts as a goal in itself.

Bouhours offers us the most smiling model of tasteful friends’ two great tastes tasting great together. Other critics are more polemical, and they too have something to teach us. Dennney is also compelled by the example of Nicolas Boileau. I don’t know if anglophones read Boileau anymore, but he’s one of the great French poets and one of the great literary critics, whose criticism happens to take the form of poetry. He is sometimes remembered, Denneny notes, as a prophet of austere, rule-bound French neoclassicism, but this is wrong.

Boileau’s poetry/criticism is personal, hot-blooded, bitchy, and appeals to a variety of shifting sources of authority, from Nature to Reason to Experts to What Everyone Knows to Posterity, without either setting these sources in a clear hierarchy or even explaining exactly what they are—quite the way that any gifted non-systematic thinker trying to explain what’s good or bad about a particular work of literature will do. Rather than being ‘without concept’ (essentially ineffable) or ultimately conceptualizable, the beauty (or ugliness) of a given work of art appears in Boileau’s criticism to be something that impels the observer to use concepts to attempt to show how the specific features of the work are rightly connected to his evaluation of the work as beautiful (or ugly), even though he knows that there is no single proper relationship among these features, concepts, and evaluations that could be proven logically valid.

Besides using concepts in this tactical, contingent, non-totalizing way, Boileau also relies on an ad hominem rhetoric, attacking specific authors, quoting their bad verses, holding them up to ridicule, calling people sots and fats, which is like my calling them retards. This is not, on Denneny’s account, a failure of judgment, a falling into the merely personal and the intemperately emotive. Pointing to the defective character of the author is, like drawing on shifting constellations of concepts like Nature, Reason, History, etc., a way of getting the reader to notice things about the work that they wouldn’t otherwise, which in turn, Boileau might hope, will get them to agree with the way he evaluates the work.

If you don’t read French, I feel bad for you:

Denneny points out that all this apparent meanness represents not (just) a wish to make bad writers disappear, but also a wish to take part in a debate, to be a citizen or member of a common world. Literary polemic is a political, world-making desire.

Denneny attends to the political theory that emerges from Boileau’s theory of taste—it’s a defense of freedom of speech, or rather of speaking freely, even in a monarchy, and progressive confidence in the wisdom of posterity who will, if we in the present speak out honestly and intelligently, come around to a correct taste. The aesthetic arc of the universe is long but (we must at least pretend to believe) is bending towards good judgment. Something like this does seem to be the hope on which all criticism rests!

The chapter ends with a quick discussion of later 18th-century French aesthetic theorists and critics, whom Denneny faults for abandoning the rich muddle of taste and attempting to erect a system of rules where only a right attitude ever can be. He concludes:

I’m not sure about this as history. But in focusing on Bouhours and Boileau, to the disparagement of other more neoclassically-minded thinkers, Denneny signals the qualities that he finds important in reflections on taste—by his lights these properly arise within a context of art criticism, oriented towards particular objects, interlocutors, and occasions. They help us better understand the concepts we use, whether concerning specific qualities like subtlety, or more general ones like taste itself. But these concepts all have some indefinable about them, which is why they can give rise to critical commentary in the first place.

Practicing the right kind of criticism, and being realistic about its aims, enjoyments, and limits, helps us live better with art, that is, aesthetically—but also with each other both as friends (united by specific inclinations—or united by our shared commitment to enjoy exchanging our discordant inclinations) and citizens, that is, ethically and politically. Part of that coming together, in fact, might depend on our being able to call each other retards and losers—to note that our bad work is the product of bad thinking and bad living—without, thereby, taking the step of calling the actual suppression of ‘bad’ speech by means other than mockery (Boileau in his Satires and Letters calls, for example, for a moderation of the French court’s persecution of Protestants, which would culminate in their mass expulsion).

By way of a conclusion, I’ll note that I myself have been much concerned with how the artist/critic resembles but must differ from the despot, or how the violence of aesthetic life (which presupposes that some things are better—more worthy to shine and endure in our attention and esteem—than others) might (or might not) be made safe for liberal democracy, which presupposes that we can/should pretend people are in some way all equal. In part I’ve done so by enacting, via writers like Marc-Edouard Nabe and Shelby Foote and Julia Kristeva and Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz, my own ‘if I were queen’ fantasies, as in this passage from an essay last year on the latter:

Witness Daniel Bessner prematurely eulogizing Larry David, who could be seen as one of Lebowitz’s successors as Petty Complainer-in-Chief:

David is not alone in his ability to offend. But his propensity to do so emerges from a profound humanism—an egalitarian humanism inherent in the best Jewish comedy. For David, every person, from the pauper to the king, is fallen and thus open to mockery. This includes Holocaust survivors, hurricane and natural-catastrophe victims, the working class, and, of course, Jews. David’s work is premised on the notion that all people can be—just as he is—weak-willed, striving, awkward, prone to vanity, and frightened. Life is awful, and so, David insists, why not have a good laugh about it?

Well, for one, life’s not awful if you’re hot. It’s not even awful if you’re smart, which isn’t as good as hot but which, like most things that aren’t as good, lasts longer. Actually, statements about life are bullshit, since each of us has just one life to generalize about. And if your life is awful, Daniel Bessner, why not change it? Perhaps you need help. You’re under arrest for having an awful life.