Almost all efforts to foster receptivity in general run into the problem of exclusionary thinking, of dichotomizing, of policing the boundary between what we should be receptive to and what we shouldn't. For example, I want to say, "be open to everything," but then why does my blood boil when the Humanities lecture is announced and it's Mary Oliver? I really believe that Billy Collins should be strangled by Kenneth Koch's strangler ("Fresh Air").
It used to be that people would simply make this boundary coincide with the difference between high culture and its various opposites. That doesn't work so well. It's true that almost everything traditionally classified as high culture is, to my mind at least, valuable, but the converse is not true. Simply dismissing popular culture is the laziest possible way of enforcing that boundary. You can't confuse a sociological category with an aesthetic one.
An openness to the music of jackhammers in the street does not entail an interest in everything. Even John Cage's effort to overcome likes and dislikes did not lead him to be interested in everything under the sun. He had his own pantheon of heroes like anyone else.
So the category of resistance is just as fundamental as receptivity. Resistance come in many forms, is situated on many boundaries. For example, something not to my taste but which I feel is worthy of attention forces me to read beyond my taste. Suppose I don't Mahler so much; I listen to Mahler regardless. Something that is to my taste but which I don't wholly understand forces me to read beyond my understanding. Someone who is receptive to Mary Oliver and seems to get from it the same thing I get from something else forces me to admit a kind of radical relativism--the idea that no one person can define these boundaries in more than a provisional way.
Some of the best literary criticism can arise out of resistance--seemingly the opposite of receptivity, but really the line of demarcation between that which can be received and that which seems to threaten our ability to listen. That's where the real interest lies, it seems to me, on the razor's edge of receptivity.
This seems to me to be very right, and much clarifies for me your recent comments on receptivity.
I'm interested in the fact that these paired responses--receptivity and resistance--seem to be framed primarily as an individual encounter with a text, but your example of your rage at hearing that Mary Oliver is delivering the Humanities Lecture reveals the social and institutional dimension of those responses.
The encounter with Oliver's poems (and did we have a brief conversation about a twee poem involving a dead cat some years back, Jonathan?) provokes resistance, but the knowledge that Oliver will deliver the Humanities Lecture involves a different encounter--the difference between your response to Oliver's work and her public/institutional reception (New York Times features, etc.).
And perhaps what's maddening about that difference is not a difference of taste, but rather the difference between taste, on one hand, and a certain absence of taste, or the possibility of taste, on the other. After all, the reasons any given person delivers a prestigious lecture usually do not hinge primarily on a sensitive critical evaluation of the person's work, and certainly the New York Times cannot be said to have a reputation for taste when it comes to poetry. Institutions, in other words, never have that encounter with the text, can't have taste; only readers (and, of course, curators who may make institutional decisions) do. The encounter at that point isn't with a text but with an authorial persona and its reputation.
And so receptivity and resistance always play against a dreadful backdrop, the prospect of not reading.
I remember something about the dead cat poem, maybe on Kasey Mohammad's blog?
That sounds right.
Knowing of your love for jazz, Jonathan, I suspect that's part of why you're not willing to take the boundary between high and low or pop culture has one that puts all the worthy stuff in the high pile. That story, of jazz, certainly has an institutional dimension. While many colleges had "stage bands" in the 1950s, it took longer for jazz studies to become a degree-granting activity. And I believe it wasn't until 1990 or so that Lincoln Center instituted it's Jazz Institute, the first time jazz had become established in such an august cultural complex.
So resistance and receptiveness play out in institutions as well. Of course, it sometimes happens that by the time institutions become receptive to something new, that something is pretty much dead elsewhere -- as seems to be the case with jazz.
Yes. My love of jazz and flamenco definitely makes me want to look at cultural expressions that are not part of high culture as traditionally defined.
I'm curious about what will show up as a comment.
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is releasing them using a copyleft license.