On 15 Jun 2003 at 4:27, Iain Buccannon wrote:
> Reading through the archives to understand this argument, it seems to me
> that Marcus's position has been impressively static. To simplify it, it
> goes like this: in order to improve your writing you have to have an idea
> of what is good and bad in writing. Otherwise your writing is just a
> personal indulgence. It doesn't seem such a contentious point. (Though
> there are aspects which could be contested. Isn't it possible, for example,
> that something which is merely a hobby for the practitioner, someone bereft
> of any aesthetic principles at least that he/she could express, might have
> considerable aesthetic value for others?)<<

I agree it's not a contentious point, but Alison, Rebecca, Liz, and
others made it so. Their position is, apparently, that  *every*
person who is bereft of any aesthetic principles is better off
thereby in any attempt at art.

I would argue, though, that anyone who is trying to make something
aesthetically pleasing cannot be "bereft of any aesthetic principles"
because human action is theory-laden. The notion of "bereft of any
aesthetic principles" is a null set, it seems to me. Every human
capable of conceptually differentiating art from nature (on whatever
grounds) has aesthetic principles -- though whether they are "good"
or 'bad" or "primitive" or "sophisticated" or whatever is a matter of
a different sort of analysis.

I'd say that there are certainly those whose aethetic principles were
formed outside academic or formal art training (or at least, or even,
outside of a given audience's academic or formal art theories) -- and
they may indeed make art that has considerable aesthetic value for
others, but I think it is unreasonable to say that such artists have
no aesthetic principles.

I've pointed out several times that the next step is to distinguish
"it's good" from "I like it", only to be villified by Alison and
Rebecca and Liz, who refuse to discuss the possibility of "good" or
"bad" in writing, and who seem to think that such notions are
patriarchal or sexist or something bad, at any rate.I've said several
times that there must be a distinction between "I like it" and "It's
good" -- and that it is necessary also sometimes to say "I don't like
it but it's good, or "I like it but it's bad".

But any attempts on my part to move the conversation into discussion
what is good and bad and why have been red-herringed and straw-manned
back into discussions of whether such notions are sexist or
patriarchal or simply denied on the grounds that whether a poem is
good or bad is irrelevant because poems cannot be good or bad only
liked or disliked.

Mark Weiss and I had an interesting and productive exchange without
any name-calling at all.  The problem has been the Alison/Liz/Rebecca
response to what you call the "uncontentious" notion that some poems
are good and some are bad. The contention is all on their part.

>   (My impression is that Alison was trying to think through other issues
> than evaluative ones but then that trusty good/bad routine was brought to
> bear. The routine can operate like this:
> A:  Do you think your poems are any good?
> B:  I leave that to others to decide.<<

That's not what Alison said. She said she cannot decide and that the
readers of her poems are irrelevant both to her poetics and her
practice. She does NOT "leave it to others to decide" -- she writes
irrespective of any others for her own enjoyment. And then she
revises apparently on the same principle -- though the notion of
"revision" seems to indicate there *must* be some qualitative
evaluative criteria, Alison denies that she has anything of the kind.
And yet she revises, she says, constantly. It is a puzzlement.

It's clear that Alison and Mark must have some criteria for
what is good and bad in poems or they'd never revise at all; but
equally, they insist that the reader is irrelevant to their poetics
and practice and that they write with great craft and skill for their
own personal enjoyment. This is a sort of "private language" problem:
for so long as an individual is the sole judge of whether something
is written with great craft and skill, the notion of great craft and
skill is too undetermined to be useful. Self-referential judgments of
that sort are like buying three copies of the newspaper to make sure
that the first copy has printed the facts. The notion of "the facts"
is different from "is the same as what another copy of the same day's
same newspaper says". Similarly, the notion of what is "great craft
and skill" is different from "what I wrote before".

It is not a matter of objectivity; it is a matter of shared
subjectivity. Standards in art are consensually subjective, not
privately subjective -- that's what makes them "standards" rather
than "the way I do it". Of course "the way I do it" may influence the
standards, but the standards *must* influence "the way I do it" or
else "the way I do it" devolves into solipsism.

Marcus Bales

[log in to unmask]
http://www.designerglass.com