Apologetically intellectual, unapologetically anti-intellectual

[imomus]

"Do not admit cleverness in any form into your life," says a spoof Press Release in British artist Stuart Bailey's ongoing text performance at the Whitney Biennial. It's a very British theme, that "do not admit cleverness". We saw it raise its head in the Click Opera comments yesterday when someone mentioned John Carey's books attempting to topple the reputations of some of Modernism's greatest writers. It may also have lurked behind Noel Coward's sketch about the Swiss Family Whittlebot. It's certainly the theme of Frank Furedi's book Where have all the intellectuals gone?.

Clever people in Britain are vociferous in their anti-cleverness. When a camera crew came to Britain from Finland in 1993 to make a Momus documentary called Man of Letters, I took them to meet interesting people I thought would have intelligent things to say. One of these was children's authoress (she'd just published "King Kid") Rozelle Bentheim. I'd met Rozelle -- Scottish and Jewish, like my hero Ivor Cutler -- at my friend Tamar Yoseloff's poetry club at the Earl's Court Troubadour. I didn't know her very well, but she seemed like an interesting and intelligent person. She'd spent time in New York in the 80s, befriending Klaus Nomi.

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So, with director Hannu Puttonen and the film crew, we arrived at Rozelle's basement duplex on the New King's Road. On camera, as you can see in this clip, Rozelle warmed to "Platinum", the first track on my Timelord album, but took me to task for the way I was framing it in words:

"I haven't heard anything you've ever done before in my life. I didn't listen to the words, but this is very playful and this is very intuitive and it's very playful in a good childlike not childish way. So why are you substantiating it with all these kinds of words with edges on them?"

"Because that's one side... that's my playfulness too," I countered, "I love playing with ideas and whenever I hit you with a theory it's always --"

Rozelle interrupted me with a scream: "A theory? ARGGHHHH!"



I wondered what had become of Rozelle Bentheim, fifteen years after that conversation. A quick google turned up an article in the Media Guardian. Headed "Bright Prospect goes on lookout for big ideas", the article described how British magazine Prospect had commissioned Rozelle to make them over in order to attract new, younger readers. Seeking to reflect the magazine's authority and eccentricity (if not its intelligence), Rozelle "has used warm colours, introduced a slightly larger typeface and commissioned typographers and illustrators to create some unique 'furniture' for the title. It feels less cluttered, fresher and easier to read as a result."

The Guardian continues: "While it remains an unapologetically intellectual title - publishing 'big opinions about big ideas' - now it has a big redesign to boot". The syntax and the implications there are oddly British -- do you need to apologize for being intellectual? Why that "while"? Why does a big redesign contradict an interest in big ideas? Are the implications of a redesign using warm colours, large type and simplicity that an ideas magazine is otherwise cold, dense and complex?

What I found interesting, though, was the way this article about a redesign of Prospect magazine followed the same basic contours as my conversation with Rozelle fifteen years ago. "Do not admit cleverness" seemed to be the not-so-secret theme of both.

"Your little songs are all like these little chairs of mine, which I think are rather adorable, and they're very -- actually they're quite unselfconscious," Rozelle told me back in 1993. "But I'm not going to talk about them in an intellectual way."

I countered with: "There is a lot of media attention around pop music and you have to fill columns and columns... you have to talk about it." (You couldn't really make the same defense today: intellectualisation of pop music has fled what's left of the music press.)

"Why do you have to be seduced just because you're supposed to do it, why are you doing it?" demanded Rozelle, making thinking look like abject conformism.

"I love talking about art, I love it, it's so unnecessary. Nobody has to talk about art, nobody has to make art." Going through my mind as I said this was probably some picture of Rozelle sitting in New York with Klaus Nomi. Surely he talked about art? Why was she suddenly so much against it?

Telescoped history of Britain over the next ten years: rave culture, lad culture, Spice Girls, Oasis, reality TV, New Labour. I leave for Paris, New York, Tokyo, Berlin. Zoom up, here we are, fifteen years later.

I look at the Prospect site. Rozelle's redesign is indeed elegant, with a nice curlicue joining the C to the T in the title. The front page headline is unapologetically intellectual: "HOW CHINA THINKS: the brains behind a superpower". Below it there's a profile of a Chinese man with a big domed shaved head, stroking his chin, thinking in the most conspicuous, calligraphic way imagery has yet found to depict the process -- the pose, in fact, of Rodin's "Thinker". The lead article is called "China's New Intelligentsia".

Rozelle's disgusted scream when I uttered the word "theory" rings in my ears. This new job must be a sort of torture for her. Unless -- like all clever British people -- she only affects, cleverly, to hate cleverness. Now there's a prospect to get you scratching your chin!

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I've always had a proclivity to dislike "warm" color schemes. I much prefer "cool" color schemes, which is odd considering my favorite color is red. Maybe it's because of where I'm located, the weather is almost always hot and I want it to cool down. Do you think region affects the preference of color schemes or am I just talking out of my ass?

Also, the color scheme on the cover of Prospect that you posted makes me hungry, which is why McDonald's uses that color scheme. 5 points please, Mr. Fry!

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Oh and I've watched that video before and it looks like she's attacking you. You seem so sad about it in the video. Awww, poor FancyPants. :(

[planetboo.livejournal.com]

Yes, the curse of the British... 'nobody likes a smartarse', 'it's a bit clever clever', 'too clever by half'... that last phrase always puzzled me. I used to imagine a school parents evening with a teacher saying, "Your Tommy is doing OK, but there is just one thing - he's too clever I'm afraid."
"Really? Oh dear!"
"Yes, by exactly fifty per cent, in fact."
The British public will always take an unashamed idiot to their hearts, but one must be ashamed to be the opposite.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, at least too-clever-by-50% British kids can still get a cleverectomy on the NHS. It's painless, I hear.

[psalamone.livejournal.com]

How much of this is a product of the Blairist attempt to move the British Left / Labor away from seeming like patrician know-it-alls to focus-grouping faux-populists? Is this the legacy of New Labor, or something even more deeply British? Prospect, by the way, looks like really bad intellectual porn -- complexity reduced to affect, literature giving way to the literature industry. That fucking curlicue says it all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think we can trace it back to Cromwell. Elizabeth I's Britain certainly loved cleverness and compexity. It was obviously considered very sexy then. You seduced someone by writing a fiendishly difficult sonnet.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's obvious that anti-intellectualism is merely an affectation rather than a reality in Britain. The very fact that it's a culture that produces the likes of Prospect, the TLS, LRB, Radio 3, BBC 4, a culture where getting into Oxford or Cambridge is both an educational and a social pinnacle - all that belies the fact that Britain (or the British middle classes at least) are anti-intellectual. Go to places that really are anti-intellectual - the Deep South, huge tracts of Australia, etc. - and you'll see the difference.

I think Rozelle Bentheim's recoil at "theory" is a different thing, it's the idea that to intellectualise art is not to experience it. She probably hated the 'conceptual turn' of the art world in the nineties and beyond.

[(Anonymous)]

der.

Unapolegetically unintellectual self-promotion

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Tangentially related...

As seen here:

http://dzima.livejournal.com/68133.html

I am selling all my cds and dvds so if anyone is interested in buying my copy of the Man Of Letters DVD, my price is 5 dollars plus postage from Sydney, Australia to the world out there and beyond (there are a couple of Momus cds in that list if you look hard).

microworlds and other members of the momus_lolz community will be granted a special discount on this dvd only.

I'd also give Momus a 10% cut of my sale's yields.

Thanks for the space.

Re: Unapolegetically unintellectual self-promotion

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD I SO WANT THAT COPY OF MAN OF LETTERS ILU!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I don't know if Klaus talked about art much, but he did talk about pies.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But did he theorize pies?

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I don't think Britain has an aversion to intellectuals; Stephen Hawking's popular Cosmology book "A Brief History of Time" stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Stepehen Hawkings is one of the greatest minds of our time. He went out of his way to present his brilliance in an accessible way and people embraced that. Some cynics have accused him of dumbing down, but he never intended for these books to be technical -- they were a way of introducing people to cosmology. They're fit for purpose.

I think Britain has an aversion to intellectual poseurs; those ingenuine, pretentious people who act like being able to quote obscure books and use esoteric language somehow entitles their ideas to merit. Quoting obscure books and using esoteric language doesn't necessarily make one an intellectual poseur, but it's certainly the only way a mediocre mind can pass itself off as worthy of merit.

We have an instant suspicion of lofty ideas presented in a complex way, but this is way it should be, otherwise we would never take the time to dissect what has been presented to us. We need to see if on a basic level it actually makes sense.

When someone is clear and transparent in their words and speech, their reasoning becomes accessible to a larger number of people. This is the purpose of communication. It's in your own favor to try to be as concise as possible when attempting dialectics.


The truly intelligent know the difference between dumbing down to the point meaning is being lost, and intellectually grandstanding where weak ideas are being inflated for the sake of style over substance. An ingenuine, pretentious "Intelligentsia" will do nothing but intellectual grandstanding.

The British empirical mindset

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Would a book on, say, philosophy be likely to sell anywhere near as well? I doubt it.

The way I see it, the British (or at least the English, though I suspect it's true of the Scots as well) are a pragmatic lot who place value on empiricism and relevance to the real world. Intellectual contributions, and those who make them, are judged on this basis. Thus engineers, biologists, physicists and such are respected, while philosophers, cultural theorists and so on aren't. Artists are respected if they please the popular taste (witness Banksy), or, perhaps more grudgingly so, if they make a lot of money. If they do neither, they're wasting their time, and could better allocate their resources working in a call centre or holding up a GOLF SALE sign on Oxford St. Pop culture is a subcategory of marketing; witness the "indie" industry.

Were a British Jean-Paul Sartre to arise, he would die in obscurity (or possibly, France), as his ideas would be deemed of little practical use to the average person on the street, and too bleak to sell well.

aarrrgh

[(Anonymous)]

"but i'm not going to talk about them in an intellectual way..."

When she says this I nearly screamed. I'm not sure how much of her reaction is to do with the whole cleverness acceptance, i thought it more a selfish and self righteous act. I'm purely speculating, but if the interview had been the other way round i dare say she would have had plenty to say about herself, and after all aren't your songs about you - you are the artist, why not talk at whatever level you see fit - you are the creator.

You say in the interview "Nobody has to make art" - After reading Carey (sorry to bring it up again) i actually questioned that statement. You see depending on what you define art as then that statement either rings true, or is inaccurate.

wewillbecome.com

Re: aarrrgh

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It seems self-evident that art is unnecessary, and talking about art even more so. Unless, of course, you define art in the Japanese way, and see it as something integrated totally into the pragmatic fabric of daily life. A pot, a cup of tea, a fertility ceremony designed to increase crop yields. I must say I find that attractive, but it's not the culture I was raised in.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Okay I'm being grumpy.

The whole anti-intellectual, anti-excellence thing in England drives me crazy. It just gets tiresome. Right now there are too many bands whose highest aspiration is to endlessly remake Graham Fellows' "Jilted John" - and who don't realize the original was a send up. Could a young Green Gartside come through today? Or is Babyshambles as thoughtful as it gets?

The BBC recently commissioned two hour-long programmes - one with Paul Morley, the other with classical conductor Charles Hazlewood - telling us how brilliantly clever pop music is. Both shows subjected Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" to harmonic musical analysis. They just flattered the audience; claiming that liking the pop music that's ubiquitous is actually some sort of ingenious critical discernment by its consumers.

By the end of it, I wanted to find some cob-webbed old Oxford Professor to come and tell me pop music was rubbish and that I ought to despise it. BBC 2 used to programme hour-long specials on Webern, with bookish dons trying to explain serialism to the lay-person. Now they're telling us how clever we all are to like Amy Winehouse. But I want to hear some young musician take Webern to the disco, because the most interesting pop is always sneaking in ideas from elsewhere - usually from "higher" culture.

This "everyone loves pop music" orthodoxy - with Tony Blair playing his Stratocaster, and David Cameron apparently a Morrissey fan - is actually bad for the music.

[(Anonymous)]

Getting into Oxford or Cambridge is both an educational and a social pinnacle that belies the fact that Britain (or the British middle classes at least) are anti-intellectual.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

By the way, I think it has more to do with the fact that most British (and Dutch too) intellemelectuals are almost exactly like Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm.

what was the ansewr to kershaws riddle

[(Anonymous)]

the best music and art is always made by the unkowns the type that wont ask questions in a public questions and answers....shy types how have more important persuits then success or fame...real life stuff like cleaning and cooking....thats real art...thinkings fine but flambouyant thinking is very dubious...i think the work of cathy wilkes relates to this shes always being mis understood

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

It's quite possible, even likely, that the "we love Kylie" programmes I mention were commissioned by Oxbridge graduates. They'd be the first to veto any Webern documentaries.

There's probably a class subtext to this. Middle class musicians - Mick Jagger, Joe Strummer, Nigel Kennedy, Damon Albarn - often go to extraordinary lengths to appear ruff and streetwise. I enjoy Albarn's music a lot more now he's got over his "mockney" thing - but that was probably his best-selling period in the UK. Gorillaz was more arty, and did better in America...

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's obvious that affectation rather than anti-intellectualism is a reality in Britain. The very fact that it's a Prospect that produces the likes of Oxford or Cambridge belies the difference.

I recoil at art. The 'conceptual turn' of the art world in the nineties and beyond.

[(Anonymous)]

That is why I live in a nutshell.

little britain

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

This is a subject close to my heart for many reasons. I suppose I would fall, largely and often into the apologetically intellectual category, with a little spillage over into being unapologetic. I don't think a reasonable amount of suspicion of intellectuallism is a bad thing. It can even be an intelligent thing, depending on how it's done. There is such a thing as being so intellectual that you forget your sense of irony.

I did a very short blog entry about Little Britain that, to me, is very much about this:

http://my.opera.com/quentinscrisp/blog/2008/02/08/little-britain

I don't mention it in the blog post, but the friend in question squeezed out the word 'post-structuralist' in a kind of smirking, apologetic way. I loved the fact that he'd used the word in that context, and also the fact that he was so apologetic and self-conscious about it, wanting it to be noticed, but not wanting it to be noticed, almost pretending that he himself didn't know what he meant.

speaking of ideas

[god-jr.livejournal.com]

by the way, since there are so many smarties here, i thought i would mention this journal:

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2008/03/squeaky-presents.html

it's fiction and poetry. the guidelines are pretty simple. the authors are writing in english but not living in english speaking counties. so you, momus, and a lot of people here qualify.
it's not about importing english-language culture, but about how the language and culture outside of the writer does (or perhaps does not) effect what is written.
for example, we hope to feature soon a turkish author who writes in turkish (translated into english for our readership) but lives in berlin.
i hope you don't mind that i'm plugging this on your blog. is it out of line? feel free to delete it if it is, i won't be offended.
it is also an invitation to you personally to submit something. thanks.

Books to be found in the 'Philosophy' section of Archway library (north London)

[(Anonymous)]

1. True Irish Ghost Stories (Seymour and Neilson)
2. Dear Mariella (Mariella Frostrup)
3. A Host Of Voices (Doris Stokes)
4. Shooting History (Jon Snow)
5. Teach Yourself I Ching
6. Freud's Women (cor..)
7. Feng Sui Success Secrets (Lillian Too)
8. The Kindness of Strangers (Kate Adie autobiography)
9. The Bible Code 2 (2!) (Michael Drosnin)
10. The Easy Way To Stop.. Worrying (Allen Carr)

Re: Books to be found in the 'Philosophy' section of Archway library (north London)

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"7. Feng Sui Success Secrets (Lillian Too)"

Hahaha! bullshit!

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

surely since you've started blogging you're less likely to write a song that starts with "what is the cultural meaning of..."

the white whale

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I have a low tolerance for theory, though I could listen to you talk about it all day, because you have a gift and a talent for it (and a golden voice).

You take ideas and theories and say -- let's play with these, spin some dross into gold! Boost ourselves into the lilacs. Come along. The game is afoot!

Others use "theory" to control, pin-down, euthanize, annihilate, and for intellectual posturing. There is no life in it. No joy. It leads nowhere. It smacks of religiosity.
"If only I can get all these pigeons in their right holes, then... what?"

I just don't think life works this way. It cannot be contained or explained like this. Life, at some fundamental level, always resists explanation, always re-creates, modifies, remains slippery, enigmatic, just out of reach.



pink tentacle (http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/03/mythical-16th-century-disease-critters/)

Re: the white whale

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Great link!

I love ideas when they have a direct correlation to living, especially little 'ecosystems' of small ones--but usually stay clear of them when they become big, abstract theories. At that point it becomes very male, lots of cock-waving.

The "us" of small ideas are more cooperative and humane than the "I" or "Thou" of big ones: helping someone to make their plants thrive or turn them on to a new wine, etc. If an idea or two emerges from that, so much the better. Makes for good conversation.

The triumph of idiots on horseback

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Other posters have commented on the ubiquity of this mindset in other English-speaking nations.
I wonder is it an Anglospheric phenomenon, it is certainly as common in Ireland, kudos goes to the sly idiot who 'gets on well' in a fiscal sense whilst any show of intellectualism - real or assumed - seems to be regarded as a form of pretentious foolishness or more exactly a compromise of the 'real intelligence' required to be careerist, capitalist and to fuck people over in order to make a buck.

The particularly English paradigm you cite seems quite different to this however; is it a false modesty, a fear of seeming to be remote or more perniciously a general malaise within intelligentsia - a conformity toward a bogus belief in the precedence of the general accessibility of knowledge, a desire not to alienate the dumb kids in the class - no matter what?

[(Anonymous)]

Trace it back to Cromwell, the Reformation, the democratic movement..

Cleverness, education--ostentation of any sort--does not jibe with the democratic spirit. We put it away in the trunk along with our ruffled shirts and powdered wigs. It was either that or let the liberals have our heads up on the block.

[internought.livejournal.com]

A pose as old as Socrates.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

"I love talking about art, I love it, it's so unnecessary. Nobody has to talk about art, nobody has to make art."

I love that you and I frequently paraphrase Oscar Wilde (almost) instinctively.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I'd have to agree with the above posters going on about English pragmatism and empricism, etc. While good at building what, the largest and best functioning empire in world history or whatever, is there an English equivalent of Baudelaire or Hesse (to name the better known versions of what I'm thinking). Wilde and his inspirations are a pale, weak imitation copied directly from what deep existed (and exists) in the French tradition, and that's the closest that quickly comes to mind. Well, Blake too, but he was waging a private and isolated revolution against these things.

It's funny and strange, though, that there are closer analogs to French and German cultural stances in the United States, aka, "the stupid English-speaking nation". More flights of intellectual imagination, less clean, unpretentious realism. If my mind were clearer I could go in deeper, but the English tradition never seemed too interested in working intellectual, emotional, or that weird artistic spiritual muscle for the sake of it (yes, English, excluding Scotland, etc, since that seemed to have its own thing back in my young Literature days).

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

"Our mental health has been in a semi-wretched condition for quite some time now. One of the reasons for this distress, aside from choosing cheese as a way of life, is the fact that we have, against some incredibly stiff competition, emerged victorious as the biggest bunch of liars on the face of the planet. No society has managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the fiction that it is moral, sane and wholesome, than our current crop of modern Americans.

This same delusion is the mysterious force behind our national desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as intelligent. Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmetize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a particular type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile, to the point where the ability to communicate on the most Mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become "one of the guys."

Let's face it, nobody wants to hang out with somebody who's smarter than they are. This is not fun. Americans have always valued the idea of fun. We have a national craving for fun. We don't get very much of it anymore, so we do two things: first, we rummage around for anything that might be fun; then, since it wasn't really fun in the first place, we pretend to enjoy it, whatever it was. The net result? Stressed cheese. "

--F. V. Zappa

[(Anonymous)]

Our collective desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as intelligent. Together, on this blog, we behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmetize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a particular type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile, to the point where the ability to communicate on the most Mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become "one of the guys."

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

A friend told me yesterday she'd been filmed for an upcoming lilly allen show, singing etc. But i haven't had tv for about 6 months, so i googled it:

I thought you'd find this interesting: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3364029.ece

I watched some online and it's just awful, whimsy would not approve, it's just so incredibly fake... they're over-informal, and over-casual... they try to make interviews appear like conversations, and yet they're on tv, they're being recorded, they've been dressed up and they've got make up on, they're not having a casual chat, they're being watched.

But according to the bbc 16-34 year olds don't want to know that, they don't want the formality of people actually getting payed to be on a show and being required to perform & answer questions. It's incredibly affected anti-intellectual... and proven affected because hardly anyone watched it... people aren't TRULLY interested by things that are dumbed down... even if they make shows that are.