Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism
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Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism
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Overview
Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Grillparzer and Stifter).
The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the "exemplary originality" (Kant) that only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804769983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 716 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
Exemplarity and Mediocrity
The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to RealismBy PAUL FLEMING
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5890-1
Chapter One
Exemplarity and Mediocrity
Among all mediocre things, the mediocre poet is certainly the worst. Goethe
Exorbitant or Not at All
While there has certainly been mediocre art since time immemorial, it is questionable whether mediocre art is in fact art and thus whether a mediocre artist is actually an artist. This possibility may sound extreme, but in the case of mediocrity-which, by definition, should offer a middle ground-aesthetics has repeatedly taken an extreme position. When it comes to average quality, art differs from perhaps all other human activities: an average teacher, craftsman, lawyer, or politician remains a professional within a respective field and, as average, could be doing better but isn't doing too badly either. The judgment "mediocre" or "average," while certainly not flattering, in no way strips the recipients of their status in their designated field, nor does it declare their achievements to be worthless. A mediocre student is just that: a student with average abilities, just as a mediocrelawyer remains a lawyer and, all things considered, a relatively decent one. In both cases, there are many better than average but also many worse.
Not so for the artist. As a judgment of value, "mediocre" or "average" possesses a different and decidedly more damning valence in art. The poet Gottfried Benn brings the extreme standards of lyric poetry to the fore in his lecture "Probleme der Lyrik" (1951, "Problems of Lyric Poetry"):
May I add at this point the remark that mediocrity is simply not allowed and is unbearable in lyric poetry. Poetry's field is narrow, its means very subtle, its substance the ens realissimum of substances. Thus, its standards must be extreme. Mediocre novels are not so unbearable; they can entertain, teach, and be exciting, but lyric poetry must be either exorbitant or not at all. This belongs to its essence.
And to its essence belongs something else, a tragic experience of the poet: No poet, even the greatest poets of our time, has left behind more than six to eight complete poems. The remaining poems may be interesting from the perspective of the author's biography or development, but those that rest in themselves, shine forth from themselves, and are replete with long fascination are few-thus, for the sake of these six poems the thirty to fifty years of asceticism, suffering, and battle.
If all art is an extreme, a form of expression that necessarily deviates from any sense of averageness-and therefore demands extreme criteria- then poetry constitutes for Benn the pinnacle of artistic exceptionality. With respect to aesthetic taste, poetry simply cannot endure middling quality; a poem must be "complete," at once maximizing its narrow field and exercising exacting subtlety. By "resting in" and "shining forth" from itself, a complete poem for Benn forms what one could call a monadic totality with neither superfluity nor lack, which thus holds its fascination for generations. As the "most real of all substances," poetry acknowledges a solitary, binary aesthetic standard: perfection or nothing. While such strict aesthetic demands may have sounded anachronistic or even elitist in the mid-twentieth century (much like the reproach against Adorno), Benn's reflections are in line with a distinct notion of aesthetic judgment since Kant: there are no gradations of taste, no exceptions, only the uncompromising demand for universality.
Benn interestingly reduces the effects of lyric poetry's aesthetic absolutism to the "personal tragedy" of even the greatest poet, who spends a lifetime of renunciation and suffering for a handful of complete poems. One senses here, of course, the self-stylized artist at once lamenting and masochistically reveling in the "six to eight" poems that constitute the lasting oeuvre of a great poet (including, presumably, Benn himself). But even if Benn is aestheticizing the agony of the artist, the consequences of his strict aesthetic stance are enormous for poetry as a whole: if only a few poems per great author stand the test of perfection, then the vast majority of poetry that one reads is mediocre or worse, which means that most poetry is ultimately not what it claims to be: poetry. This is not to say that mediocre and failed poems are not worth reading. Benn is clear: such work (which, in fact, constitutes the brunt of an author's lifetime output) remains "interesting" and can reveal much about the author and his or her development, but these are literary-historical, psychological, or philological categories, not aesthetic ones. This difference between aesthetic and other categories also helps explain why Benn exempts the mediocre novel-the always somewhat suspect "genre" of modernity-from this absolute standard. What a mediocre novel offers (e.g., entertainment, information, and excitement) may have been part of the novel as such from the beginning and thus perhaps excludes this bourgeois genre from high art. Therefore, just as mediocre novels provide an escape from everyday life, mediocre poetry is fodder for philologists and literary historians, not for aesthetic judgment, which demands something exorbitant. From Benn's perspective, one could say that the university is the place where one processes, studies, and tries to render mediocre poetry "interesting"-for an author's work or for a tradition's development.
That aesthetics should be considered an extreme discipline is further developed by the German author Jean Paul in 1796: "Completely miserable poetry is better than every mediocre poetry." In art it is better to fail miserably than to succeed mildly. While this insight may apply to other areas and endeavors, this is the case only when life is viewed, in Nietzsche's words, "as an aesthetic phenomenon" (as opposed to, say, an economic, ethical, or political one). The scale of aesthetic judgment is not a horizontal line with "failure" on one end and "perfection" or "beauty" on the other, whereby "mediocre" splits the difference. Rather, the spectrum of aesthetic valuation forms a circle with "success" and "failure" next to each other at the top and "mediocre" on the distant, bottom half. For this reason, the aesthetic judgment "mediocre" or "average" is more damning than failure. Like greatness, failure marks an extreme and, therefore, still announces itself as remarkable: One tried something spectacular and failed spectacularly, which has its own aesthetic pleasure. Failure, in fact, is akin to the sublime. There can be sublime failure but no beautiful failure. Sublime failure can be understood as a certain formless or malformed monstrosity that overpowers the imagination and yet achieves pleasure in displeasure. Aesthetic failure additionally harbors the possibility of being misunderstood by the contemporary audience and thus before its time. A central topos of the artist is the belated genius, the one who came too early, was too inventive and original, and hence is only posthumously given the proper recognition and admiration. Great art often awaits a future, adequate reception. Average art, on the other hand, fits comfortably into the current art scene; it may possess a certain proficiency, it may sell well, but by not achieving an extreme, mediocrity, unlike sublime failure, is ultimately forgettable.
While the abhorrence of mediocrity may sound like a modern proclivity or obsession, the singular status of mediocrity in art is as old as Western aesthetics and expressed just as forcefully by Horace in a text that would be the foundation of poetics until the mid-eighteenth century, the Ars Poetica. Horace's virulent critique of mediocre poetry is significant for two reasons: first, Horace's rejection of poetic mediocrity will proceed from different-indeed, polar opposite-reasons than modern aesthetics. As one of the quasi-lawgivers of normative aesthetics, Horace offers a rather rule-based notion of art that implicitly equates mediocrity with excessive deviation from exemplary models and authorizing judges of taste. The function of exemplarity in normative aesthetics is to collect and canonize great works that codify norms, offer models for imitation, and enable an unbroken tradition. Therefore, while mediocrity has always been taboo in art, everything changes regarding its criteria with the advent of the aesthetics of genius and the imperative of originality. Until the eighteenth century, poetics operated under the authorizing influence of normative aesthetics, in which to defy established exemplary texts was to risk mediocrity. With the rise of the genius and originality, the opposite holds true: to imitate is to be mediocre. The second reason for Horace's significance regarding the issue of mediocrity is that he is also famous for coining the phrase "auream mediocritatem," which is regularly translated as "the golden mean" or "the golden middle" but can be literally rendered as "golden mediocrity"-the ethical ideal of a middle road between extremes. Horace thus offers two distinct conceptions of mediocrity, one that relies on external standards and exempla to determine aesthetic quality (normative aesthetics) and another (the golden mean) that does not proceed from a rule and, in fact, rejects the very notion of a universal standard but nevertheless offers a measure without a guiding norm-a determination of the middle that bears affinities to Kant's notion of original exemplarity.
This chapter examines and differentiates the grounds for aesthetics' rejection of mediocrity by investigating the key reversal that takes place with the break from normative aesthetics (Aristotle, Horace) in the eighteenth century and the development of a genial notion of art (Kant). It then looks at how Kant and Schiller negotiate the representability of the average and common under the auspices of originality and concludes with a discussion of Kleist's text "A Principle of Higher Criticism," in which he argues contra Kant (and most aesthetic thought) that mediocre art, in fact, serves as the basis of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic community, since mediocre art by nature demands an argumentative engagement.
Living the "Mean" Life (Aristotle)
As is well known, Horace's notion of the golden mean is derived from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle's entire ethical apparatus is premised on the contention that extremes, whether of deficiency or excess (i.e., too little or too much), are always destructive, while the "middle" or the "mean" both nourishes and preserves and thereby paves the path to "arete," which is often translated as "virtue" but is more akin to "excellence." Aristotle's good life, his ethical and happy life, requires avoiding extremes and choosing the mean. Although such a philosophy sounds like the blueprint for taking the mediocre road in life, Classical ethics had a completely different notion of the average. Unlike Christianity or Kant's categorical imperative, Aristotle rejects the notion of an absolute law or universal principle. "Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good," writes Aristotle, "have for us no fixity, [...] they do not fall under any art or precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion." If ethical questions have neither fixity nor objective precepts, the extremes to be navigated are not fixed mathematical points against which all are measured and judged, but rather particular excesses relative only to one person. The contingencies of individual constitution demand the mobilization of a mean relative to the individual, a mean that "is not one, nor the same for all." Every person has a different character with certain inclinations and weaknesses. Within these idiosyncratic parameters one must locate one's individual extremes and thereby determine the measure particular to oneself.
The Classical golden mean differs, however, not only from person to person but also from situation to situation. One does not have a fixed, lifelong average; rather, the mean constitutes a moving target that shifts in each new context:
For instance, fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in either case not properly; but to feel them at the right times, toward the right objects, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence. Similarly with regard to actions, there is excess, defect, and the intermediate.
Every ethical decision is contextual and thus demands a recalibration of one's mean. What is the object? The motivation? The particular constellation of factors? Only in finding one's individual "intermediate" or "middle" does one avoid extremes and embody excellence. For Aristotle, locating the middle-much less choosing and acting on it-is not the easiest but most difficult, the path of greatest resistance: "For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle. [...] Any one can get angry-that is easy-or give or spend money." In this version of finding one's own private average, if one succeeds in living the mean, one can never be average or mediocre, because there is no better or worse in relation to others. Whereas mediocrity in its now standard sense is a relational, comparative term, defined vis-à-vis the rest and especially the best, the middle in Aristotle is always mine, mine alone and, in fact, never the same for me. That is, there is no one golden mean, but a mean for every person in every new situation and thus the demand to repeatedly recalculate such an idiosyncratic measure.
Despite the emphatic differentiation between being average and finding one's average, one senses Aristotle's own slight suspicion that the middle may ultimately be of middling quality: "Hence, in respect to its substance and the definition which states its essence, excellence is a mean; with regard to what is best and right, excellence is an extreme." Aristotle acknowledges here the somewhat paradoxical logic underpinning what Horace will call the "golden mean" or "golden mediocrity": What is by definition (and, therefore, essentially and literally) a middle state must at the same time be considered an extreme with respect to excellence. The "best" (an extreme) is not an extreme, but the mean; Aristotle's slight hesitation toward the mean-maybe living the mean is a bit mediocre-is symptomatic of the ambivalence that will surround the terms average, mean, and mediocre throughout this study. The key factor that separates Aristotle's doctrine of the mean from the usual understanding of the middle as mediocre is, however, that his sense of the average rejects any notion of comparison. This concept of a singular mean, which proceeds from neither a rule nor a principle yet offers one in turn, will be decisive for a notion of original exemplarity that arrives with Kant, in which exemplarity is at once an effect of originality and decoupled from imitation.
The Rule of Mediocrity (Horace)
If the golden mean is always an individual measurement that ideally has nothing to do with being average (since it is a singular calculation free from comparison), this does not mean that antiquity had no notion of the mediocre as a judgment of relative ability and quality. In the Ars Poetica, Horace again utilizes the word "mediocris," now as a relational category denoting its established sense of middling quality or average ability. Here the middle is not an idiosyncratic deduction of a personal mean, but a judgment of relative value. Horace, however, does not simply dismiss mediocrity as being of no worth. Rather, he already pinpoints the roots of mediocrity as a double-edged sword, in which art deviates from other professions and forms of expression:
Take to heart and remember this dictum; there are only some things in which we rightly allow what is middling [medium] and tolerable. A mediocre [mediocris] lawyer or pleader falls short of the merit of eloquent Messala and doesn't know as much as Aulus Cascellius, yet nevertheless he has a value; but neither men nor gods nor booksellers allow mediocre [mediocribus] poets.
With this imperative-"remember this dictum"-one encounters a fundamental dilemma of mediocrity that persists until today. Already with Horace, mediocrity as a judgment of relative ability possesses a qualitative difference in art as opposed to all other professions. In most areas of life (e.g., in the practical arts such as law), averageness has its place, function, and value; in the fine arts, however, mediocrity is absolutely taboo. In both of Horace's examples, the lawyer and the artist, the word "mediocrity" marks a judgment of relative ability. In both cases, "mediocrity" means that compared with others one is simply not the best. But for Horace a mediocre lawyer is not only "tolerable" but also has a "value"-an allowance not granted to the mediocre poet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exemplarity and Mediocrity by PAUL FLEMING Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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