You see, Harris had virtually invented the online television network with Pseudo in 1995. His standard procedure was to recruit future “stars” from the attendees of his 90s-era raves and make them instantly famous through the burgeoning power of the internet. However, after his own attempts to recreate himself as an internet persona failed, Harris turned his attention toward the question of how all this attention-seeking and instant access might affect the general populace. His answer was “Quiet,” a subterranean environment in the heart of New York City—wired with 24-hour a day, zero privacy video surveillance. Harris hand-selected a set of men and women who donned matching jumpsuits, lived in lofts made of scaffolding, and enjoyed instant access to free food, drink, and drugs. In return, participants signed away any rights to words and images collected during the project.

Applicants for Harris’ “hotel” of “pods” submitted to a lengthy screening process, invasive questionnaires, and the proviso that they could not leave unless dismissed. Even so, “Quiet” filled up in a matter of days. Yet, the reality of the project was more than some had bargained for. Each “pod’s” television monitor could view the feed from any other camera regardless of whether the fellow participants were eating, sleeping, visiting the restroom, having sex, or weeping inconsolably on the floor. But, the “podwellians” found that they no longer cared. Participants complained that they had been unprepared for the depth of detachment and loneliness they felt while living elbow to elbow, stacked-up together in open cubicles. They and their fellow citizens were routinely interrogated, driven to the edge of sanity, and forced to debase themselves in manifold ways, but found they could no longer empathize with one another. “Quiet” concluded on New Year’s Day, 2000, by order of the New York City fire marshal—just thirty days into the experiment.

Ironically, given what he had already seen, Harris next trained the cameras on he and his girlfriend, Tanya. The result was a website that allowed similar, no-holds-barred access to the couple’s burgeoning romance. Surfers found ample video from the couple’s high-tech apartment, decked-out in motorized, motion-tracking net cameras and chat spaces for direct interaction with the couple. Not surprisingly, the relationship folded under the pressure as subscribers meddled in their fights, mentioned their unmentionables, and critiqued their most private interactions. Harris had discovered, before anyone else, what any reality-TV guru today knows instinctively. The public wants drama, needs salacious conflict and oddly, as long as the camera is rolling, most people will sacrifice everything to give their viewer’s what they want. As expected, following Tanya’s stormy exit, interest waned and Harris was forced to pull the plug on the project.

Where We Live in Public might have been just another tragic biopic, Timoner succeeds in turning the mix of archival footage and interviews into a parable. The film makes the case that today’s wired population is manipulated by “friend counters” and data-mining in ways eerily similar to Harris’ avante garde experiments. For those who wish to enjoy the ironic catharsis of watching the film, I won’t further divulge Timoner’s mechanism. However, more frightening than the film’s unexpected moral is its lingering effect. While her audiences have been graphically shown the dehumanizing, alienating effects of sharing one’s deepest thoughts with the world, most of us—myself included—will run to our computers and blog about the experience.

All that having been said, when considered philosophically, We Live in Public offers a valuable glimpse of human nature inside—and outside—of the internet’s virtual world. Linda Flower and John Hayes argue in their oft cited article “The Cognition of Discovery” that a writer’s output is shaped, in part, by image of the intended reader they construct. Furthermore, this image of the ideal reader is constructed from the writer’s own self-image, remolded to fit into the writing’s rhetorical context. This rhetorical context—the problem the writer is trying to solve—is, itself, a construction based on the writer’s own perception of their relationship to the subject and audience. A writer fashions their audience and goals, not out of whole-cloth or even out of previous experience, but by reproducing themselves as their audience. Thus—in as much as it is possible—an author’s work is the result of totalized subjectivity. The self-presentation is written by a self as author, crafted for that self as audience, and written to affect the self’s perception of the world.

If it is granted that all of us live our lives as presentations of an ideal self, (like actors in a play), and one grants that our output is tailored to an ideal audience that is actually our own self-image, (as with Flower and Hayes’ theory), then the result of surveillance culture is the truest expression of ourselves. That is to say, the results of the “Quiet” and “We Live in Public” projects—naked people throwing each other around a shower enclosure, threatening to kill each other with sub-machine guns, or attempting rape on the net—are not aberrations. These depraved and debased actions are calculated to appeal to the Other, but this Other is our own self-image—the Other is us.

If all this is correct, then when I act the part of myself for the audience of who I think you are, I am truer to both my actual self and the self that I deny. However, a simpler explanation beckons: Perhaps I simply think everyone else more depraved than myself?

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem.” College Composition and Communication 31, no. 1 (1980): 21-32.

Harris, Josh. We Live in Public. DVD. Directed by Ondi Timoner. 2009. United States: IndiePix Films, 2010.

“… I think [kitsch] is so hurtful, if not evil.”
Calvin Seerveld, Rainbows for a Fallen World, 1980.

If Calvin Seerveld lacks the courage of his convictions, hedging his claim that kitsch is hurtful, if not evil, Hermann Broch suffers from no similar crisis of conscience. Broch calls kitsch “the evil within the value-system of art” such that, if true art is good, kitsch is evil. If Seerveld seems unwilling to level this final judgment, this unwillingness is probably more due to his holding a traditional vision of art wherein it functions in many modalities the leading function of which is aesthetic. In contrast Broch argues that art’s function is, at its most fundamental, ethical rather than aesthetic.

In order to understand the logic behind each man’s position it is necessary for the reader to submit to each author’s radically different conception of value, truth, and the nature of cultural formation. However, along the way he or she will also find a surprising overlap between the two philosophers. To aid in the quest, three questions will be asked and answered: 1) What is the nature of good and evil? 2) How does cultural formation of art express good or evil tendencies? 3) What is the function of kitsch in relation to cultural formation?

What is the Nature of Good and Evil?

To begin by contrasting Seerveld’s and Broch’s differing opinions as to the status of kitsch as evil was, perhaps, misleading because Herman Broch’s use of the term evil is not, at it would first seem, identical with that of Seerveld’s. Calvin Seerveld defines evil as sin, and sin as deviation from the creational ordinances that God established for our response to Him. This is to say that creation itself is inherently and definitionally good, being the work of God, while human endeavor in the creation of cultural artifacts introduces into God’s creation “the committed slant of man or woman’s heart.” Further, Seerveld’s commitment to the Calvinistic understanding of the total depravity of man after the Fall argues that human beings are born with a “responsibility to evil” from which Christ alone may “set us free from our sinful selves to be your willing servants.” Thus, sin is not the loss of the goodness of creation, but “an anti-creational, ruinous bite” that corrupts, dirties, puffs up and breaks human endeavor because it ignores God’s law. Seen from Seerveld’s perspective, evil is the corruption of the otherwise good aesthetic, (or any other), endeavor by refusal to follow God’s commands concerning that endeavor’s formation.

However, for Broch, death is the great negative value, that is, evil. Broch writes in the the early ninteen-thirties, yet already he considered the world to have suffered “the collapse of a comprehensive general value system.” The general value system he had in mind included the whole of Western European culture beginning in the Middle Ages and having suffered dissolution “bit by bit” as “individual value-systems became independent from one another.” Having lost this communal understanding of mankind’s ultimate value, individuals had become increasingly confused and torn by both destructive and constructive forces, to an increasing degree at the mercy of their own consciences. Broch argues that into this “confusion of decline” cause by positivism’s distrust of the theological and speculative, a new re-clarification of general value and non-value may come.

Thus, Broch’s contender for the replacement of earlier theological and speculative value underpinnings is the recognition of human mortality and human creativity as the opposite poles upon which value judgments may be made. Evil is death and death is evil. Even for logical positivists, death expresses itself persistently in the “night and uncertainty,” so that “in this darkness fear resides” and mankind finds itself with no possible defense and no way to numb this fear’s impact. Therefore, that which has value, that which is good, always aims at the nullification and overcoming of death. However, paradoxically it is only through the eternity of death that the absolute enters into real life, “bestowing its magical meaningfulness,” bringing magic words like “infinity,” “eternity,” and “universe” that otherwise have no meaning. In this way, even those who had earlier rejected the general value system of religion and historical philosophy were to be brought to a reborn general ethics by way of cultural formation as positive value activities over and against the absolute negative of death.

I found the interesting blog Voyou Desoeuvre, which certainly has a striking design—at first repulsive, and then fascinating. Then I found the blog’s colophon. What I love about this little design explanation are the variety of reasons enumerated. Aesthetic: “the way in which it combines cartoonish, pin-up art with a grid layout and geometric sans-serif font;” historical-political: “this seems to me to represent beautifully the peculiar modernism of the 1950s, a modernism of the banal, in which what had been a heroic futurism in the 1930s became commonplace;” concretely allusive: “the inspiration for the current design of the site comes from 1950s commercial art, particularly the collection of adverts at Plan59, and even more specifically a 1954 advert for Jantzen swimsuits by Pete Hawley.”

For the time being, Voyou Desoeuvre takes the prize for most interestingly intentional blog-design. (Even if I personally could never live with that design on my own blog.)

I’m not yet an authority on design itself; but I consider my envy in good taste, given its coherence and steady development in one direction.

As far as site design goes, two huge principles guide my envy: simplicity and density.

Unquestionably, my cyber-aesthetic runs in the direction of equating excellence with functionality. But I’d like to think this is not because of any aesthetic-degrading utilitarianism on my part so much as because cyber-dysfunctionality is so appallingly ugly. For example, I offer the winner of webpagesthatsuck.com’s 2008 worst web site award: havenworks. Don’t spend much time there if you value your sleep.

The principle of good design which havenworks is lacking, clearly, is simplicity. Music offers the best analogy here, I think. The most memorable compositions, the most stunning variations upon common musical ideas, have as their base utterly simple structures. (For example, read Jeremy Denk’s eloquent analysis of some genius-transformed simplicities in Chopin—and while you’re there, look at the model design of his blog.) Consequently, it is no surprise that the minimalists win; I envy them most.

Some minimalist favorites (having no relation in terms of content):

• Fractal Ontology
• Critical Mass (Blog of the National Book Critics Circle)
• Unfogged

But minimalism really doesn’t cut it by itself. (I hold my own site up, whose content certainly doesn’t have enough value to make it worth the hours I’ve labored to improve its appearance… I hope that changes at some point.) — Which is why I am most envious of sites that manage to be both simple and dense.

Dense sites have an aesthetic of abundance. They are like the book that you take down from the shelf at the bookstore intending to browse and replace, only to discover that the table of contents is so riveting that you waste half your day standing in the same spot leafing through it and then borrow fifteen bucks off a friend in order to buy it on the spot rather than waiting to get home to buy it cheaper from amazon. Dense sites are the ones you don’t just put in your feed reader—you set aside a few hours and go back to their first posts in order to get a sense of the original intention; you put them in your favorites and visit them in bored hours; you memorize their URLs to show friends at parties…

I close this post by tempting you to sin with me. Here are some of the sites whose simple, dense designs make me greenest:

• Cosma’s Notebooks (ridiculously simple design: incredible wealth of content)
• The Volokh Conspiracy (origin of my first serious desire to study law)
• Object-Oriented Philosophy (actually I hate his site-design, one of Wordpress’s worst ready-made templates; but I mention him as a bit of healthy self-subversion because he’s still great to read—when I started I went right back to the beginning of his archives and worked forward. Clearly, site-design isn’t everything. Great content wins every time.*)

* But site-design is nice. Like beauty in women is a great addition to personality and wisdom… Just sayin’.

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.

While I don’t think aesthetically engaging a piece of literature, art, or music necessarily only involves these spinal shivers, certainly they constitute one of aesthetic engagement’s finest moments. Revulsion is also a valuable aesthetic reaction, and analysis or synthesis are valuable aesthetic engagements, but one of the best ways to talk about art of any kind is to share shiver-moments.

Example:

This evening I spent a few hours with my friend Dan, chatting of theology and philosophy, eating Clementines, and listening to his record-player. The first disc he put on the record player was by Leonard Cohen. We paused at one point, listening to the scratchy-record sound of Cohen’s allusive lyrics and lovely voice—and he performed one of those chromatic modulations that mark his unique melodic style.

“Whoa,” I said, “that modulation gave me shivers.”

“Yeah,” said Dan, “some of his lyrics give me shivers…”

Suddenly what I believe is an accurate characterization of Cohen’s over-all aesthetic sprung to my mind: the unexpected chromaticism of his melodies, lyrical, musical, dialectical. The fittingness of some of those (what I can only call) ironic melodies for his ironic allusivity became more apparent. And the synthesized characterization that had resulted from comparing shivers led into a discussion of the fittingness and meaning of the fact that Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been used both (mistakenly) as a hymn in some churches and also as the altogether appropriate background music for the ironic and anti-heroic sex scene in Watchmen.

The point I am trying to make is this: that Nabokov made a good point. We can certainly do worse, aesthetically, than to follow the shiver of our spines.

To me, this suggest two models of engagement. On one hand, we could engage contemporary art by writing and speaking about our own experience of it. The mode of experiencing the physical world, for a Christian formed by the liturgy of sacrament and community and by the Biblical narrative, is successfully sacramental. God’s grace does actually reach down, the transcendent through the immanent, to grip and change our hearts—and this can occur even through contemporary art. On the other hand, Siedell argues that contemporary art itself functions with a version of liturgical sacramentality informing the art world’s expectations for it. These expectations are predominantly that art can transform one’s life. Plenty both of artists and committed art-viewers who may be alienated from Christianity as such, still reserve a place for the spiritual power of art. This context opens up the possibility of a new kind of analysis—let us call it liturgical analysis—which investigates the sacramental aspirations, the transformative hopes, implicit in contemporary art. Christians possess a unique resource for this kind of analysis: the well-developed framework of Nicene Christianity.

Thus far Siedell. His are unquestionably exciting and provocative ideas. Applications of his insights are diverse and urgent.

One very small (but important) example of the utility of these insights is taking place even now here at Dordt College.

I edit a campus cultural rag called the Canon. Beginning with our next issue, we are expanding the Canon to include art criticism of art produced and exhibited on campus. Only we face a difficulty: none of my writers are professional art historians or academic art critics. We struggled with what role exactly our criticism should play on campus—apart from the lame point that there isn’t any right now so we’d be filling a gap. (Actually, I wish more critics of just about everything would ask themselves why they write the criticism they do…) But having discussed it among ourselves, we’re now pretty well ready to sign onto Siedell’s movement. The benefits appear to be (1. the hard work of initiation into the artworld in order to properly understand the iconic significance of art on our campus; (2. the elevation of our artists themselves, who have been confronted with the Rookmakerian paradigm (if they’ve thought about their philosophy of art at all) or else the rather ill-expressed and unhelpful opinions of Seerveld regarding “allusivity.” We can help these artists to take their own art seriously by taking it seriously ourselves. The plan is as follows: to pick, each of us, two pieces of art exhibited on campus which particularly grip us. Then to spend half and hour in front of each, just looking, allowing the pictures to work upon us as they will. Afterward we will encapsulate the reflections of this half hour in a 500 word review of each piece. We have the explicit goal of writing about our experience of these pieces of art—which means that our writing will be worthwhile precisely in proportion to the degree that we invest ourselves in the works themselves.

Thus one practical result of Siedell’s book. More theoretical reflections to come.