The Harold Rosenberg School of Historical Cosplay
Blake Smith first came onto our radar in the course of saying some very mean things about some of our friends and associates dans le monde. “Ouch!” was our first thought. “Poor L***! Dear innocent S***! That’s going to hurt!” And our second thought was: “We’ve got to get this guy writing for The Hinternet.” But what really clinched our irreversible Blake-pilling was this short letter he wrote to The Harper Review in response to the question, “Should we tell children the truth?”: a letter that cut through all the takesmanship and Geplapper of our shallow culture and reminded readers, at least those alert enough to receive the lesson, what it is truly to think a question through to its end. An uncompromising parrhesiast, a historian and a polyhistor, and above all a great wit, Blake exemplifies a social role, and a form of life, that so many others in the present age, perhaps in every age, only know how to cosplay. So let’s just get out of his way now before he turns his wit on us! —The Hinternet
1.
History repeats itself — first as tragedy, then as farce. Marx’s memorable phrase from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) contains, like many apparently cynical observations, much disguised optimism and unfounded certitude. Doesn’t history repeat itself more often as tragedy (first as tragedy, then as tragedy)? Doesn’t it repeat itself more than once (and then as tragedy… and then again as tragedy…)? How can I tell tragedy from comedy? (Was the first Trump administration the tragic one? Is now a time for laughing?) How can we be sure that history really does repeat itself, and what might it mean for history to “repeat”?
So much supposedly high-minded commentary consists of underemployed former humanities majors musing about whether the present moment is more analogous to interwar fascism, the last years of the Soviet Union, or, why not, the year 1587 of the Ming Dynasty. These exercises allow commentators, I ungenerously suppose, to feel as though, having as it were located themselves in time, and surmised in what sort of drama the timing of their birth has enrolled them, they can then discover the right course of political action.
History, a flux of infinitely many happenings, is neither progressing towards anything in a series of unrepeatable but accumulating stages, nor turning endlessly around an axis of unchanging archetypes, nor occasionally “rhyming” with itself (such that the 2020s “are” “our” 1920s), except in the conversations by which we try to impose on the blur of events a comprehensible —and perhaps, we hope, manipulable— form.
We say we’re living in a tragedy, a parody, “another Weimar”, a “new Gilded Age”, just as we say, to make sense of our own lives, “I’m such a Miranda… an Aquarius… an introvert”. To be able to act at all, as an individual or a political group, requires a certain amount of bonkers rhetorical horseshit, claims to know “who” and “when” “we are” that cannot possibly be grounded and that generate arguments —no actually it’s your eighth house that determines your rising moonstone… the substructural base of the class dynamics suggests that the better comparison is to late-feudal…— giving certain kinds of nerds dizzying enjoyments and making certain kinds of nerd-haters wish for a Night of the Long Swirlies.
Why, come to think of it, does “History” have a dustbin or trashcan but not a toilet? Why can’t we flush its debris?
2.
Such questions, inspired by a decades-long engagement with Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, preoccupied the art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). Best known as one of the leading defenders of Abstract Expressionism (he preferred the term Action Painting), Rosenberg became a public figure in the company of the New York Intellectuals in such little magazines of the 1940s and 1950s as Partisan Review and Commentary. He was also perhaps the sharpest critic of these circles’ smug coziness, intellectual mediocrity, and ostensibly “free-thinking” conformity (his essay “The Herd of Independent Minds” (1948) retains interest for us today as an anticipatory critique of our own neo-little-magazine scene from n+1 to The Point). In the 1960s and 1970s he became a professor at the University of Chicago, teaching notably in its idiosyncratic Committee for Social Thought alongside his friend Hannah Arendt. He was also, like her, a regular contributor to The New Yorker (this time he did not bite the hand that fed, writing no sequel to “The Herd of Independent Minds” to blast his expanded middlebrow audience).
At the time of his death Rosenberg was familiar to many educated Americans as a rather cranky reviewer of contemporary art shows, hilariously skewered (along with his rival Clement Greenberg) in Tom Wolfe’s ignorant, unfair, and entertaining The Painted Word (1975). An eccentric teaching appointment at Chicago was not a position from which he could produce an academic heir or found a Rosenbergian tradition in art history, and his posthumous reputation has had nothing at work on its behalf to match the canonizing influence of the Arendt Industry. The former student with whom he was closest, Michael Denneny, was also his literary executor and the editor of three of Rosenberg’s several collections of essays. Denneny, however, abandoned his Ph.D. dissertation on the notion of “taste” in aesthetics and ethics, and with it the prospect of an academic career, to become a pioneering publisher of gay literature.
There are some signs of a renewal of interest in Rosenberg in the academy and among art critics. A recent, comprehensive biography of Rosenberg by Debra Bricker Balken builds on the work of scholars like Christa Noel Robbins, who helped renew our understanding of the connections between Rosenberg’s philosophical art criticism and the practices of mid-century American painting, and on Fred Orton’s 1991 article that showed how Rosenberg’s lifelong reading of Marx, and particularly of the Eighteenth Brumaire, linked his writing on aesthetics to political and ethical concerns. More programmatically, Travis Jeppesen, an editor at Artforum, has called for a “twenty-first century art criticism” drawn from “Rosenberg’s Romantic conception of art’s inseparability from life.”
Art historians and critics —a few of them, anyway— are thus catching up to Denneny, who spent years after Rosenberg’s death working, in the end unsuccessfully, to convince the University of Chicago Press (the publisher of Rosenberg’s books of essays, which it now keeps out of print) to put together a collection of his mentor’s writing on Marx, and particularly on The Eighteenth Brumaire, which he saw as the center of Rosenberg’s thought and a still-bright spark for what could be our own thinking.
3.
At this point you may be thinking, though, that you need another mid-century Jewish intellectual who combined a heterodox reading of Marx with an eclectic modernist aesthetics and an essayistic, unsystematic mode of writing-thinking like you need a second asshole. Why am I trying to sell you on a discount Walter Benjamin? Intellectual history repeats itself by making so many of this type of guy.
There is something tiring, too, in discourse on New York Intellectuals that seems to collect opinions and anecdotes about them like Funko Pops. In our own desperately stupid era of collective mental impasse, when thinking seems powerless to do more than confirm things are worse than we’d thought, it’s tempting to envy what seems retrospectively like a high point of American intellectual seriousness, when the country’s best came close to imitating what they imagined were European standards. They tried to be Mann and Gide, we try to be them, and everyone keeps getting dumber.
But —I’ll be arguing— it’s just such feelings that drove Rosenberg’s own thinking about Marx, who seemed, in his linking of history to the dramatic forms of tragedy and farce to have posed, albeit in terms that needed to be corrected, the conditions for making sense of how, in fact, the type-of-guys we imagine ourselves to be and whom we imagine to populate our world relate to the reigning conditions of our stupid, backward-looking, ever-worsening era — and how we might think our way free of both.
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