Postrelativism

"'Relativism' only makes sense in a realist epistemology." - Patty Lather

An article in the New York Times describes the strange position of Western filmmakers in North Korea who, in exchange for the privilege of filming in North Korea, must adhere to authoritarian Pyongyang standards of form and content. In order to reveal an informed view of the state control of the arts and society that is their subject, they have to play by the rules and thus show the absurdity of the rules. Go along and get along.

Very few Western artists have found their way through the obstructionist maze of official oppression to make a documentary film about the extremities of life north of the 38th parallel. The intention to subvert the system could only succeed ironically, by adhering to its restrictions and pleasing the approving authorities. Not biting the hand that feeds you, just obeying it with a straight face.

In the good old freedom-loving USA, paragon of democracy, diversity, and dissent, we don't have to resort to such duplicity.

In the Art World as the eminent critic Arthur Danto defines it - you know, galleries, museums, collectors, agents, buyers, sellers, critics - there is a (desperate) need for standards of high art and low, 'fine' and 'folk', this school and that, uptown-downtown, etc., and those distinctions of course serve many purposes. For one thing, the market appears to require them in order to set the value of the products it buys and sells.

If you buy into that worldview, as Danto, et al, clearly do and want the rest of us to do, then you become eligible to belong to the club - or not. [Note: eligibility does not guarantee membership, but buying in is a prerequisite to eligibility; let's get that straight.] It's a realistic view of art and artists, producers and consumers, supply and demand, goods and services, you know the drill. Qua realism, it is what it is; the world just works that way, so if you don't like it, get over it.

Besides, I read it in the New York Times, so it's true. Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CBS, CNN, whatever. Don't you watch The News? These people make the news. They're professionals in a serious and competitive business. Whether they take themselves and the content they produce as seriously as their target audience does is another question. I'm guessing that the news biz is rife with ironists.

What several friends have tried to teach me on several occasions over the years - I'm a slow learner - is that this realist paradigm is not necessary or even helpful in understanding the world or getting by in it. On the contrary, it is liberating to take a peek outside it as often as possible, to think and act other than what expert opinion makers agree upon, and above all to not waste your life stoking the star-making machinery behind a popular soooong. Yet there are consequences to opting out of the dominant paradigm, and as a young poet once said, to live outside the law you must be honest.

My old friend Nancy tried to convey something like this to me back in Ann Arbor when as a callow lad I was desperately trying to be unique and special and extraordinary - at something, anything. She was as patient as humanly possible, but I was a slow learner in my own poetic and alienated way.

Another friend, Dazey, a couple of years later, was much more direct in setting me straight about art and life. Yes, there is a difference between theater and everyday life, and no, there is no difference between famous people and ordinary people. There are talented, cool, regular people all over the place doing amazing and groundbreaking work, so what if you haven't seen them on TV.

Professor Lather's statement several years later, uttered impromptu in response to my simple-minded assertion on behalf of 'relativism' during her qualitative research class, resonated in a similar way with respect to science, valid data, and education. What counts as 'true' is not the property of the institutions who fund the research. What counts as beautiful is not the property of the record label, the movie studio, or the publishing conglomerate. What counts as good is not the property of the church, the university, or Major League Baseball.

If you've heard all this a hundred times before, I beg your pardon. Like I said, I'm a slow learner, and it helps me to belabor the obvious every once in a while just to remind myself where I am.

Relativism was simply my favorite term du jour for the much more fluid and mutable view that nobody gets to determine for everybody else what the facts are, what is valuable, and whose work is most interesting and consequential. Realists want to stop the world and nail down once and for all what is the case and claim that it's just objectively so (because they said so).

Given that kind of categorical claim, you know someone will make the contrary claim, and since they don't want to be in the 'realist' camp, they have to call themselves something else. So along came the 'relativist' stance, an attempt to undermine realism by taking nothing as given. Okay, fine. That worked for about five minutes and generated a lot of theses by people who repeatedly told each other, "No, no, you don't understand."

But the more radical truth that Lather did understand is that you can't be a relativist without a realist to disagree with. That's like buying into the realist's argument in the first place, so never mind, might as well skip that step. Forget about relativism, because it's barking up the wrong damn tree. Kind of like trying to be all radical and alienated according to the rules of the New York Times and Arthur Danto, because they call the shots about who's hot and who's not, right?