Honesty Competitions (Part 3)

Past, present, future

Irony maintains a strange connection to history, always inhabiting a tricky past-present. Its many meanings continuously build upon and erase each other, only to return again. Irony appears as a rhetorical device beginning with Plato, as a characteristic of dramatic theatre, as a core concept of German Romanticism, as the colloquial definition of “saying one thing and meaning another,” as proposed cultural dominant of postmodernism, and as sacrificial lamb of New Sincerity. Irony often means knowingly digging up material from the past in order to say something about the present, its many reference points forever falling in and out of fashion. When we speak of irony today, we speak of it as cultural mood, as synonym for sarcasm and cynicism. Since the following chapter is centered around the early 2000’s – the site of a secondary rupture, of a “post-postmodern”¹ break - it seems customary to bring up the end of irony, and along with it the end of postmodernism.

Linda Hutcheon foreshadows these links with “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” (1998) an essay she begins with a personal anecdote. Hutcheon writes about completing the final manuscript of Irony's Edge (1995), one of the many texts she has written on the subject of irony. An hour after submitting the manuscript to her publisher, Hutcheon walked into a bookstore. The first thing she noticed there was a magazine whose headline read “The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition.” The feature article announced that irony had tired itself out, and that it was currently being replaced by “seven different types of nostalgia."² Hutcheon had spent the good part of a decade writing about postmodernism and what she saw as its defining feature - irony - but had not thought to write about nostalgia. Not only did she find irony more appealing, more "edgy," she did not think that irony had much to do with nostalgia anyway.³

Hutcheon's accidental encounter with this article prompted her to reflect on what it meant to write about irony towards the end of the twentieth century. As a result, she tries to make sense of the unlikely marriage of irony and nostalgia, the latter being alternately indulged in and derided by postmodern culture. Like nostalgia, sincerity can unassumingly stage itself as “a mode of self-expression generally held to be nondiscursive, transparent, outside of ideology.”⁴ “Back in the day”-type rhetoric suggests that there was simply more sincerity to go around in the past, and that this reserve of sincerity has since been depleted. This thought process stands in opposition to the varied and “transideological” uses Hutcheon attributes to irony.⁵ That is to say, where nostalgia tends to idealize the past, irony tends to instrumentalize the past in order to critique it. Herein lies Hutcheon’s belief in the political applications of irony.

Hutcheon’s article made a few things clear to me. One, that as postmodernism drew to a close, irony (its defining feature, according to many) began to close in on itself. A strange culture war emerged on its grounds, one where the supposedly lost value of sincerity is selected as a radically conservative, oppositional tactic for combatting postmodern irony. Second, that the question of irony and its “end” is inextricably linked to the ends of both modernism and postmodernism. Third, that irony’s end had been announced prior to 2001, and that its end(s) will continue to be announced in the future. The very act of placing irony along a historical continuum is an exercise in “evading teleology” that requires one to shuttle between the past and the present.⁶ 

An irony of ends

The ends of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced to a single name: that of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki designed the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a monolith of modernist architecture. Modernism’s (thwarted, so the story goes) aspirations to utilitarianism, functionalism, and progress were embodied, caricatured, and incapacitated by the building’s imposing square structure. The complex's small apartments and large communal spaces - initially intended to be practical, economical - quickly became run-down. Less than twenty years after Pruitt-Igoe was erected, its buildings were largely abandoned and uninhabitable. On March 16, 1972, the first of the thirty-three buildings that made up Pruitt-Igoe was demolished. Architectural critic Charles Jencks famously announced this as the movement’s death knell, or “the day that Modern architecture died."⁷ While the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe did not bring modernism to its end (it was going to die anyway - of old age, of inefficacy, according to Jencks), it stood as a pretty clear indicator of the way things were headed.

The pathos of Yamasaki’s failures as an architect extends to his other famous project; the buildings that made up the World Trade Center. Many interpreted the collapse of its towers on Septemeber 11th 2001 as the double end of postmodernism and irony. The act of ironic interpretation suddenly seemed ineffective in the wake of unforeseen cultural trauma. In the weeks following the attacks, announcements of irony's death proliferated. It is true that a certain kind of irony - cynical, detached irony as cultural mood - had naturally gone out of style by the early 2000's. But this is only one kind of irony, so our conversation doesn't end there. To reject irony in favor of simplicity is not a simple, unidirectional task. How is one to forget cultural irony when its aftermath is still strongly felt? Linda Hutcheon makes a good point by observing that our age “joins just about every other century in wanting to call itself the age of irony.”⁸ The recurrence of this historical claim supports the assertion that irony is “inherent in signification, in its deferrals and in its negations,”⁹ that every age is ironic in one way or another. If anything can be agreed on regarding irony at the end of the twentieth century, it is that “irony had become an extremely charged code word masking a number of larger social, cultural and aesthetic divisions,”¹⁰ eventually dividing itself into our current conversation of irony and sincerity.

The etymology of the word ‘sincerity’ contains two meanings:

1) of one growth, unmixed

2) that which is not falsified.

Alison Young uses this definition as the jumping-off point for her essay “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity,” which discusses a contemporary “aporia of sincerity."¹¹ Through examining the methodology and outcome of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), Young concludes that we must reconsider the question of sincerity. As sincerity shifts from affect to “media effect,” Young wonders whether texts can succeed in delivering the sincerity effects their authors seek.¹² Young is not questioning whether authors are sincere or insincere, but rather how works of literature or visual art might go about communicating the concept of sincerity. Hopefully it’s become clear that my intention in writing is not to claim particular artists for the camp of sincerity while banishing others to the land of irony. To vouch for an artist's sincerity would mean to know fully that artist’s intent, to be sure of the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling”¹³ Lionel Trilling gave as a formula for sincerity. Because our reading of sincerity is primarily one of effects, and since infinite (mis)readings of these effects can and do occur, a sincere attempt at expressing something can easily appear ironic.

It follows that my discussion will center on recent stylistic techniques used to represent sincerity. After the “death” of irony rose two strategies of the sincere within visual culture. The first takes the form of a codified aesthetic of sincerity within contemporary American cinema,¹⁴ the other a nostalgic-ironic appropriation of so-called amateur aesthetics in video art. The subject or document that is viewed as amateur generally has no conception of itself as being sincere, but nonetheless comes to signify this quality. 

Is there a sincere colour?

Around the time these things were happening, I was ten years old. I remember going to to see the film Zoolander with my family on the weekend of its release - September 28, 2001. We arrived at the theater early, and sat watching previews. One of the trailers made a distinct impression on me, not least because I thought it only made a distinct impression on certain kind of person. Though I never liked pink when I was younger, I found the faded Pepto Bismol that spelled THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS delightfully disgusting. Maybe I was a little proud of my newfound appreciation for strange shades of pink. These shades filled a montage of white, upper-middle class characters exhibiting vaguely anti-social behaviours. A man with a bright geometric pattern painted on his face sped towards the screen in a vintage car. A grandfather cheered on a dogfight with his grandchildren, surrounded by a cast of “ethnic” characters of non-specific ethnicities. A blonde girl stalked around her bedroom decorated with African masks. The scenes unfolded against the soundtrack of “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones. Both the film and the song, which I had likely just heard for the first time (I was ten years old, after all), felt interesting in a new way. After all, my reading of the trailer had nothing to do with the contentious avant-gardes of punk music and reactionary sincerity. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001) shortly after its December release, and subsequently tried to model myself after a young Margot Tenenbaum. I quickly took to walking around my middle school with the Ramones blasting from my headphones, though I was never very good at affecting Margot’s disinterest. At some point in my early teens, I fell out of love with Anderson’s films. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe I thought them insincere, maybe I was going through the teenage ritual of rejecting childhood things – but I think my total adoration-turned-total-disgust speaks to the inexplicably strong reactions Anderson’s films draw from audiences.

The most (in)sincere director

A friend wrote to me in a February 2012 email, “wes anderson is the most insincere director i can think of, because i think the naivete is false and a twee refusal to grow up is a gross and counterrevolutionary…super heteronormative as well.” I read the email and agreed with him, only to find myself in the middle of a heated bar conversation a few nights later. I brought up Wes Anderson, and before I could get a word in, an acquaintance declared Anderson to be a supremely sincere director. Not only was Wes Anderson sincere, my he insisted, but he was sincere in a way that many people just didn’t understand.

In light of these two responses, Wes Anderson seems a particularly compelling subject of inquiry regarding the post-9/11 “aporia” of sincerity that is the focus of this chapter. Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums is set in an anachronistic New York populated by whimsically decrepit buildings, for example a fictitious “375th Street YMCA.”¹⁵ With no Twin Towers in sight, one is almost allowed to believe that the film took place sometime before they were built, sometime before postmodernism and the brand of irony associated with it.

But The Royal Tenenbaums is bookended by a hyper-awareness of nostalgic stylization. The film begins with a neatly composed shot of a book being checked out of a library. A hand peeking out of a camel blazer stamps the card enclosed in the book’s cover, something I haven't experienced since childhood trips to the library. The book is then closed to reveal a quaint illustration of melting candlesticks, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS spelled out in the pink Futura of the film’s trailer. In the following shot, the cover illustration reappears as a real-life set design, using the same mustard-green colour scheme and curtained backdrop. These mirrored images make unclear the starting point of stylization. Anderson could very well be flattening the personalities of his characters to fit a simplified storybook format. But Anderson works almost exclusively with stock characters, mainly drawn from white upper-middle class America. Or, to be more specific, the stock character of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Of course this "character" exists in the real world, but it has been sufficiently mythologized (see The Preppy Handbook, Ralph Lauren advertisements, the disaffected prep school students of J.D. Salinger novels, and so on). We can say that by framing The Royal Tenenbaums as fiction - its intertitles take the form of book pages, “scene” swapped for “chapter” - Anderson counters the argument that he is merely stylizing a referent firmly based in reality. An astute observer of aesthetes and an aesthete himself, the visual style of his films reads to me as the combined efforts of his own narcissism and the narcissism of his characters.

The characters in The Royal Tenenbaums largely understand themselves through representation. Some fashion their reality in writing, Margot with her plays and Raleigh, her husband, with his studies in anthropology. Some emotions are explained only through their bracketing, the story of Richie’s fall from tennis stardom succinctly told in television footage of his losing game and a tabloid cover that reads MELTDOWN. Etheline also styled her children, a “Family of Geniuses,” in prose. Like the rest of the film’s books-within-books, Family of Geniuses appears onscreen dog-eared and faded, a simulacrum of the book as intellectual fetish object. Family of Geniuses is not a real book, empty of content (asides from the story of the film that contains it), but nonetheless appears significant, handsomely weathered. Like the many unread books that make up an impressive library, the books written by the Tenenbaums are markers of lives dictated by the pressure to endlessly perform individual intelligence and precocity.

The Royal Tenenbaums and mise en abyme subjectivity

The Royal Tenenbaums is a portrait of a family and their now-grown children. All three were child prodigies - Margot a gifted playwright, Richie a star tennis player, and Chas an astute businessman (businessboy, perhaps) - who faded into obscurity with the onset of adulthood. The story picks up with a cast of characters obsessed with recapitulating the glory of their youth. They continue to wear their childhood clothes, as if the garments had magically grown in a gesture of solidarity. Like the closet of a cartoon character, Margot's wardrobe is filled with a dozen penny-loafers and a striped Lacoste dress in every colour. Richie continues to dress like Björn Borg, even in non-tennis situations. Chas replaces the business-wear of his childhood with a new daily uniform, but the repetition does not end there. Now a father, both Chas and his two sons wear red Adidas tracksuits at all times (save for a funeral, where the trio opts for black Adidas tracksuits). They also share the same curly brown hair, though this can be owed more to genetics than to intent. This cycle of repetition is extended to an absurd degree; Chas makes himself into a caricature, then projects this caricature onto his own children.

This bittersweet navigation of identity fits with the tone of The Royal Tenenbaums, which film scholar James MacDowell describes as the composite of deadpan humour and melodramatic subject matter.¹⁶ In "Notes on Quirky" and subsequent essays, MacDowell argues that tone - not subject matter, not certain editing techniques, not uniform visual style - is the strongest indicator of the "quirky" film. Treating the quirky film more as a sensibility than as a genre, MacDowell explains that its tone is illustrative of a larger cultural condition, a structure of feeling characterized by its back-and-forth dialogue around irony and sincerity. I follow MacDowell's analysis by focusing on Anderson's films in an essay concerned precisely with this ironic-sinere structure of feeling. But before I delve into the topic of tone, I want to comment on a particular aspect of the quirky film. Central to The Royal Tenenbaums and other quirky films is a certain kind of character best encapsulated by Anderson's paradoxically self-conscious adult-children. I would offer the titular characters of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007) as culturally significant and instantly recognizable examples of the "quirky" character. The aestheticized awkwardness of these characters can be located along a spectrum. At the one end is the character whose idiosyncrasies serve as fodder for cheap jokes, and at the other is the character whose idiosyncrasies are meant to endear the audience. On the first end, I think of the painful confession Napoleon Dynamite makes after presenting his crush with a hand-drawn portrait: "It took me like three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip." Even if Napoleon's misguided social interactions are endearing by proxy, they are generally treated with a kind of detached, jokey irony. MacDowell points out that the ostensibly cathartic/redemptive dance scene at the end of the film still mines from a "comedy of embarrassment."¹⁷ An earnest but uncoordinated (note, uncoordinated) Dynamite performs a solo dance routine to the applause of his classmates, but even his choice of song - the musically awkward blue-eyed soul of Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" - is meant to be a kind of in-joke with the audience. 

Still comedic but more melodramatic, more openly sentimental, Juno treats its main character more kindly. She shrieks would-be, cutesy teenage slang ("Honest to blog!") into her novelty phone, which is shaped like a hamburger. These qualities are not framed ironically, though; they contribute to a vision of a benignly dorky teenage girl unexpectedly faced with the very adult responsibilities of having a child. Returning to MacDowell's diagnosis of the quirky film, Juno tones down deadpan humor in favour of emotional engagement. 

                What? - Can you just hold on for a second, I'm on 
                my hamburger phone. It's just like really awkward 
                to talk on.

Also worth mentioning is the character-person of Michael Cera, who plays Juno's boyfriend in the film. Cera's first popular role was as George Michael Bluth on the sitcom Arrested Development. Cera was fifteen years old when the series debuted in 2003, a real-life awkward-looking teenage boy at the onset of puberty. Also an awkward teenage boy facing the onset of puberty, George Michael mumbles nervously through most social situations that take place on Arrested Development. One of the more notable situations is the crush he harbours on his cousin, a teenaged girl named Maeby (whose strange name serves as an endless source of puns, including the running joke of her questionable conception). Humour drawn from awkward-seeming characters and situations is a mainstay of quirky cultural output. Adam Kotsko explores this point in his 2010 book Awkwardness, partially explaining the phenomenon of awkwardness-based humour as a contemporary response to the issues of postmodernism, one of these issues being the much-treaded theme of irony as cultural dominant. Kotsko selects Woody Allen as the progenitor of this kind of humour, describing the ambivalently autobiographical leads of all Allen films as "the Woody Allen character."¹⁸ Woody Allen clearly bases this character (and its nebbishy charm) on his own idiosyncrasies and neuroses, fashioning many doppelgangers in the characters of Alvy Singer (Annie Hall, 1977), Isaac Williams (Manhattan, 1979), Mickey Sachs (Hannah and her Sisters, 1983), and others. The Woody Allen character does not necessarily need to be played by Allen himeself; Larry David (Kotsko devotes a whole chapter to David in Awkwardness) recently assumed this role in the Allen-directed Whatever Works (2009). Beyond this, the Woody Allen character has its own life as a cultural type, the character-person of Michael-Cera being a contemporary example. Since Arrested Development, Cera has continuously been cast in the role of the adorably awkward teenage boy. Perpetually virginal and sheepish, he still manages to impregnate his love interest in Juno. Subsequent roles in films like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), Youth in Revolt (2010), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) see Cera shyly charming his way into the hearts of manic pixie dream girls, subtly reputing the common notion that confidence is sexy (see chart below). I imagine Cera was first cast in this type of role because he was, conveniently, an actual shy teenage boy. But Cera has been playing this role for a good part of the last decade. Yes, playing the role of himself, contrived as it sounds. This confusion of identity is compounded in Paper Heart (2009), the meta-documentary (I don't know how else to describe it) based on the unverifiable romantic relationship between Cera (who plays himself in the film) and Charlyne Yi, the film's screenwriter and lead actress.

              Here is something I made a while ago. It seems
                 relevant to this essay.

What does it mean for a person to purposely act awkward, acting being by definition self-conscious and awkwardness being by definition unconscious? It leads to the impossibility - as with Allen and as with the Tenenbaums - of verifying whether the character of a film is necessarily the stylization of a referent firmly rooted in reality (in simpler terms, of the actor or actress who plays the character). Further, it makes any claims to authenticity near-impossible to confirm, resulting in a perpetual chicken-or-the-egg-type questioning of subjectivity. 

What, then, should one make of the Tenenbaums? Are they just a cast of lovably "quirky" characters? Are we supposed to interpret their antisocial behaviour as a fashion statement or a remote critique via inhabitation? In his article "If I Can Dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson," Mark Olsen writes that Anderson "does not view his characters from some distant Olympus of irony."²⁰ After all, how is Anderson to maintain emotional detachment from characters who stand as infinitely repeated versions of himself? The director's early films - Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1999) - were filmed in his native Texas. As an adolescent, Anderson atteneded the preppy collegiate - seemingly lifted straight from a Salinger novel - used as the set of Rushmore. One can easily identify Rushmore's Max Fischer - serial overachiever and director of pretentious, cutesy middle school plays - or the dysfunctional geniuses of The Royal Tenenbaums as the director's gently self-mocking portraits. If we trace the caricature at work in The Royal Tenenbaums far back enough, we end up with Wes Anderson infinitely styling and projecting himself as the characters of his own (the) film.

Knowing naiveté

Art historian E.H. Gombrich writes, “The more you prefer the primitive, the less you can become primitive,"¹⁹ a statement that is taken up ambivalently in The Royal Tenenbaums. This paradox is best expressed in the film’s knowingly naïve visual style; its neatly composed shots look like childhood drawings traced by an adult, the final product retaining none of the original messiness. James MacDowell points to this in the “sweetly unsophisticated pink flag” that flies above the Tenenbaum home.²⁰ Anderson’s aesthetic can be easily described (and dismissed) as cloying. Unusual shades of pink pop up everywhere; the awning of a hotel, a rotary phone, the walls of an ice cream parlour, a woolen glove. The decidedly unrealistic proliferation of such details holds a mirror to the suspended naiveté of the film’s characters. MacDowell writes that the childhood artifacts that Margot, Chas, and Richie cling to remind us that they are no longer children. Richie sets up an anorak-yellow tent in the family’s living room, his too-tall body dwarfing the structure clearly intended for children. This visual gag frames the character’s longing for childhood instead of expecting us to indulge uncritically in it. The “wrongness” of these images rests not only in their resemblance to impossibly perfect children’s drawings, but in their ability to evidence the Tenenbaums’ problematic relationship to childhood. 

This unfaltering belief in the purity of childhood is not the only element of primitivism evident in The Royal Tenenbaums. The characters display a tendency to view other cultures as exotic or less advanced than their native American one. Margot bolsters her writing career with cultural tourism, the kind I imagine she thinks of as "zany anthropology." A brief montage shows Margot at the age of nineteen at a wedding on an unidentified West Indian island; flirting with lesbianism in Paris at twenty-one; then a few years later in New Guineau, groping a man in tribal dress (her in a pink bikini). Etheline works as an archaeologist, and Raleigh St. Clair as a neurologist who conducted field studies on a fictional tribe called the Kazawa Atoll. St. Clair's book on the subject, The Peculiar Neurodegenerative Inhabitants of the Kazawa Atoll, features a photograph of the author with one of his research subjects. The two men stand side-by-side, St. Clair in a bathing suit and the subject in a loincloth, headdress, and body paint. The photograph is shot in classic ethnographic style, straight-on and perfectly centered. The composition of the photograph is not unlike those of the shots that make up the film, their veneer of order and artistic control contradicting the unfinished emotional business (adult children, intentional naivete, an "aporia" of sincerity, and so on) taking place in the frame. 

Throughout the film, St. Clair studies the behavior of Dudley Heinsbergen, a boy inflicted with a peculiar form of autism. He calmly watches Dudley struggle to arrange a set of toy blocks in a particular formation, calmly taking notes on the boy's progress. He later reads the results and chuckles to himself “How interesting, how bizarre,” as if the boy were a mischievous pet or inhabitant of remote New Guineau. What is actually bizarre, I suppose, is that St. Clair does not make much of a distinction between the two. St. Clair takes Dudley everywhere he goes, the boy narrating in deadpan the details of their surroundings to no person in particular. Dudley favors a Jacques-Cousteau-plays-tennis outfit of corduroy shorts, yellow ringer t-shirt, and bucket hat with navy stripe, his nerd-chic style later cashed in on by films like Napoleon Dynamite. The unlikely fashion plate of Dudley Heinsbergen reflects a world where no person or thing is immune to being aestheticized.

“I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum”

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.²¹ - Pierre Bourdieu

In his essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film, Kent Jones points out that The Royal Tenenbaums – alongside other films directed by Anderson – centers on a character “from a little lower on the economic ladder.”²² This character is Eli Cash, the boy grew up in a simple apartment with his aunt. Cash lived across the street from the Tenenbaums and became a regular fixture at their home, an honorary member of the family also inflicted with their complex around creativity. Eli was not a child genius, but later tried his hand at writing. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the grown-up Eli at a reading for his newly-released novel. After reading, he takes a phone call from Margot, and anxiously implores of her “You think I’m especially not a genius?” Cast as his adoptive family’s foil, Eli illustrates just how strongly the concepts of taste, precociousness, and genius are linked to class. We are reminded of many kinds of work that factor into the designation of genius. 

Eli writes middlebrow fiction that is met with lukewarm critical reception and offhand remarks from those close to him. Having grown up in a lower-middle class household, the quality of Eli's work is never validated with the label of “genius” his wealthier counterparts already attained before adolescence. In fact, Eli’s books are only met with positive regard at the very end of the film. In the middle of a police questioning, the officer pauses to pay Eli a compliment; the officer, transparently portrayed in jus'folks-style, had read Eli's new novel and greatly enjoyed it. The officer even asks for an autograph, temporarily alleviating the embarrassing events leading up to the police questioning. 

The Royal Tenenbaums points to the cycle of legitimation that links class, taste, and cultural production. Eli's inability to be validated as an author of "highbrow" fiction reflects a kind of glass ceiling of class mobility; (lower) middle-class upbringing, middlebrow writing. Conversely, the Tenenbaums cannot escape the trappings of their own background. Their predetermined, premature success is crystallized forever in the figure of the adult-child. Like fallen rulers, the “royal” Tenenbaums are trapped by the privileged status they reached as children. They remain there indefinitely as dysfunctional apparitions of their former selves. I feel that the film is neither as explicitly political as my discussion of it, nor as apolitical or twee as it has been made out to be. Maybe I'm at fault for not picking a side, but it's the film's back and forth - between irony and sincerity, critique and indulgence, artifice and naturalism - that makes it so intriguing. 

The strongest point of Jones’ essay on The Royal Tenenbaums is his identification of the film’s political  implications. Unfortunately, this point is a little lost on Jones, whose assertions of Anderson’s particular brand of sincerity read as self-congratulatory. Jones writes, “For someone like me, who connected directly with his sensibility from the first frame of Bottle Rocket, it's difficult to comprehend how anyone could not get the work of such an exquisite storyteller.”²³ Jones suggests that Anderson presents a secret kind of sincerity that only a special kind of person would understand. I do not know what to make of this “secret” sincerity; I have made it clear that the definition of sincerity is no simple task, but the idea that it can only be decoded by some kind of super-sensitive aesthete does not sit well with me. Despite pointing out the issues of class raised by Anderson, Jones only affirms these relations by designating sincerity as an esoteric taste category requiring specialized understanding. This category, which formed in reaction to the perceived ideological threat of postmodern irony, possesses a problematic ideology of its own. Postmodern irony may have been dismissive and mocking of the stupid, the unrefined, the "primitive," but the New Sincerity still condescends to the "primitive" (albeit, in a different way) by romanticizing it.

In the following installment, I will discuss the New Sincerity, a term that has risen to prominence in the last decade. As I understand it, the New Sincerity - like Anderson's films - lends itself to a discussion of subjectivity, the artistic process and artistic self-representation, the designation of "sincerity" as a reactionary stance towards irony, and recent iterations of primitivism.

_________________________________________________________________

^{1 I'm hesitant to use the word, but no single term has been agreed upon. Of the many terms put forth in the race to name the contemporary moment - off-modern, hypermodern, altermodern - the one that interests me most is the metamodern. I will discuss the concept of metamodernism in the next chapter. 
2} Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 193.
3 Ibid. 195
⁴ Jane Taylor, “Torture, Truth, and the Arts,” The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Eds. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 22.
⁵ Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 20.
⁶Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 195.
⁷Charles Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 57
⁸Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 27.
⁹Ibid.
¹⁰Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film,” Screen 43:4 Winter 2001: 353.
¹¹Alison Young, “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibilty of Sincerity,” eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 99.
¹²Ibid. 104
¹³Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) 4.
¹⁴This aesthetic is best represented by what has been termed the "quirky" film.
¹⁵375th Street does not exist; The highest street number in New York City is 263.
¹⁶James MacDowell, “Wes Anderson, tone, and the quirky sensibility,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10:1 March 2012: 8.
¹⁷Ibid. 11
¹⁸Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness:An Essay (0 Books:Winchester, 2010) 1.
¹⁹E.H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive (New York:Phaidon, 2006) 297.
²⁰James MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism I (2010) 5.
²¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
Trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 6.
²²Kent Jones, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Criterion Collection: Current Jul. 8 2002. www.criterion.com/current/posts/214-the-royal-tenenbaums
²³ Ibid.

Honesty Competitions (Part 2)

Below is the first chapter of my thesis paper. It points to 1970s conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader as an important figure in the discussion of the New Sincerity. Ader made work decades before the concept of the New Sincerity even existed, though his approach to the themes of sincerity and self-presentation predate techniques used by contemporary artists.


This chapter was originally titled "New Romanticism."


*****************************************************


Bas Jan Ader and the problem of sincerity
“His sincerity is sincere – until it’s not only sincere."¹

So begins “Legend of the fall,” Bruce Hainley’s essay on 1970s conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. While I have an idea of what Hainley is trying to get at with his description  of sincerity (you know, the sincere kind), his wording is admittedly vague. I think this vagueness has something to do with the nature of Bas Jan Ader’s work, its guiding premise being that sincerity is anything but self-evident. Ader self-consciously quoted tropes of sincerity - the wandering artist-monk of Caspar David Friedrich paintings², the intentionally cathartic close-up of the film melodrama - not in order to announce the exhaustion of their expressive capabilities, but in order to reinvigorate them.

Ader’s appropriation of these tropes was neither entirely naive nor entirely cynical. His films and performances suggest that the effectiveness of these tropes is mostly contextual. At a time when his peers were beginning to experiment with video, Ader was making films that directly referenced early cinema. I do not believe this deliberate anachronism was an attempt at radical conservatism, an action that rejects the present in favor of an idealized past. Ader did not insist that the strategies of the studio film were inherently more sincere than others; only that they were not inherently less sincere than, say, the tropes of the ‘arthouse’ film (sparse dialogue, lack or complete absence of traditional narrative structure, characters whose emotions are delayed or left unexplained). In fact, Ader often delayed the audience’s emotional response by refusing to explain his own.

Again: tropes of sincerity operate contextually. Melodramatic tendencies have been and continue to be a common target of criticism³, yet Ader avoids this brand of disparaging  irony. One is never certain whether Ader believes entirely in the gestures he performs. He suspends our ability to read his intent, or in other words, our ability to judge whether he is being ironic or sincere. Ader was ostensibly a suffering artist type who played the role of the suffering artist, another privileged signifier of sincerity. I am tempted to describe this move as being “meta-sincere” on Ader’s part, but it’s a ridiculous and pretentious term. Ader's practice is one that prompts explanation through concepts like "sincere sincerity," concepts that do not always amount to much in language.

Like Raymond William's difficult-to-place structure of feeling, Ader’s work makes sense in a roundabout way. Williams notes that artworks can offer hints about emergent structures of feeling precisely because they operate visually (as opposed to linguistically), encapsulating concepts and impulses that rest “at the very edge of semantic availability.”⁴ The challenge of writing about Ader's work, and more broadly about the topic of this essay, is writing convincingly about things that are semantically unavailable. Maybe Ader was onto something with his refusal of language; without using words, he spun his own comic-tragic yarns like a modern-day Buster Keaton. The only place words appear in I'm Too Sad To Tell You (1971), arguably Ader’s most famous work, is in the title.

Bas Jan Ader’s knowing play on sincerity – it is one that acknowledges the inherent performativity of sincerity and stages itself accordingly - fits well the conflicted sincerity of contemporary concepts like post-irony and New Sincerity. Keeping this connection in mind, I trace the beginning of this ironic/sincere contingency to the early 1970s - the site of a postmodern break within the visual arts - and to Bas Jan Ader, who routinely looked back to romanticism. Using Ader as a starting point, I want to parse out some links between present-day culture and German Romanticism. This comparison may seem far fetched at first, but hopefully it was not made in vain. The current conversation around irony and sincerity retains two central features of German Romanticism: the role of irony as both moderator and consequence of idealism, and the centrality of oscillation to works of art and philosophy. In romanticism, there exists a conflicted desire for having (and representing) an encounter with the sublime, the transcendent. In post-postmodern culture (or whatever you’d like to call it), there exists a conflicted desire to experience (and represent) an encounter with the sincere, something that seems nearly transcendent in the aftermath of postmodern irony.

A momentary break
I want to return to the idea of the “postmodern break” in order to clarify it. Just as the definitions of postmodernism’s terms are as varied as they are contradictory, so are the historical accounts of its beginning. For my purposes, my definition of the postmodern break (and more generally, of postmodernism itself) is similar to the one  used by Fredric Jameson. Of particular importance to me is the “waning of affect” Jameson outlines in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”(1984).⁵

Jameson writes there of the dissolution of modernism’s expressive depth models – essence and appearance, latent and manifest, authenticity and inauthenticity, signifier and signified – that went hand in hand with the singular subject of modernity.⁶ With the breakdown of the monadic subject came the breakdown of forms for expressing catharsis, expressiveness, and originality. In simpler terms, if there is no true or sincere self, then there are no sincere emotions to convey, nor sincere forms for conveying them.⁷

Parallel to developments in critical theory was a turn towards the postmodern in visual art. Pop and conceptual art developed in the wake of high modernism’s collapse, incorporating into their programs a rejection of modernism’s perceived cult of individuality and expression. Ader also fixated on the figure of the endlessly expressive artist, often to the point of embodying its clichés. While Ader’s interests line up with those of early conceptualism, he departs from its goals by failing to explicitly dismiss or negate the themes of expression (as a positive or even possible feature of art), the artist as tragic hero, art as tool for catharsis.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar

 David Friedrich, 1818) and Farewell to

Faraway Friends (Bas Jan Ader, 1971)

Mystics rather than rationalists: a few words on Romantic Conceptualism

The small body of work left behind by Bas Jan Ader was timely yet strangely prescient. It is no wonder that writing on his work - mostly nonexistent before the 1990s - has steeply increased in the last decade. It also follows that Ader should be placed at the center of Romantic Conceptualism, the revisionist look at conceptual art devised by critics Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert. When they speak of the romantic, they refer specifically to the philosophical and artistic movement that dominated eighteenth-century Europe and not to "the kitsch of love and desire” the word suggests more generally.⁸ Here, the romantic is not engaged with as an idea of sentimental escapism (Heiser insists that romanticism is anything but), but as an explicit critique of the Enlightenment and the value it placed on logic, science, and knowledge.

But what does romanticism have to do with conceptual art? Since I am speaking primarily of early conceptual art, I will make reference to Sol LeWitt’s "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” (1967) which is routinely referred to as the movement’s manifesto. In

“Paragraphs,” LeWitt suggests that the conceptual artist make his work “mentally interesting” and "emotionally dry.”⁹ Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but they work together to undermine the "expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed."¹⁰ I’m going to generalize a bit here and stress that romanticism, like conceptualism, formed as a reaction to the movement that directly preceded it. Romantic thinkers were skeptical of the attempt to understand all phenomena through scientific inquiry and logical thought. The romantic emphasis on the emotional and the irrational can be understood as an oppositional stance regarding an Enlightenment favoring of logic. Conceptual artists, initially at least, wanted to play down the theatre of the artist they associated with modernism - German Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism - deeming it melodramatic and distracting. Like romanticism, conceptual art began as a reactionary movement. But the question still remains: What do these two movements, whose core beliefs are contradictory, have in common beyond being reactionary?

Heiser and Verwoert would point to an artist like Bas Jan Ader to answer this question. Ader used conceptual strategies to investigate romantic themes, adding an “emotional kick” to the “mentally interesting.” Romantic Conceptualism is founded upon this paradox - how does one deal with the coexistence of romantic impulses and the anti-expressive methodology conceptual artists sought out to enforce? The forced contradiction of a term like Romantic Conceptualism is actually based in reality. It departs from the idea that opposing impulses often coexist within a single text, a theme that was central to romanticism. This is evidenced in the “perpetual oscillation between enthusiasm and irony” Friedrich Schlegel selected as the defining feature of romantic art.¹¹ Following Schlegel, Heiser insists that romanticism and conceptualism can never be resolved, framing this as a productive tension.¹²

As a final note, the romantic emphasis on oscillation – on the in-between, the neither-nor - serves to call into question binary thought. The mental exercise of considering opposing categories simultaneously means to recognize the traits of one within the other. It asks us to acknowledge that romanticism does not signify an uncritical lapse into illogic and passion - two qualities conceptualism is not entirely devoid of. “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” (1969) Sol LeWitt’s addition to the

paragraphs he wrote two years earlier, opens with a statement that directly contradicts the received knowledge of conceptual art: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”¹³

With irony, not innocently

I’m Too Sad To Tell You begins the way it ends. For three minutes, Bas Jan Ader cries in close-up. Movement within the frame is minimal, and camera movement nonexistent. The film was shot in 1971, but could have been made in 1921. It shows only Ader’s face – no sound, no colour, no narrative. This short film pairs melodramatic motifs with a self-consciousness that threatens to undermine their effectiveness. I’m Too Sad To Tell You isolates the climactic moment of film melodrama - the cathartic weeping of a main character – which is always presented in close-up. Ader borrows this technique but deliberately does away with the the narrative conventions of the genre. In fact, the film’s title explicitly refuses the possibility of explanation – the kind of explanation needed to complete the emotional effect of Ader’s crying.

Ader presents a double-coded image. Of course his weeping is real; he brought himself to tears and recorded this on camera. The film serves as the ultimate proof that this event took place. At the same time, Ader’s crying is clearly staged, merely  a condition of a conceptual work that needed to be fulfilled. We also think of film as staged emotion, triteness, and artifice. A kind of irony/sincerity dialectic is set up by Ader, but never resolved. I like to think of Ader’s film in relation to this anecdote given by Umberto Eco:

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the

past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction 

leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.  

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very 

cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly,"

because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) 

that these words have already been 

written by Barbara Cartland. Still,  

there is a solution. He can say,"As Barbara Cartland would put it, I

love you madly. ¹⁴

Charles Jencks brings up this passage in “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions,” an essay where he outlines the concept of double coding.¹⁵

Jencks first uses the concept  of double coding to describe the dual presence of modern and postmodern characteristics in then-contemporary architecture. The term can be further extrapolated to explain the presence of two seemingly conflicting sensibilities in a single text; high and low, ironic and sincere. The man in Eco’s world must self-consciously refer to a highly codified genre – Cartland’s romance novel – in order to pronounce everyday feelings of love. Ader engages in a similar procedure when he self-consciously employs melodramatic forms to represent sadness. Both instances are double-coded, rely on the reconfiguration of an older genre, and take emotion as their subject matter. Quotation marks are placed around these forms, revealing their structures (and inconsistencies) on the one hand and reinvigorating their expressive capabilities on the other. The language used here is a transitory one whose goal is to navigate expression after the exhaustion of expressive forms.

An index to tears

Ader frequently samples melancholy from romanticism’s repertoire of motifs. Melancholy is the kind of self-conscious, aestheticized sadness that inspired famous Romantic texts like Novalis’ Hymns to the Night (1800), its narrator “ready to sink away in drops of dew” while pining for a lost love.¹⁶Ader abandons the flowery language of romantic poetry in favor of no language, just pared-down visuals. This is what I referred to earlier as using conceptual strategies to investigate romantic themes. Ader’s films, with their spare visuals and static shots, adhere in their own way to the matter-of-fact, deadpan aesthetic of early conceptual art.

Before the Renaissance period, melancholy was considered to be a pathological disorder. But over time, aesthetic accounts of melancholy proliferated (think of Goethe’s Werner, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Durer’s Melancolia) and its connotations shifted greatly. In the realm of art and literature, melancholy came to be designated as a privileged form of suffering, “the curse of genius and trademark of outstanding individuals.”¹⁷ This ideal of the artist preceded romanticism and proliferated beyond modernism. Ader wrestled with its specteR.

The weeping figure of I’m Too Sad is not unlike the man of feeling, a stock character in British sentimental literature. Published in 1771 by Scottish author Henry Mackenzie, The

Man of Feeling cemented this archetype in its unusually sensitive

main character.¹⁸ Later editions of the book, beginning in 1896, included an appendix titled “Index to Tears.” The absurdly long and detailed index divides the novel according to a “hand bathed with tears,” or “tears flowing without control”.¹⁹A century after Mackenzie wrote a group of sentimental vignettes, the supplementary index spelled out a more knowing catalogue of emotions.

Not long after Mackenzie’s book was published, its unconditionally feeling subject and the genre it belonged to – the sensibility novel – had fallen out of fashion.

The instructive, moral tone of the sensibility novel, which trained readers to pride themselves upon crying at the appropriate moments of a story, eventually slid into caricature after enjoying popularity for the first half of the eighteenth century. Understood as an early response to the encroachment of industrialism upon the personal²⁰, the sentimental novel ironically become an easily manufactured good,  an emotional effect that could be repeated ad infinitum.Two hundred years later, Ader found himself at a similar impasse. The tropes he invoked seemed similarly exhausted. It is impossible to look at Ader’s film without thinking of the immense taxonomy of twin images from the history of cinema. The event of catharsis has been sufficiently staged within the film melodrama, even the casual viewer now aware of its inner workings.

By emoting within the realm of staged emotion, Ader asks how we can reconcile sense with sensibility. His aptness for “distilling emotional truths from generic truths” problematizes the distances previously drawn between authenticity and artifice, irony and sincerity.²¹ By pairing the theatrical with the existential until the two become indistinguishable, Ader illustrates the difficulty of identifying where emotions end and their representations begin.

Ader also suggests this process can work in reverse. He turns down our efforts to locate the

origin of the sadness he shows. It is not a matter of one or the other, but of oscillation. Ader’s crying is undeniably emotive, but undeniably contrived. The paradox of expression, and particularly of expressing sincerity, is that feelings must always be staged, transformed, reified. Such contradictions coexist in Ader’s film, whose transparency of visual language betrays an apparent rather than hidden meaning. I’m Too Sad To Tell You actively resists the “drama of exposure” inherent to the conception of meaning as a problem of depth.²²Meaning is not wrested from a surface layer of artifice in Ader’s film; rather, artifice and meaning are combined on the same plane.

Tragedy and farce

Few discussions of Bas Jan Ader’s career omit In Search of the Miraculous (1973-), the artist’s final and unfinished work, and mine is no exception. The three-part performance began in autumn 1973 with In Search of the Miraculous (One Night

in Los Angeles) a series of following a twilight stroll spanning the Hollywood Hills to the shore of the Pacific. At one of Ader’s openings, his students performed traditional sea shanties, seeing him off for a greater journey.²³

That July (the year is now 1975), Ader set sail for Amsterdam in a one-man yacht. Needless to say, he was never seen again.

With In Search of the Miraculous, Ader put into practice his earlier explorations of romantic motifs. He played the part of melodramatic actor and suffering artist in I’m Too Sad to Tell You, an exercise he continued with his Fall (1970-1971) films. The Fall films find Ader stuck in a tree, riding his bike dangerously close to a canal, perching precariously on a rooftop, positions he does not hold for long before tumbling into the waters or foliage below. Comparisons can be drawn between the grand themes of failure and the tragic hero, but also between the tragic-comic slapstick of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. The roles of the tragic artist-hero and the slapstick character who naively stumbles into traps are effectively made into mirrors of each other.

The grandest gesture of art into life I can think of, Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous saw him participate in the romantic ceremony of recognizing the finite self through an encounter with the sublime.²⁴ And while he used his own body to do it, who can really say which self he was actualizing? After Ader disappeared, a book detailing the account of another ill-fated sailor was reportedly found in his locker at the University of

Irvine, California.

A popular book at the time of its release in 1970, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst tells the true story of an amateur sailor’s ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic.²⁵Crowhurst was a participant of the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a race to circumvent the globe via a one-person yacht. Crowhurst sent back false reports of his progress, though he had fallen behind early in the race. Crowhurst’s notebooks, detailing his mental breakdown and eventual suicide, were found in the wreckage of his yacht. After his disappearance, Ader’s yacht Ocean Wave (named after one of the sea shanties from the 1975 performance) was also found, wrecked off the coast of Ireland. His body was never found, and it is tempting to use Crowhurst’s diary as a surrogate of the artist’s. The slapstick actor stumbles unwittingly into a trap - hence the melancholy of a Charles Chaplin film - but Ader’s apparent self-consciousness complicates any claims to tragedy. The connection between Ader and Crowhurst is the strongest yet, the two stories strange mirrors of each other. Bas Jan Ader’s artistic persona is one stitched  together from a cast of characters played by the same actor: Bas Jan Ader the suffering artist, Bas Jan Ader the slapstick actor, Bas Jan Ader the tragic hero, Bas Jan Ader the wayward sailor.

As for the unfinished nature of Ader’s project, it traces a circle around the unending project of romanticism. This project is one that focused on failure, one that rested on Schlegel’s assertion that “there is no absolute perfection until death.”²⁶

(Still) too sad to tell you

For the contemporary artist, the value of Ader’s works lies in its foresight of the current state of sincerity. Not only do we cycle perpetually between irony and sincerity, but the very possibility of achieving sincerity as we once defined it is diminished. To chase after its realization is a measure that will inevitably be treated with irony, self-consciousness, and self-doubt. Ader expressed what Raymond Williams termed an emergent part of culture, one of those pervasive but often-unacknowledged currents best made sense of in retrospect.²⁷

Over three decades after the film was made, artist Jessica Williams offered a reinterpretation in I’m Too Sad To Tell You (After Bas Jan Ader) (2007). In this web-based project, Williams invited participants to submit self-portraits of themselves crying. The submitted portraits ranged in effect, some quite earnest in their attempt at expressing sadness, others deliberately flippant or jokey. Repeating Ader’s gesture on a multiplied scale, Williams’ project shares an interest in tropes of expression, but replaces film with online space as the platform for these actions.

 Found screenshot of now-offline I'm Too Sad To Tell 

You (after Bas Jan Ader) website

Williams was an undergraduate student at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science at Art in New York when she undertook the project. Its various iterations were housed on the photo-sharing site Flickr, the independent publishing website Lulu (free copies of the project can still be downloaded in .PDF form), and Williams’ now- defunct personal website, Paperheart. The artist’s new website makes no reference to the project, and any attempts at accessing the project’s original homepage at http://

www.paperheart.org/imtoosad/ only bring up dead links. Like Ader’s final project, I’m Too Sad To Tell You (After Bas Jan Ader) is fragmented, and can only be completed in the mind of the viewer. Its earlier forms can be surmised only from a cut-and-paste journey through web searches, cached pages, and archived blog posts. Williams’ distancing of herself from the project - an erasure of past work and past selves – is also an act of artistic act self-creation by means of selection, mediation, elimination.

                     Self-portraits submitted to Williams' 

                     project by Max De Leon (top) and Caitlin 

                     Durlak (bottom)

***************************************************** ¹ Bruce Hainley, “Legend of the Fall,” Artforum March 2009: 56.

²See Beat Wyss, “The whispering Zeitgeist,” Tate etc. Autumn 2008. Accessed June 23 2012. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/whispering-zeitgeist

³I think here of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and her love of sentimental novels, but there are countless examples.

⁴Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press,

1977) 133.
⁵Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 10.

⁵Ibid.

⁶I do not mean to take certain theories of the subject for granted, but proceed from the knowledge that the dissolution of the unified subject is an important theme within postmodern discourse.

7I do not mean to take certain theories of the subject for granted, but proceed from the knowledge that the dissolution of the unified subject is an important theme within postmodern discourse.
8I do not mean to take certain theories of the subject for granted, but proceed from the knowledge that the dissolution of the unified subject is an important theme within postmodern discourse.
9Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) 12.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹Quoted in Jos de Mul, Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1999) 10.

¹²Jörg Heiser, “A Romantic Measure,” Romantic Conceptualism, eds. Jörg Heiser and Ellen Seifermann(Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007) 143.

13 Sol LeWitt, “Sentences On Conceptual Art,” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) 107.
14Quoted in Charles Jencks, “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions,” Chicago Review 35:4 (1987) 34-35. 

¹⁵Ibid. 34.

16 Novalis, Hymns to the Night, Trans. Jeremy Reed (Hampshire: Enitharmon Press, 1989) 15.
17 Jan Verwoert, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall, 2006) 17.
18 Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan, Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 14.

¹⁹ Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1896) vi-vii.

20 Regarding the use of the word personal: Raymond Williams notes that the elements of human experience deemed untouched by the dominant culture and its modes of production tend to be classified as personal, private, natural. Williams does not insist on this dichotomy – and neither do I – but makes note of it. See Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977) 125.

²¹Jan Verwoert, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall, 2006) 17.

22 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 9. 
²³Jan Verwoert, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall, 2006) 4.
24 Jan Verwoert, “Bas Jan Ader: The Conceptuality of Grand Emotions,” Camera Austria June 2000: 7.

²⁵ Jan Verwoert, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall, 2006) 47.

26 Jan Verwoert, “Impulse Concept Concept Impulse,” Romantic Conceptualism, eds. Jörg Heiser and Ellen Seifermann (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007) 139.

²⁷ Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977) 124.