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I am increasingly interested in the position occupied by would-be synthesizers in moments of cultural change when everything is falling apart at the seams, and the freshly separated parts are doing their most damnable to wipe out the parts from which they have separated. In such messy circumstances, literal as well as metaphoric violence is often the order of the day, or more accurately the disorder.
The synthesizers recognize that things will never again be the way they were before, and they try to invent ways to stitch the parts back together in a different order, which they hope will be a better order. All too often, the proposed New Order is a worse solution than the existing disorder, and proposed New Disorders are not much better in practice. Yet sometimes the least plausible of proposals turns out to be the best possible solution in a world in which the best of options is barely distinguishable from the worst. Burkean conservatives’ assertion that the existing order is always the best one because all alternatives are worse has more truth in it than proponents of radical revolution believe, but it is a false assertion on balance, nonetheless. (That modifier, “on balance,” is also what is lacking in the us-vs.-them dynamics of moments of social and cultural change, when things seem to be either black or white, one or zero, or any other binary system you care to use as a metaphor. Which side are you on? The lines are clearly drawn in a case like Harlan County where the labor-organizing song asked that question; not so clearly drawn in faceoffs where the best answer would be “neither” or “both.”)
Depending on the starting place and personal conditions of the would-be synthesizers, they end up being martyred, or degenerating into crackpot theorizers when they weren’t that from the beginning, or being brought down by the personal instabilities that made them want to reach for impossible outcomes in the first place. Usually the best outcome is that their legacy is re-evaluated by theorists who try to cram it into the rigid categories the synthesizers were trying to overcome, often by separating the legacy into the parts that can contribute valuable insights to the existing order and the useless parts stemming from personal trauma. The possibility that the combination of traumatized thinking and remodeled versions of existing thinking might itself yield hitherto unnoticed insights, ones that were unavailable to the synthesizers themselves, is rarely considered. When it is, it is usually considered by yet another would-be synthesizer, so the needed combination of unconventional perspective and psychological stability is once again not met. The world needs more stolid close readers of impossible visions in order to expand what is considered possible. This obviously does occur for particular modes of thought on a regular basis throughout history, but it is quickly regularized into a linear story of thinkers ahead of their time who had the same thoughts as their successors, only sooner, or who were misled by their surrounding culture. If Sir Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy and Biblical interpretation, it is considered an unfortunate byproduct of his immersion in the presuppositions of his era, rather than as possibly the only, ultimately futile, approach Newton could take to ensuring the preservation of a universe that was not entirely “Newtonian.” Newtonian physics may have come from the beginning with an asterisk noting its non-ultimacy, but it is probably not worthwhile to pursue what may be an undecidable question.
For that reason, I am trying not to get bogged down in the details of failed synthesizers, just to extract a very few commonalities en route to considering, but not answering, more productive questions. Probably the best we can do in any generation is improve the questions, against the forces that are forever impelling us to ask the wrong ones. “The rest is not our business,” to quote a boundary-pushing conservative who failed to perceive the full implications of the boundaries he was pushing.
That reference to T. S. Eliot illustrates the depth of my problem, or perhaps the problem of any re-reading that brushes history against the grain (to quote Walter Benjamin) in these troublous days. The dislodging of once-sacrosanct reputations is such that any attempt to re-examine them ought to come with a trigger warning. So many areas of investigation have turned into conceptual minefields, to mix metaphors in a fashion worthy of Thomas Friedman.
I know far too little about Jean Toomer to express a responsible opinion, certainly not to go up against thinkers whose judgment I respect more than mine (Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example), but this New York Times article doesn’t seem to quite get the implications of Toomer’s search for a new type of humanity that would mutate out of ill-considered racial and social stereotyping. He obviously wanted to live his life as freely as possible, but he seems to have hoped to find what it would take to shatter the “mind-forged manacles” (my use of the Blake allusion should not be taken literally as implying influence) that had created an oppressive society—a goal that would require more than simple political revolution on the one hand or “passing” as a less exalted practical alternative on the personal level. Rudolph P. Byrd wrestled with Toomer’s stint with George Gurdjieff, and I need to re-read his book on the subject, especially since Byrd co-wrote with Gates the afterword to Toomer’s novel in which the subject of passing for white stirred such controversy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/books/review-cane-jean-toomer.html
Since writing this, I have discovered a very newly published Paris Review essay that does more justice to the problem of Toomer’s self-identification, and have perused some indignant refutations of Gates and Byrd’s essay that were published when it first appeared in 2011. I can’t safely venture an opinion, but these writers can (Marcia Alesan Dawkins, for example, or Ismail Muhammad, here):
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/01/14/how-jean-toomer-rejected-the-black-white-binary/
The synthesizers recognize that things will never again be the way they were before, and they try to invent ways to stitch the parts back together in a different order, which they hope will be a better order. All too often, the proposed New Order is a worse solution than the existing disorder, and proposed New Disorders are not much better in practice. Yet sometimes the least plausible of proposals turns out to be the best possible solution in a world in which the best of options is barely distinguishable from the worst. Burkean conservatives’ assertion that the existing order is always the best one because all alternatives are worse has more truth in it than proponents of radical revolution believe, but it is a false assertion on balance, nonetheless. (That modifier, “on balance,” is also what is lacking in the us-vs.-them dynamics of moments of social and cultural change, when things seem to be either black or white, one or zero, or any other binary system you care to use as a metaphor. Which side are you on? The lines are clearly drawn in a case like Harlan County where the labor-organizing song asked that question; not so clearly drawn in faceoffs where the best answer would be “neither” or “both.”)
Depending on the starting place and personal conditions of the would-be synthesizers, they end up being martyred, or degenerating into crackpot theorizers when they weren’t that from the beginning, or being brought down by the personal instabilities that made them want to reach for impossible outcomes in the first place. Usually the best outcome is that their legacy is re-evaluated by theorists who try to cram it into the rigid categories the synthesizers were trying to overcome, often by separating the legacy into the parts that can contribute valuable insights to the existing order and the useless parts stemming from personal trauma. The possibility that the combination of traumatized thinking and remodeled versions of existing thinking might itself yield hitherto unnoticed insights, ones that were unavailable to the synthesizers themselves, is rarely considered. When it is, it is usually considered by yet another would-be synthesizer, so the needed combination of unconventional perspective and psychological stability is once again not met. The world needs more stolid close readers of impossible visions in order to expand what is considered possible. This obviously does occur for particular modes of thought on a regular basis throughout history, but it is quickly regularized into a linear story of thinkers ahead of their time who had the same thoughts as their successors, only sooner, or who were misled by their surrounding culture. If Sir Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy and Biblical interpretation, it is considered an unfortunate byproduct of his immersion in the presuppositions of his era, rather than as possibly the only, ultimately futile, approach Newton could take to ensuring the preservation of a universe that was not entirely “Newtonian.” Newtonian physics may have come from the beginning with an asterisk noting its non-ultimacy, but it is probably not worthwhile to pursue what may be an undecidable question.
For that reason, I am trying not to get bogged down in the details of failed synthesizers, just to extract a very few commonalities en route to considering, but not answering, more productive questions. Probably the best we can do in any generation is improve the questions, against the forces that are forever impelling us to ask the wrong ones. “The rest is not our business,” to quote a boundary-pushing conservative who failed to perceive the full implications of the boundaries he was pushing.
That reference to T. S. Eliot illustrates the depth of my problem, or perhaps the problem of any re-reading that brushes history against the grain (to quote Walter Benjamin) in these troublous days. The dislodging of once-sacrosanct reputations is such that any attempt to re-examine them ought to come with a trigger warning. So many areas of investigation have turned into conceptual minefields, to mix metaphors in a fashion worthy of Thomas Friedman.
I know far too little about Jean Toomer to express a responsible opinion, certainly not to go up against thinkers whose judgment I respect more than mine (Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example), but this New York Times article doesn’t seem to quite get the implications of Toomer’s search for a new type of humanity that would mutate out of ill-considered racial and social stereotyping. He obviously wanted to live his life as freely as possible, but he seems to have hoped to find what it would take to shatter the “mind-forged manacles” (my use of the Blake allusion should not be taken literally as implying influence) that had created an oppressive society—a goal that would require more than simple political revolution on the one hand or “passing” as a less exalted practical alternative on the personal level. Rudolph P. Byrd wrestled with Toomer’s stint with George Gurdjieff, and I need to re-read his book on the subject, especially since Byrd co-wrote with Gates the afterword to Toomer’s novel in which the subject of passing for white stirred such controversy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/books/review-cane-jean-toomer.html
Since writing this, I have discovered a very newly published Paris Review essay that does more justice to the problem of Toomer’s self-identification, and have perused some indignant refutations of Gates and Byrd’s essay that were published when it first appeared in 2011. I can’t safely venture an opinion, but these writers can (Marcia Alesan Dawkins, for example, or Ismail Muhammad, here):
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/01/14/how-jean-toomer-rejected-the-black-white-binary/
