Conversation

Note that critique has its own issues. It’s basically “MFAs should listen to literature PhDs.” It suggests that the ahistorical no-context “innocence” posture adopted by postwar pomo MFA writing should bend a knee to academic-literary history/theory. A cure as bad as the disease.
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I think I’m a historicist-anarchist. Work in the context of a historical sensibility, but avoid being trapped by any *tradition* of history. Anarchic historical sensibility > historical institutional tradition > ahistorical institutional tradition
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The “tradition” you situate your work in is simply the context created by everything you’ve chosen to consume, not things you were institutionally coerced to consume. Of course you can *choose* to borrow from traditions or entertain suggestions, but agency is yours.
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Traditions make good servants but poor masters. They’re like librarians. A librarian might occasionally make a good suggestion on what to read, but their main job is to help you find things related to what *you’ve* decided to read.
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If you let a tradition pwn you, producing vacuous works of satirical commentary with trollish “certificates of authenticity” is the least of your risks. The big risk is you’ll have no fun at all and wonder why the hell you’re going through motions larping artist or writer.
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Institutionalized art is *safe* like 1980s IBM Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM Nobody ever got fired for writing MFA program fiction Nobody ever got fired for making grant-art Nobody ever got fired for writing Hugo/Nebula-intent sf “Fired” in art = ostracized from a scene
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The larger idea I’m criticizing is the unspoken claim than the only available contexts to situate anything you do are institutional traditions. That without the imprimatur of a tradition not only is your work suspect/poor/vanity (which is fine), but that it exists in a vacuum.
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One reason I enjoy the wild internet as my context is that it’s actually richer than interior of any given tradition. If you don’t care about your access to traditions being officially sanctioned, you can access all the innards plus 10x stuff in the unincorporated interstices
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