“Kitsch is a folding screen set up for curtaining off death.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Kundera is generalizing from the forced positivity of May Day celebrations in socialist Czechoslovakia, where the Communist authorities had declared the struggle between good and evil to be superseded by the progression from good to better, a formulation that cries out for kitsch. Obviously, the forcibly upbeat tone was designed to cover up the repressive official background which included the torture and execution of founding Czech Communists. However, Kundera extends his generalization to America, where idyllic childhood scenes fulfill a similar function of repressive kitsch. Obviously, the accuracy of the generalization depends on the context and intention. As Turgenev observed, kitschy clichés can signal deeply felt but inarticulate sentiments; and obviously, too, we see a Teddy Bear differently in the arms of a child than in the hands of an adult cancer survivor. The late Barbara Ehrenreich took aim at the latter kind of survivor infantilization in protest against inferior medical care, but also in conformity with Kundera’s dictum. Cancer survivor kitsch is a sad defense against death. I would propose two criteria for defining kitsch: it is a commodity and as such it condescendingly talks down to the mature sensibility to sell false comfort and sentimental illusion.
Let’s suppose that all the kitschy crapola we acquire and entomb ourselves in is there to blot out death from our consciousness. This suggests that death always haunts us, informing our anxieties, diluting excitement to dreary predictability, and demonizing the darkness that children and unsettled adults instinctively fear. Baroque artists and poets preferred to look death in the face, pairing the worm-eaten corpse with the flowering young maiden. They knew that intense joy was the flip side of the contemplation of death. It may be that those who confront death more directly experience life with less phoniness. It’s not the case that a 76-year-old man who is slowly succumbing to a degenerative disease is overwhelmed by joy; but then neither is the prospect of my imminent demise spoiling my pleasure in the little treats of daily living. It is attuning my mind to the question of what life amounts to when it is stripped of all embellishment, all kitsch and illusion, all activity and achievement.
When I think about life per se, my mind always orients itself to the first philosopher who captured my teenage attention: Arthur Schopenhauer. I read about him in Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy and managed to get hold of and read the Kemp abridgment of The World as Will and Idea. Since that first reading, I’ve read his main work more than once in German, plus his other writings. Schopenhauer offers a phenomenology for Freud’s psychology and a metaphysics for Marx’s Capital. All our desires, our rapacious acquisitiveness, our lusts and secret cravings are manifestations of the will to live which stands opposed to resignation and death. The lover’s infatuation, the capitalist’s striving for profit, the politician’s lust for power, the artist’s craving for recognition and fame—these are merely the kaleidoscopic manifestations of an underlying vital will. No one should be surprised if the politician trades power for money or sex: these were all equivalent appearances of a single universal impulse. We can trace the blind will down into the lowest forms of life which are driven to survive, reproduce, and aggrandize themselves; we can trace the will even beyond the sphere of life to the blind forces operating in material nature. We can proceed from these roots to the branching manifestations of the will to power and profit, into the systems of domination and the blind profit-seeking neoliberal economy where dog eats dog. All embody, according to Schopenhauer, the same flight from death, the same blind struggle. Paradoxically, the blind will to life may soon be the death of us all. The plastic that chokes and poisons the oceans includes a shit load of kitsch and commodities.
The will only ceases to be blind when the mind distances itself and instead of grasping at things, gazes at them in wonder and comprehension. That comprehension is distanced and calm, and as such the living equivalent of the death from which the vital will flees. It’s the death of the will which the mystics regarded as mystical union with God, and which Schopenhauer equates with nirvana and escape from the wheel of reincarnation in which the blind will is driven to reproduce itself. I wish I could do justice to the vivid logic by which the philosopher guides the reader around all the forms of embodied will, like Virgil guiding Dante around the circles of Hell. It’s quite a tour de force. I said Hell, but the effect on me is soothing. Years ago, when I was stressed, I read a canto of the Inferno in the Pinsky translation before going to sleep every night. I slept better for it. The storm was raging beyond the brightly lit interior of my mind. The tormented will was outside. Dante’s cantos with their memento mori were perhaps the ultimate anti-kitsch. Now I see my son searching the Bhagavad Gita for what I found in philosophy.
Schopenhauer has his limits. What lies beyond his life experience and speculative interests are the devotion of the lover, friend, or family member, the disciplined, coordinated will of the collaborator, and the solidarity and self-sacrifice of the comrade. Family, friends, work, comradeship are intermediate between kitsch and anti-kitsch, depending on what we make of them: they can be kitschy adornments of the self or selfless ends in themselves. What sustains me most of all is the gratuitous goodness of friendship where nothing is owed and nothing earned. It’s a goodness that can’t be commodified.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 