Gavin Butt: Scholarly Flirtations

The Serious Scholar

Over the past decade or so in my role as an academic in the field of Art History and Visual Culture I have been called upon to write numerous references for my students, often to support them in pursuing further studies, but also to help them secure employment once their studies have come to a close. As with most professionals faced with repetitive tasks of this kind, I have come to realise over time that I have developed some stock turns of phrase which find their way in to almost every (good) reference that I write. The one that interests, and somewhat surprises me - given the direction of my current research (more on which below) - is the sentence that I frequently begin such letters of reference with: “In the time that I have known ‘X’ (the student in question), he/she has proved themselves to be a serious and committed student”. In beginning thus I signal to Professors and prospective employers alike that the person in question possesses, at least on the basis of my evaluation, the requisite attitude and aptitude for undertaking scholarly work, and, by extension, other forms of specialised labour. To view things negatively, this suggests that to be neither serious about nor committed to academic work, is to betray an inappropriate relationship to it. To be ‘unserious’ would be to demonstrate a lack of respect for the purported importance of scholarly activity, and to approach it too lightly, perhaps in the manner of a dilettante. Similarly to not be committed (enough) to one’s studies would be to show one’s errant tendency to get distracted by other things, to not be focused and attentive enough to the matters at hand, and – opening out to a broader character judgement of the person concerned – it would be to suggest that they are unreliable and unlikely to stay the distance required by the tasks of this, or indeed, any other form of professional endeavour.
It perhaps shouldn’t surprise me that my recommendations have re-iterated these values of seriousness and committed-ness over the years, given that academic scholarship is broadly thought of as a ‘serious’ enterprise of research and thinking, leading to the production of important and specialised forms of knowledge. But recently I have come to question the values of seriousness which habitually inform our attitudes towards research and writing in the arts and humanities. This questioning is not something that we routinely do as part of scholarly activity. As is clear from my opening remarks here, all too often we simply reiterate the values of ‘serious’ scholarship idly and tacitly by dint of the ritual acts we undertake as academics: for instance, I recommend students as serious and committed almost without thinking, without making any kind of argument or defence for the terms of such a recommendation. Often we become conscious of these values only when we feel that we fall short of them – perhaps when we feel, or even fear, that we are being too flip or trivial, for instance, in addressing the subject at hand. But even then, such a consciousness rarely gives rise to any sustained reflection on seriousness as such and instead usually makes us act in order to bring us back in line, to recommit ourselves once more to the serious business of our work.
One such example of this is a remarkable, and somewhat unguarded, confessional afterword to a recent book on censorship and homosexuality in twentieth century U.S. art. In Outlaw Representation (2002), the art historian Richard Meyer writes:

For as long as I have been writing about homosexuality and art history, I have wondered – and sometimes worried – about the discomfort my work might arouse in various audiences. I have worried that teachers, colleagues, students, readers, even family members would not consider my work fully professional that, on some level, all it would signify to them would be sex, and, more especially, gay male sex. At scholarly conferences, I have secretly suspected that the slides I was projecting on screen (of, say, Mapplethorpe’s bullwhip Self-Portrait or Warhol’s Decorated Penis) were displacing the intellectual seriousness and interpretive nuance I sought to sustain. In this sense, the respectability of my own practice as an art historian has been an ongoing – if, until now, unspoken – concern, one that has shaped the research and writing of this book. (277)

Here Meyer voices his anxieties about how the choice of homoerotic objects of study will likely affect the audience members present at lectures he gives, as well as detrimentally impact upon the readers of his book. He worries that, in addressing such ‘hot’ and eroticised – and, in Mapplethorpe’s case, pornographic – imagery, the seriousness of his endeavour will become compromised or overwhelmed by excitable responses of desire and/or disgust which might displace a more sober engagement with the intellectual thoughts he proffers about them. Moreover, Meyer admits, this may ultimately prove threatening to the “respectability” of his practice as an academic art historian. And if this is an issue which, as Meyer writes, is one which has been an “ongoing” concern of his book, one that has “shaped [its] research and writing”, we can surmise that it is also one which he has sought to put right. For in reading Meyer’s study we quickly become aware of the wealth of ‘proper’ art historical attention – to archival documents and images – through which the author scrupulously founds his commentary. So even in writing about the ‘unrespectable’ strategies of queer artists, and the lack of respectability accorded to homosexuality itself within homophobic culture, Meyer works perhaps especially hard to be taken seriously as an art historian given that seriousness is something which his very choice of subject matter conspires against. His book might thereby be seen as working particularly hard to lay claim to professional respectability, courting the recognition of the academic establishment by committing itself to the avowedly important and established protocols of historical research and writing.
In doing so Meyer’s work falls in line with what, in a Foucauldian vein, I call a technology of serious value and attention: one which produces the appropriate attitudes and modes of attention through which we might confer value and importance on something. By attending to objects with earnest regard then, or by expending effort and attention in evaluating and interpreting them – as does Meyer with the works of Warhol and Mapplethorpe – we reiterate power in, and as, a technology of serious attention. I do not, however, wish to suggest here that Meyer is unusual or alone in doing so. But simply to say that this is a form of the reproduction of power which almost all scholars performatively reiterate as they speak and write. It is also one which I have recently become acutely aware of myself in my own work in the field of queer and visual cultural studies, specifically with my 2005 book Between You and Me which looks at the role played by gossip and rumour in affecting the meanings and affects of art and artists in New York bohemia. In many ways I too have felt like Meyer that my choice of subject, in this case gossip, runs the risk of being seen as trivial and unworthy of attention as an academic object of study. Moreover, the adoption of gossip as method, as well as subject, of an historical study has further compromised any claims to seriousness that my work might purport to make. But rather than attempting to counter any potential lack of recognition of my work as ‘serious’ by trying ever harder to be seen to be doing things ‘properly’, I quickly came to realise that flirting with not being taken seriously was a necessary part of my act of queer scholarship here. Indeed my self-styled ‘flirtation’ with history was one which needed to be undertaken in order to address my subject as such: i.e. to see what it might mean to write history differently, queerly, without recourse to the habitual and ‘proper’ ways of doing things. Without going into the details of this project here, this was a scholarly act which, at least in part, deliberately posed the question of whether or not it could be taken seriously as art history and, importantly, left that question open and without an answer. It was a book which asked whether or not a specifically ‘queer’ history might be pursued precisely through the medium of such an open-ended flirtatious act, and where the determination of it as either a serious contribution to historiographical debate or as some sort of trivial excressance upon it, was something which was necessarily left hanging as the performative promise of my queer scholarly gambit.

Flirting with the Serious

Since publishing this book I have become very interested in flirtation and its relationship to so-called serious and important matters, both within queer scholarship but also more broadly within the context of scholarship on the arts per se. To some degree it may seem odd to consider flirtation and seriousness together as we customarily and reflexively think of flirtation as non-serious, as a simply trivial and oftentimes harmless pleasure. We may even think flirtation and the serious as opposing terms since, as Adam Phillips notes in his book On Flirtation (1994), once a flirtation becomes serious it ceases to be flirtation. Once we become committed – to sex; to a relationship; to marriage – we leave the frivolities of flirtation behind. But thinking this way, Phillips also suggests, is to miss out on how flirtation might actually offer up an odd or unusual engagement with the serious rather than simply being opposed to it. Phillips writes: “The fact that people tend to flirt only with serious things – madness, disaster, other people – and the fact that flirting is a pleasure, makes it a relationship, a way of doing things, worth considering” (xvii). And, he goes on, “Flirtation, as the ‘easy’ or much maligned double of things done properly, might simply describe a different kind of relation, another way of going about things” (xxii).
I am very much interested in the “different kind of relation” to the serious that flirtation offers, this other way of “going about things”, especially as we might think and practice it in the context of research and writing on contemporary art and performance. I am currently drawn to those moments of engagement with visual arts practice or performance work where we are left uncertain as to whether or not to take them seriously, where our judgemental attitude is left in play by the very manner of what we might call the work’s ‘flirtatious’ approach. I am finding such forms of flirtatious address in work which is varied in style and genre, from the queer cabaret of Kiki and Herb, to the dance and choreography of Richard Move, the performance work of Kathe Izzo, and the art of Joe Brainard, amongst others. For instance, at a recent performance by Kiki and Herb, a now well–established act on both sides of the Atlantic on the overlapping scenes of queer and theatre performance, I was left in tears. This I found odd, not in the least because I am not given to such unexpected outbursts of sentiment, but also because it was in the context of an act which is renowned for its mocking, ironic cover versions of cheesy pop tunes like Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ or Tom Jones’ ‘Sex Bomb’, interspersed by the biting, campy wit of Kiki’s autobiographical narratives. But, as Kiki sang what I can only describe as a ‘heartfelt’ rendition of the Stevie Nicks song ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?’, the mood turned elegiac and I found myself curiously moved. But what intrigues me about work like this is how this could be so. How could the performance have slid so readily from high camp humour to what seemed like emotional sincerity? And, crucially, amidst the welter of everything else – from the satire to the over-the-top and dramatically stylised characterisation – did I come to take this all so seriously?
This is just one example of the ways in which some contemporary work engages its spectators precisely by rendering indeterminate the serious judgemental attitude, making the question ‘Should I take it seriously or not?’ into an aporia which, at least in this instance, leaves the viewer with the affective experience of uncertainty. This experience, I am in the business of proposing, is what we might consider as a flirtatious approach to matters of sincere expression and serious intent and may be interesting precisely as example of Phillips’ “different kind of relation” to the serious - as oddly sincere or even a queerly serious form of cultural expression.
In the context of this essay and this publication, however, my more immediate question is how might we then go on to write and produce knowledge of such experiences? Should we simply write about them in time-honoured academic fashion, subjecting them to the serious attention of academic analysis and scholarly prose? Or, is there an ethical imperative here to respond to the challenge to serious forms of attention suggested by such work by transforming, or disrupting, the habitually sober performativity of critical writing? My response to this latter question is very much to answer in the affirmative. In doing so this is in part to reaffirm my call in After Criticism (2005) to reconsider the multiple possible performatives of critical response, but it is also to echo Susan Sontag’s much earlier call in the 1960s to replace a discourse of hermeneutics with an “erotics” of art writing (104). Flirtation may offer up just such a model of writing, a pleasurable, eroticised mode of engagement, which might be characterised, again following Sontag, as being “against interpretation” – or at least any straightforwardly ‘serious’ mode of it.
Sontag writes interestingly in her 1964 article ‘Notes on Camp’ that Camp is one cultural phenomena that she finds resistant to serious interpretation by dint of its playfulness and seeming triviality. Camp, she writes somewhat paradoxically, is “one of the hardest things to talk about”. And because it is so, she goes on, “[t]o talk about Camp is therefore to betray it” (105). In some respects Sontag then goes on to justify her own take on camp in fairly received scholarly terms:

If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyse it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

This is interesting. For whilst Sontag clearly expresses a “deep sympathy” for her subject, it appears that it is on the basis of her equally deep “revulsion” towards, and her desire to produce knowledge of, Camp that she is prepared to betray her subject by going ahead and writing about it. It appears that both of these things – her revulsion and her desire for illumination – are sufficient to distance herself from her subject and it is this distance, this critical distance, which, she suggests, is the precondition which enables her to write about Camp in the first place. But though this may suggest that Sontag takes a typically distanced scholarly perspective on her subject, what is interesting is that nevertheless – and almost despite her avowed intentions to provide “edification” – all she can come up with is a constellation of ‘notes’ on the subject. Its almost as if, in attempting to undertake the serious work of cultural analysis, her decidedly tricky and playful subject (“Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’” (116)) comes to register itself in the ways in which the essay falls short of some more elaborated thesis, as if she could only flirt with the possibility of writing about Camp in time honoured scholarly fashion – and nothing more than that. In presenting her essay in note form then, we could say that there is here the staging of a provisionality about that which she writes, as if, at some later stage, it could be worked up into a more finished, or determinately argued piece of scholarly prose.
This motioning towards an arguably ‘more’ serious form of scholarship, whilst at the same time deferring it, might stand as just one example of how flirtation might be practiced at the level of critical writing. According to Phillips, flirtation’s “implicit wish is to sustain the life of desire” (xvii-xviii), to put “in disarray our sense of an ending” (xix), and to keep “the consequences going” (xxiii). In this respect the flirtatious performativity of Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ – at least as I read it here – can be seen to reside in the ways in which the serious is engaged as playful possibility, where the desire for the “edification” commonly provided by serious discourse is placed in play, thereby sustaining its “life”. In this way, Sontag might be seen as introducing into critical writing a relatively explicit temporal mode, in which – flirtatiously – the serious is pitched into an indeterminate future in which Camp may, or may not, turn out to be a worthy subject of her would-be serious attention.

Knowing Contingency

And this brings me to the question of the temporality of art writing, and how it posits what it knows in relation to a past, present, and future – indeed how it acts in temporal terms. If a flirtatious scholarship might be seen as engaging playfully and pleasurably in the now with how things may eventually turn out, then we may distinguish it from a mode of critical attention which queer literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, calls ‘paranoid’. For Sedgwick, paranoia has become the pre-eminent mode of critical reading in contemporary cultural studies generally. It is paranoid because, in its quest to unmask the operations of power in society and culture, it works to ward off the negative affect of humiliation. What paranoid thinking fears above all is surprise. To be surprised is to be found off one’s guard, to take one’s eye of the ball, and to be hood winked by the various ruses of power. In order to safeguard against this the paranoid subject remains constantly vigilant and on the lookout for power’s various masquerades. Such thinking braces itself against the unpredictabilities of the future, for what it likely holds is only humiliation.
This is a problem, Sedgwick suggests, because this “paranoid consensus” blots out “alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). It reproduces familiar critical manoeuvres just as it reproduces familiar objects of critique. It remains frozen in the circularity of its paranoid structure. This doesn’t make it completely without value, she argues, because what it knows, it knows very well, and what it knows is also eminently teachable. But “the result (of paranoid thinking) is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognise whether and where real conceptual work is getting done, and precisely what that work may be” (136). It often fails, Sedgwick writes, to attune itself, to “the heartbeat of contingency” (147). This I find interesting. For what would it mean for a scholarly discourse to be attuned to ‘the heartbeat of contingency’? How might we adjudicate whether or not a discipline or a discourse could be deemed active within, and alive to, the very moment of its engagement?
The answer to this question is not particularly straightforward. The ‘life’ or ‘death’ of scholarly analysis cannot be determined by assessing whether or not a discourse simply references, or is relevant to, the moment of its critical engagement. A good example to illustrate what I mean here is Terry Eagleton’s 2003 book After Theory. The book is certainly about the contemporary state of critical theory, it addresses itself to the now, but it is not, I think, very alive to it. Eagleton, most renowned of course as a scholar credited with importing critical theory - and particularly Marxist theory – into the study of English literature, argues in the book that we have now reached a point where the high point of radical theoretical intervention in the humanities has passed, and that really nothing good has been produced since the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes etc in the 1960s and 1970s. His argument is also that such ‘postmodernist’ theory – which is often a rather crude fiction in Eagleton’s work – is in danger of making us mute in the face of the aggressive, untheorised fictions of e.g. George Bush’s ‘good’ and ‘evil’ which mobilise and frame contemporary geo-politics. The problem is, however, that even though purportedly written in response to the critical and political urgencies of the contemporary moment, of the now, it feels very much like a book I’ve read before – which lines up the same enemies (postmodern relativism and the militant forces of the political right) against the same necessary critical project – which happens to be Marxist materialism with the familiar lip service, and no more than that, to feminism. No sense, then, on my reading, of Eagleton responding to the ‘heartbeat on contingency’ in ways which might open up or trouble his defensive, paranoid explanatory system. No sense of having his world view rocked by some small, contingent observation which might unsettle his totalising paradigm, or which begins to suggest the need for the framing of new questions or the reframing of older questions in a new way.
What I am suggesting here, of course, is that, in comparison, acts of scholarly flirtation may offer up a more activated model of scholarship to those exemplified here by Eagleton. For, to begin with, as I have already suggested, flirtation stalls the moment of definitive judgement and commitment, and thereby makes space for the entertaining of less familiar possibilities, which, in turn, reduces the constricting hold of the paranoid impulse on the production of scholarly knowledge. What the activity of flirting may offer to writing is a way of playfully exploring contradictory or incommensurate propositions by entertaining the oscillation between them as the very substance of its pleasures. The flirt is less anxious than the paranoiac about how things might turn out, and is less concerned about the possible humiliation that the future may bring, so can find pleasure in not knowing for sure what might be over the horizon. For the flirt, the possibility of a happy outcome of one’s contingent engagement with another is equally as plausible as hurt or disappointment. The future of flirtation, therefore, is indeterminate. As Georg Simmel writes, this play between happy and unhappy possible futures is what makes for the pleasures of flirtation in the present:

On the one hand, [the psychic conduct that the flirt provokes] draws anticipated happiness from the promise that flirtation implies. The reverse of this, on the other hand, the chance that anticipation may be disappointed by a change in the situation, results from the remoteness that the flirt makes her partner feel at the same time [Note: in the context of Simmel’s patriarchal heterosexism, all flirt’s are women]. Insofar as both are continually played off against each other, so that neither is sufficiently serious to repress the other from consciousness, the possibility of the Perhaps still stands above the Negative. (143)

So, flirtation puts into play what it knows. Indeed this play is the very way in which it knows what it knows. It is not that flirtation is antithetical to epistemology but rather that what it knows it does so through the promise of this Perhaps. In placing “the possibility of the Perhaps” over and above, for instance, the negative affects of potential humiliation imagined by the paranoid subject, flirtation embraces the future as uncertain rather than as likely, and injurious repeat of the past. Or, in Phillips formulation, we can understand the epistemology of flirtation by understanding the ways in which it “eroticizes the contingency of our lives by turning doubt – or ambiguity – into suspense” (xxiii). All of this puts flirtation very much in line with Sedgwick’s championing of “weak” epistemologies which, she argues, might constitute ‘reparative’ critical practices, ones which might offer alternatives to paranoid forms of criticism and thinking. Flirtation may be deemed ‘weak’ by dint of its pleasurable embrace of uncertainty and doubt. But this should not blind us, Sedgwick might argue, to those things that it might nevertheless tell us, to those things that it allows us access to which more ‘committed’ models of cultural enquiry – committed, that is, to judging or revealing some analytical ‘truth’ – may rule out. Flirtation might therefore be seen as model for practices of criticism - where it seems necessary and germane – to decentre the paranoid structures of serious analysis, or indeed to re-inflect them with a flirtatious, and playful, form of knowing.

Notes Toward a Conclusion

But if I am advocating a ‘knowing’ form of critical flirtation here, where flirtation becomes self-conscious metaphor for the activity of critical engagement, am I risking making flirtation over into some serious form of critical engagement, thereby betraying it in the process? Perhaps.
And in writing this essay as I have, in spending time - mine in writing, yours in reading – are we both conspiring to deaden flirtation, to turn it into some tropic husk which we traffic between us in the hope that it might spring to life and reanimate the scene of critical writing? Perhaps.
Is the figure of the flirtatious scholar an unfathomable paradox? Is it even possible to flirt in a scholarly manner within the contexts of authorised institutions of learning and teaching – chiefly within the University, but also within allied institutions in the art world of the Museum, and of Criticism? Perhaps.
And as a queer mode of critical engagement which playfully engages with the straight seriousness of academic parlance, should you take seriously what I have written in these pages? Can I really mean what I say in all earnestness? ….

References:

Gavin Butt, After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell: Malden & Oxford, 2005.

Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2005.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, Penguin: London, 2004.

Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth Century American Art, Oxford University Press: New York, 2002.

Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, Faber and Faber: London, 1995.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2003.

Georg Simmel, ‘Flirtation’, in Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, Trans. and Intro. Guy Oakes, Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1984, pp. 133-152.

Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’ and ‘Notes on Camp’, in A Susan Sontag Reader, Intro. Elizabeth Hardwick, Penguin: London, 1983, pp. 95-104, 105-119.