Over at the Position of Ignorance, Dan calls me on the use of ‘pure’ as a general positive. No, it’s not actually All About Your Humble Blogger, but since the word shows up five times in my last post, I’ll go ahead and call it a response. Anyway, he’s totally right. He points out that rather than referring to purity, he’d rather refer to “hybrid vigor and genetic diversity, steel alloys, impurities that give gems their color, translation and multilingualism, healthy difference of opinion, baking powder, Italian tomato sauce, variegated yarn, and so forth.”
As it happens, I was talking about (talk about talk about) Pop Music; talking about the purity of pop is like talking about the aridity of the ocean. Pop music is (and has always been) a hybrid; the pop music John Scalzi is talking about is a mutt. African rhythms adulterated by the North American slave experience adulterated further by the urban industrial experience on one side of the family, European instruments adulterated by Eurasian and Gypsy design and the needs of jazz, and then electrified on the other. There are fruitful dalliances with Western Swing (Yee-hah!), Disco (hoo-ah), and funk (hah!) in its past; it’s a wise genre that knows who its father is. What could be a better symbol of glorious impurity than that bastard the Electric Guitar? So, yes, point taken.
But I’m still being too literal for his real point. He says “I think I'd rather have to work out some kind of disagreement with someone who values even superficial experience in multiple cultures -- as annoying as that can be -- than with someone dedicated to their purity as a paragon of their culture.” I think this is where some of us get caught in the hyphens; one the one side, the outrage at “hyphenated Americans” who refuse to drop their own culture and become part of the mall, and on the other the insularity and defensiveness that makes people insist on those hyphens. I’m sympathetic to both, but what I really like is the mix. I go down to Chinatown not because I think I’m getting food as I would get it in Szechuan, but because I’m getting Chinese food, a thing which never existed before the friction between immigrants rubbed off sparks. Is egg foo young to be despised because it’s inauthentic? But it is authentic, it’s authentically American, just like pizza, corned beef and cabbage, and the Rueben. It’s the friction between cultures that rubs off art and innovation and modernity and chopsocky movies and ska and zoot suits and gumbo and the Demoiselles of Avignon.
I think I’ll have to find a way to add that value to the tastes that I think of as city tastes (and which I only with difficulty refrain from calling blue tastes). I had been calling it variety and novelty, and while this taste satisfies, in a way, both of those, this is something different: a taste for mixture, a taste for alloy, a taste for fusion, a taste for combination and amalgamation and conglomeration. Maybe variety, novelty and salmagundi?
I do think, however, that it is more of a taste, rather than a moral value. Like all my tastes, I can and often do defend them on moral grounds, but those are not the reasons I like ’em. And, of course, although it is a taste I have, that doesn’t mean that I like everything that is aimed at it; my taste in jazz is for Big Band and Jive, rather than fusion. The mistake is to think that fusion jazz is more of a fusion than Big Band, or to think that Pad Thai is more genuine than a hot dog. Often, what that taste means is just that I focus on the aspects of alloy rather than those of purity, which, after all, is what Dan’s on about.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
Arrrr, you’re too quick for me. Here I was thinking that no one was likely to have seen that entry yet and that I’d be safe making some edits to it… the current list of ‘mixture’ values now includes “Chinese restaurants in New York,” and I was in the middle of trying to think how to phrase, concisely, phenomena like the introduction of South American beat patterns into jazz.
Honestly, this wasn’t about you in any way. I’ve been thinking about the damage of the ‘purity’ meme for quite a while and only just got around to posting. (Corrolary to Asimov’s Law: Never attribute to argument what can be adequately explained by bad timing.)
I’m not sure that I’m really advancing ‘mixture’ as a moral value. In some ways, saying that it’s better to appreciate ‘mixture’ instead of ‘purity’ is, itself, a very ‘purity’ sort of thing to say. I meant it more as a valuable addition to the mix than as a replacement.
And I did label that post “silly”, right up there in the title. Maybe I should remind myself of that, too. 🙂
What an excellent riff on the topic that you’ve posted here, though. Time for me to go back and link to it.
If we’re looking at symbols of mixture, I’d advocate for Cuban Chinese food in New York, which is awfully good.
Two points, however, on the “purity” side:
One, good mixtures can’t be made without the intense and more-or-less independent development of cultural expression in relation to its own standards.
Two, cultural mixture is often the product of the displacement and suffering of large groups of people. The creation of vibrant mixtures is a healthy activity; it is a way of transcending suffering by re-building culture in new circumstances. Celebration of mixture too easily may leave this out.
The celebration of diversity can be a way of making the mixing forced by circumstances to be less painful, and a way of getting some of the benefits of mixing without suffering being a necessary prerequisite. These are good things.
But they’re not necessary to good taste or authenticity. Authenticity comes from a serious response to one’s circumstances and a desire to make something good that is suited to those circumstances or that transcends them. Good taste recognizes authenticity.
That’s my take today on cultural aesthetics, anyway.
Dan,
Just giving myself the business, really. And without detracting from its silliness, I do think you have a good point (on this one, although the phrase ‘on the wires’ just hits me wrong for some reason).
Chris,
Well, but Cuban Chinese food (particularly in New York) is obviously a good example of cultural combination; “Chinese food” isn’t. But, yes, it’s easy to celebrate either whilst ignoring the circumstances of the mixing. Egg Foo Young (and Corned Beef and Cabbage) are responses to a malificent combination of poverty and exclusion, and neither validates those nor even seriously ameliorates them anymore than Moissac justifies the Crusades (do I mean Moissac?).
But I think what I was getting at was that mixture happens, and that by adopting a language (of metaphor, particularly) that celebrates its strength and vivacity, and as you point out its ability to transcend its circumstance, we can highlight the ways in which things we like are mixtures. If, in addition, we can edge towards mixture without (much) suffering, or even can edge towards recognition of suffering within the celebration of beauty/technical advance/novelty/variety/yummy tasty treats, then that’s a good thing, too.
Of course, back of all this are my ideas about pluralism, rattling in the back of my head. It may be that Chinese food (Szechuan and Cuban as well as Egg Foo Young and fortune cookies) has value as a metaphor for the whole idea. It may not. Must ruminate further.
Thanks,
-V.
Just a $.02 on a tangential side point:
I think you mean La Madeleine at Vezelay (ca. 1115) where the tympanum of the Mission of the Apostles has been discussed in connection to the Second Crusade later preached from there.
Still mulling cultural interaction (supposed to be grading…)
Oh, wow, Cuban Chinese food. I’ve got to try that sometime.
At the risk of losing my defensive shield of whimsy (too late?), I’ll mention that the displacement and suffering of large groups of people as groups has gotten a lot of historical support from the ‘purity’ value. If by a wave of a wand xenophobia disappeared from human nature and took whatever authenticity it had helped create with it, I naievely believe that human cultural richness would net a positive.
Hmm. And when I started jotting down the ‘mixture’ thoughts, I was hoping to be more general about it and not to settle too heavily on the cultural theme. (For frivolous example: my wedding ring is “rose gold”, a gold-copper alloy. It suits my skin tone in a way that everyone who’s looked at remarks on, while ‘purer’ gold didn’t flatter me at all.) My fault for taking my one longer example from the cultural realm, though, and I suppose it is what’s on people’s minds.
V: too bad about ‘on the wires’ — win some, lose some.
it seems like purity and impurity in human affairs stem from a desire to connect actions with group concepts, perhaps to link a variety together and reinforce them. the group concept being reinforced is usually a wink-and-nod process of leaving out the uncomfortable sexual or invasive history of the population. so things pass a test of purity by holding them up to a group concept (“chinese”) belying the multi-ethnicity and wildness of the originating population, its political history, its current power and resource sharing arrangements, etc.
People categorize. That’s how our brains work. Learning categories and assigning everything around us to those categories is what child development is about. And without those categories, language and thought break down.
It doesn’t seem surprising, therefore, that purity would appeal in almost any arena — it’s easy on the brain. You don’t have to test or modify the boundaries of those categories if you can keep the things around you “pure”, in the sense of easy to assign to a category.
Mental acuity is developed and maintained by challenging those categories. Alloys and hybrids and hyphenations will stave off Alzheimer’s, ward off reactionary worldviews, and nurture human progress. Not a bad reason to grab a quick lunch at the Cuban Chinese restaurant on Broadway around 79th.
I don’t have anything thoughtful to add, but the other day I had some leftover massaman curry sauce, and some leftover cheese ravioli, and so, of course, I mixed them together. “Hey,” I thought, “I’m eating fusion cuisine!” I was amused ::grin::.
categories! good or bad? you decide.