a blog by Peter Leonard
This Thursday was the seminar on political literature and critical engagement that I flew down to Copenhagen to attend. Organized by the Danish Students Study Circle, the event brought together artists, professors and grad students with a shared interest in the socio-political turn in recent Danish literature. This recent development is perhaps the natural pendulum swing -- or the payback -- after the 'sleepy' early 1990s.
There are a few names which stand out when you consider literature from this period -- probably most notoriously Claus Beck-Nielsen, the performance artist who has, among other things, 1) lived as a homeless person on the streets of Copenhagen, 2) travelled to Iraq with an enormous empty box labeled "The Democracy," and 3) written his own postmortem.
Beck-Nielsen (seen here at a talk in early 2007) is interesting in that he takes equal aim at internal Danish society (Claus Beck-Nielsen: 1963-2001) as well as Denmark's engagement in the world abroad (Selvmordsaktionen: beretningen om forsøget på at indføre demokratiet i Irak i året 2004). Kristian Ditlev Jensen's Det bliver sagt is more sharply focused inward, an autobiographical account of a young working-class boy's sexual abuse by a member of the cultural elite. In certain people's readings, this narrative stands as a symbol for a collective loss of faith in mores of the ruling class who are supposed to provide cultural liberation to the working class. This unique solidarity between arbejder and intellectual could be thought of as the keystone in the edifice of the welfare state -- a connection that has been problematic in American history long before Dan Qualye's assault on Murphy Brown, but one taken for granted in Scandinavia for decades.
Ditlev Jensen's book was one of the volumes we read last semester in Tue Andersen Nexø's class Vidnesbyrd fra velfærdsstaten, and Nexø was the first speaker on today's program. Nexø concentrated on the domestic Danish cultural landscape, noting the increased emphasis on man as a fundamentally social creature, with individuals situated in oftentimes problematic relationship to others. (Helle Helle's famous short story about a woman's "violent inner life," which proves to be entirely fabricated, deserves a separate post in the near future.) In a theme that others would return to throughout the day, he suggested that the welfare state's implicit goal of "disciplining individuals to achieve self-realization" was now widely recognized as problematic. The resulting "slippage" between the professed view of humanity, and how people actually experience the welfare state in their everyday, is a rich field for current writers.
Nexø pointed to examples such as Ditlev Jensen and Beck-Nielsen as evidence that automatic confidence in the welfare state's intentions and performance could no longer be taken for granted. An interesting nuance in some of these authors' attacks on contemporary Danish society is the division between those who suggest the powerful central state is failing in to nurture the weak and vulnerable and protect them from abuse (Ditlev Jensen, Peter Høeg in De måske egnede) versus those who believe the Danish state is succeeding all too well in its project of dehumanizing citizens (Beck-Nielsen in his postmortem autobiography.)
Hans Hauge, professor from Århus and author of Post Danmark - Politik og aestetik hinsides det nationale took the stage next to discuss "Kunstnernes automatiserede men statsvenlige venstreradikalisme" (Artists' automatized, yet state-friendly, leftist radicalism). I have to say Hauge was a complete surprise in terms of what I was expecting: he delivered a talk that flitted between a kind of ironic nostalgia for the simpler literary debates of earlier times, all the while making it clear he was in command of the vocabulary and critical issues confronting the contemporary reader. I wasn't aware that he was among the first in Denmark to usher in Deconstruction many years ago, but would believe it after hearing him talk. Overall this made me wish I had had more time to read his Post Danmark volume when I had it out from the library last semester. Perhaps it's his own consciousness about the foibles of left-wing academics which makes his ideas seem to flirt with reactionary dogma even while they expertly describe a radical present.
Next up was "Thomas Altheimer," stage-name of an artist who went with Claus Beck-Nielsen on his quixotic journey to Iraq. Altheimer played a slow-motion video of him and Beck-Nielsen undressing on the seashore, changing into bathing suits, and wading out into the (north?) sea. Meanwhile, he described what it was like to go to the Middle East with a Dane who was arguably crazier than himself. He referenced Thomas Friedman's term for Osama bin Laden and his followers as "super-empowered fanatics" and suggested that he and Beck-Nielsen could be thought of as "under-empowered fanatics" in their quest to highlight the absurdity of the Coalition project in the middle east.
As amusing and quotable as "under-empowered fanatic" is, however -- and certainly it's a great way to understand much of contemporary Danish culture, from von Trier's Dogme to Jyllands-Posten's editorial board -- Altheimer's use of it was undercut by the trailer for the film he showed next, an upcoming project entitled "Europe '08". The film -- which truthfully works better in concept that any possible realization -- chronicles the attempt of Altheimer and Simon Robertsen to win the American presidential election -- with Europe herself as the candidate.
The problem with Altheimer's claim on the status of "under-empowered fanatic" was clear in the film clip he showed of traveling to small-town America to open campaign headquarters in Altheimer, Arkansas. (Michael Moore is the king of these kind of mockumentary setups, and films from Roger & Me to Sicko walk the line between presenting economic inequality as a moral outrage and offering it up as entertainment.) Altheimer runs into the polite and helpful Black mayor of the tiny Arkansas town, who takes the Dane completely at face value and offers his help in setting up headquarters. Thus it's hard to know what to make of the artist's sniggering at a typo on the mayor's business card (which appears more prominently in the film trailer than on the blog.)
Just like the closing credits of Dogville, when we don't know whether the photographs of poor, ugly Americans are supposed to incite pity or disgust in the European mind, Altheimer shows a willingness to use the figure of the American ethnic bumpkin as a foil for his own Continental sophistication. Compare von Trier's closing sequence to Altheimer's still photography:
Who, exactly, is under-empowered in this cultural dynamic?
2011 Update: The Europe 2008 website has disappeared from the net and even the Internet Archive didn't cache the photos. The above is the only one I could find -- the original post linked to a larger collection.
(If you want the worst example of this kind of umlauted self-righteousness, check out Jacob Holdt, whose photographs grace the end of Dogville and who traipses through the world with a moral erection giving seminars on racism while Nørrebro -- and the Dannebrog -- burns.)
Solveig Gade went next with an analysis of some recent interventionary art in Denmark. She made reference to a few of Superflex's projects, although strangely not their most compelling: the "FOREIGNERS, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US ALONE WITH THE DANES" poster:
The person who stole the show in the afternoon was without a doubt Rune Lykkeberg, a long-term graduate student (14 years!) who works currently as an editor at Information, a kind of secular Danish Christian Science Monitor. His extemporaneous speech on the rise and fall of the cultural elite held the audience rapt, if only for the purpose of finding out where exactly which high-speed rhetorical U-turn and zig-zag would end up. Drawing from recent sociology, he suggested that the schism between working-class voting power and ruling-class cultural leadership that had characterized Denmark since the 1930s was indeed coming apart, with many ordinary Danes growing suspicious of the values of those government cultural ministers who see it as their job to enlighten the people through art and literature. This argument, of course, parallels the ways that people have explained the Bush/Kerry election of 2004: that the lower-middle class was convinced to vote against their economic self interest because they were convinced the specter of gay marriage was a bigger threat than the reality of not having universal health care. While there's data to suggest this is a misleading conclusion (apparently in poll situations people over-respond to "shares my values" questions because the term is so loose and slippery), the resonance in the Danish socio-political landscape is striking. And at this point, we need all the scientific explanations we can get for Fogh Rasmussen's continued hold on power.
Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, a professor at SDU and reviewer at Politiken whom I heard when he came through Seattle a few years ago, arguably started the blog-fight that was one reason for this seminar. In the latest edition of the literary journal Kritik, Zangenberg lashed out at what he called unreflective and automatic criticism of the Danish engagement in Iraq, together with knee-jerk hatred for right-wing politicians such as Venstre's Fogh Rasmussen and various DFP functionaries:
I don't know enough about Zangenberg to say if his position is grounded in his own support for (or ambivalence over) the war in Iraq (I just bought the issue of Kritik in Copenhagen and haven't had time to read it yet (By the way: what's up with US$30 for a freaking journal? Forget Iraq, where's the outraged struggle against high Danish book prices?)) or, possibly, if he's upset at intellectual laziness amongst his own fellow progressives. Tue went on the counter-attack here, in any case. Regardless, his talk here was unfortunately not followed-up by a lengthy stay during the question-and-answer session, as he had to leave the seminar early.
Finally, professor Marianne Stidsen concluded the day's events by suggesting that, for all the controversy and attention generated by Beck-Nielsen and other 'political' authors, they lacked any kind of positive counter-example on which to build an alternate culturo-poltical order. Her experience with previous generations' revolutionary literature -- and here I am assuming she means the 1960s, but I could be wrong -- leads her to conclude that protest is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for effective politically-engaged literature. She sees nothing in Beck-Nielsen's unique blend of Sisyphus and Quixote that leads any place positive.
The seminar actually began with a few pre-recorded pieces from contemporary authors. Here is Martin Glaz Serup -- whom I saw at the Apparatur Evening -- reading from "Trafikken er uvirkelig":
And Lars Frost, "En drøm om Anders Fogh"