Make no mistake, to watch Highway Patrol at its "regularly scheduled time" in 1957 was a
stupefying waste (just as Newt Minnow's "vast wasteland" imagined back in 1961); to watch
Highway Patrol in syndication on cable nostalgia channels in the 1990s is no less deadening
(sorry, not a bit; Mr. Ed gives you nothing of your life back). It does seem to me true,
however, that to watch Highway Patrol in the monkish, climate-controlled confines of the
Wisconsin Center for Film Research, in the greedy, self-indulgent dark, is to be presented
with an opportunity for a meditation on Time worthy of Saint Augustine. Broderick Crawford
as Captain Dan Mathews rubs his jaw speculatively. The moment passes. Thirty-five years later
I watch him rub his jaw speculatively. The moment passes. I am writing about Broderick
Crawford rubbing his jaw. The moment passes. The moment of the moment passing passes.
A lot of what is ordinarily referred to as mental illness is really just noticing things that
pass notice.
White's poster child for this phenomenon is a Guerrilla Girl critique of the dominance of male artists within private collections, and the G. Girl proposed corrective, buying the work of female artists and artists of color. The real problem, according to White, is that aesthetics have been left out of both disease and antidote, thereby creating chauvinism and its flip side. Just as William Gass argued through his novel The Tunnel that aesthetics have a moral dimension, just as Charles Bernstein argues through poetry; to White, aesthetics are political, and the politics reside in the same home as Gass's aesthetic morality - "fascism of the heart," or the domination of passivity. Extending to literature the revolution of transgressive beauty that critic Dave Hickey began in the visual arts (see especially his Invisible Dragon), White argues for a dynamic aesthetics, one that sees beauty not as a "fixed quantity" or absolute sublime, but as the opposition to the '"banality of neutral comfort,'" to use Hickey's phrase. Obviously, this applies to the neutral comfort of the corporate-sponsored opera house or realist fiction of Random House, but more insightfully, White applies it to the left, and its comfort in its own positions, its own conventions, even if, as he tells Mark America, it has been "badly treated and under appreciated" - its literature ignored, for example, by what should be natural allies like Frederic Jameson.
Nevertheless, the left hasn't "even began to acknowledge how impoverished our thinking about art is," White writes. But contained within this critique, as McLaughlin rightly points out, is his critique of the "poverty of existence in contemporary America." McLaughlin draws on Paul Ricoeur's theory of utopia as an "intellectual process, not a final destination" to discuss White. And Ricoeur is also useful to understand how White's fiction enacts this process, stopping short, as Harris notes, of "that 'systematic exemption of meaning' Roland Barthes associates with the 'writerly' text." For just as Ricoeur argues that the freeplay of meaning is arrested once it is brought into a rhetorical situation, so are White's stories, his aesthetics, once they are brought into the conflict between "abstract theory and living in the practical world," as McLaughlin writes, his own engagement with the American system.
Stanley Cavell has stated that part of his project is to address what it means to be a philosopher in America. Like Cavell, White finds his materials in popular culture and uses them to work through what it means to be an artist, especially a Hegelian, Marxist artist, in America, where the ability to mistake comfort for culture comes so easily. In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, in the essays of Monstrous Possibility, but especially in his latest novel, we see White's project unfold, and "implicitly, the purpose of art in general," as McLaughlin puts it: "to expose to the reader the ideology of the world-as-it-is, create for the reader a place from which it can be analyzed and critiqued, and offer the reader the opportunity and the means" to "live in another way." The essays, as do the chapters of the novel, circulate around many of the same themes. Each stands alone, as do TV episodes. Their narrative pull comes not from any cross-chapter plot but, as in the viewing of weekly TV episodes, from an increasing depth of understanding of its characters and their creator, situated in our artificially real world.
