Where art meets media literacy
One of the quotes Salzburg faculty chair Susan Moeller used to kick off the Academy this year was from F.O. Matthiessen, when he spoke at the first Salzburg Seminar in 1947. Europe was emerging from the hell of World War II, and the first Seminar brought together scholars from across the continent to discuss their shaed future. "We have come here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man," Matthiessen said.
What Matthiessen means when he says "communication" becomes clearer in F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism, by William Cain. What Matthiessen means is more than talking; it's understanding — taking on the complications of cultures and their exchange.
How he shows as much is through art, The Politics of Criticism explains. "… Matthiessen, as all observers report, read and explicated Melville, James, Whitman, and other American writers with special passion when he taught European students from sixteen countries at the Salzburg Seminar and at Charles University," Cain writes. "He wanted to communicate the authenticity of his desire for fellowship, and did so, as would be natural for him, through literature and criticism. Reading great texts and commenting upon them gave him a means of expressing feelings and aspirations that were hard for him to express in other ways, and that imaged for him a world built on brotherhood."
Cain highlights three passages from these teaching sessions. The first throws out differences between fiction and nonfiction communication. Here now at a seminar for young journalists, aiming to educate the world about best hopes and practices for the field, the gap between fact and fiction is constantly distinguished, but in a raw communication sense, and talking about the art of a one-time journalist and a one-time educator, Matthiessen's words apply.
The role of a Hemingway or an Eliot … is to keep alive the vital, delicate, and always menaced accuracy of communication, without which there can be no renewed discovery of man by man. (59)
The second passage, on the results of such communication, is more clear cut. If summer 2009's students can take as much away…
Hardly more than a hundred men and women, some already worn beyond their years, we were nevertheless going back to our many countries with a renewed belief in the possibility of communication. We were carrying with us too the belief that there was much we could still do, by our speaking and writing, to cut through prejudice, to destroy the barriers of ignorance and hate that otherwise will destroy us all. (66)
Between the second and third passages, Cain explains that, for F.O., "communication" means "community." The tie brings to mind slides from Chinese students last night here in Salzburg. A question they raised — "Are netizens citizens?" — is one you're likely to see more in the E-Media blog in coming days. As the digital era brings new locations for communication, do community and society automatically exist? Or if they don't, how do people in the new space create them?
Whitman knew, through the heartiness of his temperament, as Emerson did not, that the deepest freedom does not come from isolation. It comes instead through taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failure, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims, not for one alone, but for the community. Something like this was what Whitman had in mind when he said that his "great word," the one that moved him most, was "solidarity." (90)
"Solidarity" now sits historically as a loaded word in political talk, more connected with movements established after Whitman than any pure dictionary definition. But "taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failure, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims" is an interesting line. It sounds like journalism.
Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.
