Dolce Stil Novo: Harmony Korine's Vernacular

I.

The condition of an interiority that does not achieve the turgid and defensible formality of privacy is the condition of an insufficiency in determination, or an indecision in existence that both mimics and lacerates autonomy.¹ This is the paradox of existential intimacy—the simultaneous inclination toward sociality and dereliction. Its hyperbolic axes are the excessive solitude of suicide, the rigor of erotic passion, and the severe contraction of fascism. The incomparable beauty, solitude, and sincerity of suicide always involve a radically compromised individual. The hand that relinquishes life does not belong to the suicide who pulled the trigger. (For Maurice Blanchot, the lacerated solitude of the writer adheres to this logic. The writer who struggles with the language is, at the same time, himself linguistic residue: "the author.") The literature documenting the solitary confinement that structures eroticism is rather numerous. (I will note only Cristina Peri Rossi's Solitaire of Love [2000 ] as specifically exemplary.) Likewise, the society that contracts into a purified unity finds itself in permanently haunted proximity to traces of whatever "undesirables" it has excreted. In dilute form, this presents a paradox to the philosophy of a certain pervasive strain of social-democratic liberalism, which, under pressure of fidelity to the primacy of cultural alterity, has disastrously sutured ethics to politics. (Traditionally contentious and co-instructive, each is now simply a discursive alibi for the other, as Alain Badiou has scolded.)²

Our essay concerns this insufficiency in differentiation, which, we argue, is the echo of a sociality both precarious and original. We see in Harmony Korine's admirable paratactic film Gummo partial glimpses of the lives of the socially neglected (or socially shunned, or socially leprous), who appropriate sociality as if it were a dead language, and as such alter its sense. At the same time, the cinematic vernacular Korine employed to make the film reopens the possibility of ethical and aesthetic contestation that the entertainment industry would sooner forget is still possible (a threshold previously opened by Flaherty, Browning, and Buñuel, among others). The chaotic and nearly catastrophic reception of Korine's film is itself indicative of a crisis in social and political thought that his aesthetic exacerbates. Most important for our discussion will be a consideration of the gaping, detached calm and a nearly unendurable sweetness that pervade the daily lives of the socially dispossessed whom Korine depicts. Everything depends on how one understands this incongruously gentle placidity. The tone is in sharp and bewildering contrast to the insidious confidence of Passolini's impoverished thugs, and to the luminous cruelty that corrupts Buñuel's Los olvidados. It is further contrasted to the morbid preoccupations of the young in Korine's prior film Kids (done in collaboration with photographer Larry Clark), and also to the innumerable black holes of microfascist cults that flourish in the desiccated soil of dispossession excreted by the massively comprehensive capitalist exposure, domination, normalization, and domestication of every sphere of human activity. In this regard, the inspired lexical indecision that constitutes the itinerary of the now nearly archaic English word "uncouth" is instructive. From the Anglo-Saxon cuth, meaning "known" (but whose past participle once meant "passing into"), the word was inverted to designate the strange and unfamiliar. Its meaning then detoured to designate vulgarity, awkwardness, boorishness, and lack of sophistication and polish—meanings it retains today when the word is used at all. The word also (in Shakespeare notably) enjoyed a brief, glittering life designating the rare, the wonderful, and the uncanny. These lexical vicissitudes index an ambivalence integral to our discussion.

II.

The intramundane boredom of the lives of a nameless population become, in Gummo, the site of an obsession that accounts for the nearly universal spasm of revulsion that Korine's film has had to endure. That a certain population of people are a nameless and powerless residue within...