Jennifer McMackon’s been running submitted questionnaires (mine can be found here, running previous to the that post) and last weekend she posted questions by Andy Paterson. In one, he asked a question about Post-Modernism, and in my reply, I brought up John Ralston Saul as I have been susceptible to do lately. So, ‘Cynth’ posts: ‘ oh great more john ralston saul quotes’ and I reply, ‘ I know – I rely on him too much. But, at least it’s not Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, or Baudrillard’. And then Cynth writes, quoting me at first,

‘”I like the way that John Ralston Saul wrote a dictionary as a parody (sic), but also as a glossary to his way of thinking, basically pointing out that dictionaries are matters of opinion, and that we’re in a foolish place when we turn to them to find out if words actually exist.”sort of like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose?
Ralston Saul’s work depends on semiotics no? Could we really have his train of thought outside that discourse? Or where do you think it came from?

So I got back to her tonight with this:

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I wouldn’t say that Ralston Saul depends on semiotics at all. I wouldn’t think to compare him to Eco. The Doubter’s Companion is not at all like Eco’s Name of the Rose. I mentioned Saul and Eco together only once, and that was to use the monks debating Christ’s poverty in the Name as an example of how Saul sees contemporary academia, where you have a lot of energy going into debating the finer points of nothing really, when instead they should be engaged in their society, combating the corporations instead of working for them, and using their tenured positions to be fearless in criticism rather than intellectually lazy.

Saul identifies as an old-fashioned humanist trying to get us to fight the sort of dead corporate language that’s everywhere, and pay more attention to politics. He’s also doing his darndest to try and get Canadians to consider what that means, to be a Canadian.

While the question of Curnoe-like nationalism doesn’t have any steam today, Canadians do have something unique that we need a language to think about, so that we can be conscious of it, because as I see it now, we’ve spent too many years longing for the sort of life that New York artists potentially have, if they manage to make it, because we watch too many American television shows, read too many of their magazines, know too much about their celebrities that we forget that we’re not American. So we get upset at their politics, when we should be getting upset about our own, and we try to define our culture around terms that were developed to serve American-Anglo art. As Curnoe wrote in 1970: ‘Clearly people from the most powerful nation in the world can afford to say that art is international because it is their art & culture which is international right now, e.g. Viet Nam’.

e.g. Iraq … and 35 years later, we have all of these artists being pumped out of art schools, and we have this artist-run centre system and all this; but it is work being created by Canadians in American-drag. How is what we’re seeing different from the dominant discourse, or even allowed to be? Why aren’t we trying to define it our own way, instead of borrowing ‘theirs’? (Or are we, and I’m just not aware of it)?

I really like Saul because he’s tried to give us a language to think about these things, and his dictionary is essentially a glossary to his idiosyncratic way of using words.

I think that a lot of the so-called problems that we face as artists might really boil down to us not having this language. The Canada Council thing, the lack of a market – perhaps it’s because by engaging in culture in American terms we aren’t registering with the public because we offer nothing to them. We get all upset and depressed and think the public doesn’t give a shit, and use self-righteous anti-market language, when in reality, we should want to practice our profession and live a middle-class lifestyle. Why would we chose poverty? Why should that be a choice? I understand choosing to live a simple Green lifestyle, but that need not be one of abject poverty.

I mean Canada is this amazing place full of different nationalities and people from everywhere in the world, so on one hand, we’re too focused on providing art for one group, in addition, we aren’t speaking a Canadian language the people understand unconsciously like they do hockey or Tim Hortons. Maybe this alone accounts for the popularity of the Tragically Hip and the Group of 7 – because we perceive that Americans don’t give a shit about them, we appreciate them as belonging to us. At least, that’s the popular idea.

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