Interlude: Thorstein Veblen, or The Critic as Artist
It’s taken a certain amount of restraint on my part to keep from posting the visage of Thorstein Veblen, seen here posing as a voluptuary for his Yale University Library portrait. In fact, Thorstein here lived a fairly ascetic life, mostly not by choice. Like Hegel, he was in his forties when he published his first definitive, recognized work (the brilliant “Theory of the Leisure Class”). Unfortunately for the struggling outcast of all departments academic, many readers at first took the piece for a crude satire. Everyone thought he was brilliant, but few took him seriously in those belated “early years.” Reflecting on the misunderstood “Leisure Class,” he once told a graduate student that the attempt to “do serious creative work in social theory” would guarantee only obscurity or ridicule.
If Hegel found himself in a headstand when Marx got through with him, well, then Veblen put Marx into an early twentieth-century Spirograph and went to town with some eyebrow-raisingly peculiar phenomenological sketches that, held at a certain distance (give or take half a century), have proven remarkably prescient, lucid and quite beautiful works.
I’ve been working away on an essay about the genius beneath the middle-parted mop for what seems like a really long time now, and this weekend, a friend suggested I post about it (and several other Red rants that may by now have become too familiar to said friend) on that most resilient of tumblr blogs, Drunk Marxist. In fact, this tumblr was created by my friend, but he lost the keys, and now he’s sober, hungover, and locked out of the damn thing. Man, I wish I had that tumblr. Then maybe I wouldn’t be reduced to posting about Veblen on my music blog.
