Without going into the vexed question of functionalism in modern society, and how it is to be reconciled with the idea of "gradations of rank", which is no doubt much more complex than I described...
what I'm interested in is the notion of a functionalism that is imagined to work for a whole society, and a society which is ordered hierarchically, and whose real "gradations of rank" are imaginatively carried over as a necessary organisational principle underlying this functionalism...
since society is to be reproduced as a single intentional entity, a "spiritual" entity, and not a monist system where everything is as important as everything else, or a composite of rather prosaic functionalist parts that do not yet crowd out human subjectivity
We already have a model of "cultural functionalism" (where functionalism works through a hierarchical order etc) in Kandinsky's text. This text makes explicit claims, and its contemporary prestige can be more or less well reconstructed.
According to the logic of "cultural functionalism", truth is concentrated in a single point. This circumstance problematicises humanist culture, the social structure of which is predicated on the idea that people in general are capable of making distinctions between what can be considered "true" and false". If we take humanist culture to be necessarily polyvalent, it might be represented as a horizontal section cut through the "triangle", such that it formally comprehends a "lower section" that supports it and from which its subject matter is drawn, while this culture is itself formally comprehended by an "upper section" it in turn supports.
As I mentioned the question of how an interplay of functionalisms contributes to human culture in any particular society is too complex to adequately address. We can, however, draw some conclusions from the limit case of "cultural functionalism" for which we have Kandinsky's description. What might we expect of a humanist culture inflluenced by these ideas?
1. culturally consistant "upper" and "lower" sections
2. the sacralisation of a practically dormant "upper section" (in bourgeois society, bourgeois humanism would have to invent an imaginary "upper section")
3. the idea that there is a natural trade off between the security of humanism and the inactivity of the "lower section"
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Vienna 1900
These quotations were chosen by more erudite writers, first Stefan Zweig, from his autobiography:
"Everyone knew just what he possessed and what he would inherit, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its specific mass and gravity. The man of means could calculate exactly ho much interest per annum his fortune would bring him, the civil servant or officer with equal exactitude the year in which he woud gain promotion and the year in which he would retire ... everything in this great realm had its fixed, immovable place; and in the highest place of all the aged Emperor; but should he die, one knew (or thought one knew) that another would take his place, and nothing would change in all this carefully planned order..."
and from a visitor to the Paris World Exhibition of 1900:
"The Austrian section possesses this great interest - that it represents not only the individual efforts of artists and craftsmen, but also the "official" decorative art movement of the State schools. Viewed from this last standpoint there is nothing in the entire Exhibition more admirable, more thoroughly commendable, than the display in question. Is it not wonderful indeed that a Government should have entrusted to those, and those alone, capable of acquitting themselves with credit, the task of decorating and arranging its Exhibition? And is it not still more astonishing that, instead of contenting itself, as most other nations have done, with the reconstruction of ancient styles, more or less national in character, a country should have displayed so much independence, so keen an appreciation of freshness and modernity?"
I intend to look at the problems of the Viennese Secession style as problems of functionalism.
Functionalism, where it is applied to social formations, can be a productive method for analysing societies that are complex and decentred, where rationalistic logic is difficult or impossible to apply. Hence its use develops alongside the development of capitalism, where capitalist development is attended by increased social compexity and the crumbling of central authority.
In American society, and in the Americanised popular culture predominant in Western society, functionalism tends to validate the actions of the popular classes. This could be called "democratic functionalism". It's expressed almost everywhere, but can be seen very clearly in things like The Economist's fetishisation of McDonalds. It has the advantage of fostering a democratic culture, but has the weakness of tending to discount the undemocratic aspects of modern society: centralisation of corporate power, corporate bureaucracy, waste.
A democratic culture develops alongside the development of capitalism in the US, France, China, even in Britain, a sort of monarchy, where a sort of "high" culture is willed into existance, but nevertheless remains stilted, amateurish, out of place in a resolutely modern society*. In France and the US the idea of excellence also becomes mixed up with the idea of democracy, complicating things further.
In Kandinsky's monograph a different kind of fuctionalism is outlined, in which precisely those aspects of the social system relegated to the subjective by "democratic functionalism", are conversely presented as the truly functional aspects of society.
Looking at it today, Kandinsky's monograph might be seen as indirectly describing the apparent logic of one section of contemporary society: that part of the culture industry that doesn't deal with kitsch. But it's surely intended as an explicit description of the society in which he lived: Imperial Germany at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The composite system of capitalism, government bureaucracy and monarchy that existed in Germany also pertained in Austria-Hungary and the principle cities in Russia, though not Russia as a whole.
I think it might be interesting to look at Viennese culture in the early Twentieth Century as if it was informed by the "cultural functionalism" exemplified by Kandinsky. This is to arbitrarily apply a rather incomplete hypothesis, it is not to establish a historical fact.
Things like last year's banking sector bailout point in the direction of the consolidation of an almost feudal degree of class power. Under these circumstances Americanised democratic culture can only be put under further strain. This raises the question as to whether in looking at Vienna at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we aren't looking at the future, with the possibility of understanding that future, and understanding how it is historical.
*I quite like the idea of just writing "notes" about things, and so displaying the fragments of a polemic outside of their functional order, like pictures of antique rifles in an encyclopedia of weaponry. I could have gone on:
"in this respect Coleridge's epic poem can be seen to metaphorise the threadbare hobby humanism of the useless classes, set adrift on a sea of democratic absolutism."
What a thing to say!
"Everyone knew just what he possessed and what he would inherit, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its specific mass and gravity. The man of means could calculate exactly ho much interest per annum his fortune would bring him, the civil servant or officer with equal exactitude the year in which he woud gain promotion and the year in which he would retire ... everything in this great realm had its fixed, immovable place; and in the highest place of all the aged Emperor; but should he die, one knew (or thought one knew) that another would take his place, and nothing would change in all this carefully planned order..."
and from a visitor to the Paris World Exhibition of 1900:
"The Austrian section possesses this great interest - that it represents not only the individual efforts of artists and craftsmen, but also the "official" decorative art movement of the State schools. Viewed from this last standpoint there is nothing in the entire Exhibition more admirable, more thoroughly commendable, than the display in question. Is it not wonderful indeed that a Government should have entrusted to those, and those alone, capable of acquitting themselves with credit, the task of decorating and arranging its Exhibition? And is it not still more astonishing that, instead of contenting itself, as most other nations have done, with the reconstruction of ancient styles, more or less national in character, a country should have displayed so much independence, so keen an appreciation of freshness and modernity?"
I intend to look at the problems of the Viennese Secession style as problems of functionalism.
Functionalism, where it is applied to social formations, can be a productive method for analysing societies that are complex and decentred, where rationalistic logic is difficult or impossible to apply. Hence its use develops alongside the development of capitalism, where capitalist development is attended by increased social compexity and the crumbling of central authority.
In American society, and in the Americanised popular culture predominant in Western society, functionalism tends to validate the actions of the popular classes. This could be called "democratic functionalism". It's expressed almost everywhere, but can be seen very clearly in things like The Economist's fetishisation of McDonalds. It has the advantage of fostering a democratic culture, but has the weakness of tending to discount the undemocratic aspects of modern society: centralisation of corporate power, corporate bureaucracy, waste.
A democratic culture develops alongside the development of capitalism in the US, France, China, even in Britain, a sort of monarchy, where a sort of "high" culture is willed into existance, but nevertheless remains stilted, amateurish, out of place in a resolutely modern society*. In France and the US the idea of excellence also becomes mixed up with the idea of democracy, complicating things further.
In Kandinsky's monograph a different kind of fuctionalism is outlined, in which precisely those aspects of the social system relegated to the subjective by "democratic functionalism", are conversely presented as the truly functional aspects of society.
Looking at it today, Kandinsky's monograph might be seen as indirectly describing the apparent logic of one section of contemporary society: that part of the culture industry that doesn't deal with kitsch. But it's surely intended as an explicit description of the society in which he lived: Imperial Germany at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The composite system of capitalism, government bureaucracy and monarchy that existed in Germany also pertained in Austria-Hungary and the principle cities in Russia, though not Russia as a whole.
I think it might be interesting to look at Viennese culture in the early Twentieth Century as if it was informed by the "cultural functionalism" exemplified by Kandinsky. This is to arbitrarily apply a rather incomplete hypothesis, it is not to establish a historical fact.
Things like last year's banking sector bailout point in the direction of the consolidation of an almost feudal degree of class power. Under these circumstances Americanised democratic culture can only be put under further strain. This raises the question as to whether in looking at Vienna at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we aren't looking at the future, with the possibility of understanding that future, and understanding how it is historical.
*I quite like the idea of just writing "notes" about things, and so displaying the fragments of a polemic outside of their functional order, like pictures of antique rifles in an encyclopedia of weaponry. I could have gone on:
"in this respect Coleridge's epic poem can be seen to metaphorise the threadbare hobby humanism of the useless classes, set adrift on a sea of democratic absolutism."
What a thing to say!
Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Klimt seems to be quite innocently eulogising bourgeois princess Adele Bloch-Bauer. Klimt was just as innocently enthused by the possibilities of factory production, so it couldn't be said that for Klimt, polite society and the factory floor represented the contrasting faces of the bourgeoisie. And in 1907 the Austrian bourgeoisie could still be considered a progressive force.
(Does this seem right? To try to be more accurate, I feel like this picture praises unambiguously but messes with the oppositional pairs bourgeois-aristocratic and natural-artificial, if that makes sense.)
I don't think you would do something like this now because you would be tempted to cut the goldleaf out from B&H cartons. Or perhaps tastes have changed as much as technology. A contempory picture showing, say, Tony and Cherie Blair embracing on a haptic field of depleted uranium, might neither praise nor naturalise.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
about old man Freud
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recounts a story about his father being picked on for being a Jew, in their former home village in Moravia:
"I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born in happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts. "Jew, get off the pavement!"" - "And what did you do?" - "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied."
...which is meant to demonstrate what maturity can be, and how it can be distinctly counter-intuitive. Despite Freud's father having no real choice, and the subsequent history of European anti-semitism, it's hard not to see this story, cut out from history this way, as prefiguring, almost justifying, Mahatma Gandhi's idea of passive resistance,
but on the very next page we learn that:
"One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire."
So you can imagine old man Freud, suffering being victimised this way, and making his way home, where he sits reading Thiers! I don't think this is an indictment of either Freud, it just illustrates how life is.
...
For various reasons, I was trying to get a copy of Gerard de Nerval's book Visionaries, or the Precursors of Socialism, in English. That it's not available may or may not be a good thing. In restoration France, socialism seems to have been imagined as an obscure menace potentially afflicting the resuscitated old society, somehow mixed up with conspiracy and occultism. Theophile Gautier, somewhere, says all his friends, with the exception of Sainte-Beuve, were medievalists, and this would be a properly medieval outlook. I think it's more disconcerting to encounter people who think we really do live in a total society, than people who think we ought to; like Agamben, who is madder than Cabet ever was. The younger Freud, later author of Civilisation and its Discontents, simply could not understand that societies could exist, had existed, and did exist, in which one faction was permanently pitted against another. Despite that fact that socialism, if it is ever built, can and ought to accomodate aberrant or eccentric behaviour, where possible, the idea of a total society, insofar as it prefigures a rational total society, is a prefiguration of socialism.
"I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born in happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts. "Jew, get off the pavement!"" - "And what did you do?" - "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied."
...which is meant to demonstrate what maturity can be, and how it can be distinctly counter-intuitive. Despite Freud's father having no real choice, and the subsequent history of European anti-semitism, it's hard not to see this story, cut out from history this way, as prefiguring, almost justifying, Mahatma Gandhi's idea of passive resistance,
but on the very next page we learn that:
"One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire."
So you can imagine old man Freud, suffering being victimised this way, and making his way home, where he sits reading Thiers! I don't think this is an indictment of either Freud, it just illustrates how life is.
...
For various reasons, I was trying to get a copy of Gerard de Nerval's book Visionaries, or the Precursors of Socialism, in English. That it's not available may or may not be a good thing. In restoration France, socialism seems to have been imagined as an obscure menace potentially afflicting the resuscitated old society, somehow mixed up with conspiracy and occultism. Theophile Gautier, somewhere, says all his friends, with the exception of Sainte-Beuve, were medievalists, and this would be a properly medieval outlook. I think it's more disconcerting to encounter people who think we really do live in a total society, than people who think we ought to; like Agamben, who is madder than Cabet ever was. The younger Freud, later author of Civilisation and its Discontents, simply could not understand that societies could exist, had existed, and did exist, in which one faction was permanently pitted against another. Despite that fact that socialism, if it is ever built, can and ought to accomodate aberrant or eccentric behaviour, where possible, the idea of a total society, insofar as it prefigures a rational total society, is a prefiguration of socialism.
Friday, June 26, 2009
notes on Iran
When people risk violence in order to confront their rulers this is driven by biological need more than strategy. It would be a tremendous achievment if the Iranian people succeeded in further democratising their country, and it's regrettable that democracy has to be fought for this way and at such cost. Ahmedinejad probably won the election, and the reform candidate, Mir Hossain Mousavi seems to be like an Iranian Henry Hunt, except more Thatcherite. This isn't really important. It is to be hoped that these recent events strengthen opinion in the West in favour of non intervention in Iranian politics.
1. Economy
Iran has a GDP of approx $165bn, of which oil and gas exports account for approx $35bn, so oil exports account for one fifth of output. Its greatest resource is labour not oil. Iran is a populous country, in comparison to other middle east oil states, with a population of 70m. The country is practically self sufficient in food production, producing $20bn of agricultural products domestically, with net imports of around $1.5bn.
Iran is therefore unlikely to be a victim in a situation of competitive Hobsonian imperialism, where rival countries try to insource skilled labour and outsource unskilled labour, since it is guaranteed foreign currency earnings, and so capital investment, as long as a competitive market for oil exists. Since these factors mitigate in favour of the country remaining politically independent, rather than passive, it is in the national interest, as long as the capitalist system exists, to maintain that independence by guaranteeing the security of food production as much as possible. Whichever political system the country has, it will always be prudent to maintain the current relatively labour intensive agrarian base, insofar as it maximises output.
The prominence of skilled labour, and to a lesser extent diffuse agriculture, mitigate against the development of a terror society. Hence, we can speculate that if the current regime fell apart to be replaced by a bourgeois "directory", the worst-case scenario of the Western pro-Ahmedinejad lobby, the situation might not degenerate hopelessly.
2. Political system
Iran's corporatist political system was established by Islamic revolutionaries in order to lessen the antipathy of rich and poor: of "oppressor and oppressed" as much as possible. As in every corporatist system, the principle of equanimity toward the various classes that constitute class society, each permitted to reproduce itself as itself and nothing more, works itself out in the fusion of the party bureaucracy with the surviving ruling class. Iran's corporatist bureaucracy is now threatened by its bourgeoisie because in reality it cannot bridge the antagonisms generated by capitalism; because it cannot prevent the accumulation of capital; because it redistributes more to the rich through inflation than to the poor through welfare.
In as much as the bureaucracy is threatened from the right it can be said to represent the interests of those groups also threatened from the right: the peasants and commercial middle class. But the regime represents their interests in a rather circuitous way, it is not simply a magnified image of the dominant ideas of these groups. It is a bureaucratic regime principally occupied with its own bureaucratic goals. Karl Marx wrote of the French peasants of 1851: "they cannot represent themselves; they need to be represented", an historically specific argument based on technology as much as ideology. In Iran the peasants are too dispersed to be mobilised, and their patriotism, in this instance, can be thought doubtful. Since it is the children of the commercial middle class, afforded the opportunity of higher education, who are now in confrontation with the regime, the patriotism of this group can be thought doubtful too.
Disclaimer - these are notes based on reports in the UK press and should be judged accordingly
1. Economy
Iran has a GDP of approx $165bn, of which oil and gas exports account for approx $35bn, so oil exports account for one fifth of output. Its greatest resource is labour not oil. Iran is a populous country, in comparison to other middle east oil states, with a population of 70m. The country is practically self sufficient in food production, producing $20bn of agricultural products domestically, with net imports of around $1.5bn.
Iran is therefore unlikely to be a victim in a situation of competitive Hobsonian imperialism, where rival countries try to insource skilled labour and outsource unskilled labour, since it is guaranteed foreign currency earnings, and so capital investment, as long as a competitive market for oil exists. Since these factors mitigate in favour of the country remaining politically independent, rather than passive, it is in the national interest, as long as the capitalist system exists, to maintain that independence by guaranteeing the security of food production as much as possible. Whichever political system the country has, it will always be prudent to maintain the current relatively labour intensive agrarian base, insofar as it maximises output.
The prominence of skilled labour, and to a lesser extent diffuse agriculture, mitigate against the development of a terror society. Hence, we can speculate that if the current regime fell apart to be replaced by a bourgeois "directory", the worst-case scenario of the Western pro-Ahmedinejad lobby, the situation might not degenerate hopelessly.
2. Political system
Iran's corporatist political system was established by Islamic revolutionaries in order to lessen the antipathy of rich and poor: of "oppressor and oppressed" as much as possible. As in every corporatist system, the principle of equanimity toward the various classes that constitute class society, each permitted to reproduce itself as itself and nothing more, works itself out in the fusion of the party bureaucracy with the surviving ruling class. Iran's corporatist bureaucracy is now threatened by its bourgeoisie because in reality it cannot bridge the antagonisms generated by capitalism; because it cannot prevent the accumulation of capital; because it redistributes more to the rich through inflation than to the poor through welfare.
In as much as the bureaucracy is threatened from the right it can be said to represent the interests of those groups also threatened from the right: the peasants and commercial middle class. But the regime represents their interests in a rather circuitous way, it is not simply a magnified image of the dominant ideas of these groups. It is a bureaucratic regime principally occupied with its own bureaucratic goals. Karl Marx wrote of the French peasants of 1851: "they cannot represent themselves; they need to be represented", an historically specific argument based on technology as much as ideology. In Iran the peasants are too dispersed to be mobilised, and their patriotism, in this instance, can be thought doubtful. Since it is the children of the commercial middle class, afforded the opportunity of higher education, who are now in confrontation with the regime, the patriotism of this group can be thought doubtful too.
Disclaimer - these are notes based on reports in the UK press and should be judged accordingly
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
corrections, links
I should have mentioned re the "British Jobs/British Workers" strike, after my rather ad hoc comments, that proper reporting ought to have established first of all:
1. whether Total had reneged on an earlier agreement
2. how much the workers earned, and how this might change
The struggle now does not involve patriotism at all, but whether Total can get away with sacking its workers for going on strike.
Comrade Lenjino on the Lindsay strike
I don't think I could piece together a better analysis of the situation in Iran from English language public domain sources than Louis Proyect has:
here
It's a minefield of disinformation!
Whenever I've checked the blog Vineyard of the Saker I've found it accurate - it quotes a source in Iran, and briefs against Mousavi and Rafsanjani.
This piece about the Baseji, I think, rather oversells this organisation. The goon is ultimately the enemy of the worker, structurally, even.
1. whether Total had reneged on an earlier agreement
2. how much the workers earned, and how this might change
The struggle now does not involve patriotism at all, but whether Total can get away with sacking its workers for going on strike.
Comrade Lenjino on the Lindsay strike
I don't think I could piece together a better analysis of the situation in Iran from English language public domain sources than Louis Proyect has:
here
It's a minefield of disinformation!
Whenever I've checked the blog Vineyard of the Saker I've found it accurate - it quotes a source in Iran, and briefs against Mousavi and Rafsanjani.
This piece about the Baseji, I think, rather oversells this organisation. The goon is ultimately the enemy of the worker, structurally, even.
could Ahmedinejad be new "Geordie Messiah"?
Perhaps as chairman of the beleaguered Tyneside club, the former hardliner could more comfortably display his grandiloquent rhetoric, comparing to an indestructible diamond, new signing Nigel Quashie.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
"levers"
"The fight started here at Lindsey: the fight against discrimination, the fight against victimisation and the fight to put bread on your table for your children. Gordon Brown said it is indefensible. If the prime minister will not defend the working man, if parliament will not defend the working man, then the union will defend the working man."
"discrimination"? "bread"?
I wrote some notes about the "British Jobs/British Workers" protests back in January. I didn't see the point at the time of "virtually" and meaninglessly upbraiding the "British Workers" via the internet, but I think these events might be sociologically important. Firstly, as far as can be ascertained the local construction workers formerly received fairly good wages,
the basis of relatively decent wages in the construction industry depended on:
1. level of activity in the industry
2. number of industry workers unemployed: so called "reserve army"
3. state of competition in the industry
4. time/money trade offs for employers
hence the workers' wages was based on an underlying "mechanism" that was relatively stable for a while, during the growth phase, but changed markedly once the recession kicked in.
The conflict over Italian contractors brought in to work at the refinery was probably related to altered conditions insofar as:
1. the ongoing practice of cheaper foreign labour being brought in, coextensive as it is with the effects of market forces, could be targeted as an aspect of the working of market forces amenable to political intervention
2. or, maybe the local workers erroneously blamed the use of foreign workers for their problems
3. perhaps the altered circumstances in the market allowed the company to deliberately confront local workers
I think for the local workers to take action against their worsened circumstances they probably had to have a credible programme by which the former distributive "mechanism" could be restored, or where something like it could be created, which wasn't really possible. This is what I imagine underlay the "British Jobs/British Workers" aspect: a strange outburst of right radicalism, untidily recuperated by Unite the union, once it already had nowhere else to go.
If the workers had really been on the breadline in the first place, it would have made more sense to fight for council housing indexed to wages, rather than against immigration, once the fight had been extended to a general political struggle. I think the dream of "grabbing the immigration lever" somehow seemed more credible than the dream of "grabbing the social housing lever". Neither was immediately on the cards. Also, the local workers might have pressed the injustice of the deterioration in industry wages/conditions effected by housing workers of any nationality in special "hulks", presumably council approved, without having to "go nationalist" at all. Again, I think the reasons they didn't do this lay in the structure of the industry and the abruptness of recession.
the neoliberal Battleship Potemkin
"discrimination"? "bread"?
I wrote some notes about the "British Jobs/British Workers" protests back in January. I didn't see the point at the time of "virtually" and meaninglessly upbraiding the "British Workers" via the internet, but I think these events might be sociologically important. Firstly, as far as can be ascertained the local construction workers formerly received fairly good wages,
the basis of relatively decent wages in the construction industry depended on:
1. level of activity in the industry
2. number of industry workers unemployed: so called "reserve army"
3. state of competition in the industry
4. time/money trade offs for employers
hence the workers' wages was based on an underlying "mechanism" that was relatively stable for a while, during the growth phase, but changed markedly once the recession kicked in.
The conflict over Italian contractors brought in to work at the refinery was probably related to altered conditions insofar as:
1. the ongoing practice of cheaper foreign labour being brought in, coextensive as it is with the effects of market forces, could be targeted as an aspect of the working of market forces amenable to political intervention
2. or, maybe the local workers erroneously blamed the use of foreign workers for their problems
3. perhaps the altered circumstances in the market allowed the company to deliberately confront local workers
I think for the local workers to take action against their worsened circumstances they probably had to have a credible programme by which the former distributive "mechanism" could be restored, or where something like it could be created, which wasn't really possible. This is what I imagine underlay the "British Jobs/British Workers" aspect: a strange outburst of right radicalism, untidily recuperated by Unite the union, once it already had nowhere else to go.
If the workers had really been on the breadline in the first place, it would have made more sense to fight for council housing indexed to wages, rather than against immigration, once the fight had been extended to a general political struggle. I think the dream of "grabbing the immigration lever" somehow seemed more credible than the dream of "grabbing the social housing lever". Neither was immediately on the cards. Also, the local workers might have pressed the injustice of the deterioration in industry wages/conditions effected by housing workers of any nationality in special "hulks", presumably council approved, without having to "go nationalist" at all. Again, I think the reasons they didn't do this lay in the structure of the industry and the abruptness of recession.
the neoliberal Battleship Potemkin
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
after Kandinsky
(a provisional reconstruction of, and development of, Kandinsky's system, outlined in Kandinsky's 1911 monograph Concerning the Spiritual in Art, but considered to have possibly wider sociological relevence.)
1. Initial premises:
Suppose a special case of neo Burkean naturalistic philosophy: the absence of an immanent technical limit. Consider designated artistic masterpieces to represent the precipitate of humanity's self actualising struggle. These designated masterpieces can be called "dominant art". Humanity is considered to be purposive and its dominant art sublative of its purposive struggle.
2a. Since works of art concretely exist, a technical limit must exist for "humanity's self actualising struggle".
2b. hence abstract art: the dramatisation of an imagined technical limit.
2c. dominant art is abstract art (2a).
3a. from the systematisation of dominant art necessarily follows the innovation of new dominant art, since dominant art is necessarily formally unamenable to systematisation (2c), and dominant art represents the precipitate of humanity's ongoing purposive struggle.
3b. hence the stress on systematisation as a political strategy in 20th Century social criticism; or, the imagined political efficacy of art criticism in 20th Century literature.
3c. since dominant art sublates humanity's purposive struggle, humanity cannot purposively effect innovation in art without this new art negating existant dominant art and superceding it in turn.
3d. hence the Hegelian dynamics of late 19th and early 20th Century art and art criticism.
4a. since all instances of dominant art are equally sublative of humanity's purposive struggle, dominant art is not merely art, but only one kind of omnological work. The importance of art subsists in its sublative function rather than its optical merits. The particular form of an omnological work is relatively unimportant.
4b. paintings are equivalent to "the spiritual life".
4c. art is equivalent to philosophy.
4d. sex is equivalent to art; is equivalent to philosophy.
4e. "a chef can discourse on cooking techniques as if they were moments in universal history".
1. Initial premises:
Suppose a special case of neo Burkean naturalistic philosophy: the absence of an immanent technical limit. Consider designated artistic masterpieces to represent the precipitate of humanity's self actualising struggle. These designated masterpieces can be called "dominant art". Humanity is considered to be purposive and its dominant art sublative of its purposive struggle.
2a. Since works of art concretely exist, a technical limit must exist for "humanity's self actualising struggle".
2b. hence abstract art: the dramatisation of an imagined technical limit.
2c. dominant art is abstract art (2a).
3a. from the systematisation of dominant art necessarily follows the innovation of new dominant art, since dominant art is necessarily formally unamenable to systematisation (2c), and dominant art represents the precipitate of humanity's ongoing purposive struggle.
3b. hence the stress on systematisation as a political strategy in 20th Century social criticism; or, the imagined political efficacy of art criticism in 20th Century literature.
3c. since dominant art sublates humanity's purposive struggle, humanity cannot purposively effect innovation in art without this new art negating existant dominant art and superceding it in turn.
3d. hence the Hegelian dynamics of late 19th and early 20th Century art and art criticism.
4a. since all instances of dominant art are equally sublative of humanity's purposive struggle, dominant art is not merely art, but only one kind of omnological work. The importance of art subsists in its sublative function rather than its optical merits. The particular form of an omnological work is relatively unimportant.
4b. paintings are equivalent to "the spiritual life".
4c. art is equivalent to philosophy.
4d. sex is equivalent to art; is equivalent to philosophy.
4e. "a chef can discourse on cooking techniques as if they were moments in universal history".
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Zizek update
The world of Zizek studies was rocked this week with the publication of a five year old article by Ian Parker, which was basically sympathetic to Zizek, and which went some way toward explaining his writing, but which also contained an apocryphal anecdote about Zizek. The article is available as an MS Word file here:
www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc
According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.
This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.
The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".
Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:
"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."
It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.
(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)
www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc
According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.
This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.
The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".
Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:
"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."
It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.
(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)
Friday, May 29, 2009
Stress by Justice
What people saw in this video, although its makers intended something else, was a film propagandising against youths from the suburbs of Paris, responsible, apparently, for the troubles in France. But this was to insult the film makers, who only wanted to put their brand on these youths, or their imagined version of them. Because their own milieu in fact responded positively to the idea of youth gangs. Like Barthes said, as a collective project, instead of Gothic Cathedrals...
part of an ongoing collective project: a vast underclass fantasy
part of an ongoing collective project: a vast underclass fantasy
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
were postmods correct?
People mainly think arts criticism is the preserve of the effete upper classes, who cannot even make it in investment banking; hideous characters, like Batman villains who have not learned how to steal. This may or may not be accurate. We can argue against this negative picture that:
1. arts criticism is just a part of social criticism
2. Our Western Civilisation is heavily "artistic", judging by the resources devoted to the production and consumption of "art"
3. this mythology of social criticism still has to be accounted for - by social criticism
4. popular culture in the 90s wasn't so against it. (History is not just the present tacked onto an imaginary past, loosely based on 50s America)
(Social criticism was more acceptable in the 90s. This aspect of popular culture seems to have been deserted, to some extent, by other sections of popular culture, since popular culture is partly institutionally based, and the priorities of these institutions change, while some disappear. Antoine de Caunes is no longer on teevee. Probably people used to take more drugs in the 90s. Everyone wanted to be an "art terrorist", like Jean Baudrillard. It used to be that it was "kool" to know people who made electro concept albums, about corporal punishment in English Public Schools, for the Mo Wax record label. People still feared Japan, not China.)
A more serious indictment of arts criticism is: that identifying the "real" meaning of "works of art" is a false operation. For example, Lukacs identifies the nineteenth century naturalistic novel as being about reification. This wasn't the dominant impression for the producers or consumers of these novels, so isn't the theory a sort of imposture?
What Lukacs has done, or what I have tried to do, is to assume these "works of art" "reflect", more or less loosely, the concrete conditions in which they have been produced, not just economic events, of course, but memories, the weather, events lost to history. Criticism, then, ideally ought to run parallel to the "art" in "reflecting" these circumstances. That a great deal of guesswork is involved makes approximation and error inevitable. This method is, in principle, formaliseable, hence scientific. It has this advantage over "dominant response" criticism: if the dominant response to a "work of art" is that it's a scam, or just rubbish, or an aspect of our society's totalitarian tendency, this fails to account for its conditions of production.
1. arts criticism is just a part of social criticism
2. Our Western Civilisation is heavily "artistic", judging by the resources devoted to the production and consumption of "art"
3. this mythology of social criticism still has to be accounted for - by social criticism
4. popular culture in the 90s wasn't so against it. (History is not just the present tacked onto an imaginary past, loosely based on 50s America)
(Social criticism was more acceptable in the 90s. This aspect of popular culture seems to have been deserted, to some extent, by other sections of popular culture, since popular culture is partly institutionally based, and the priorities of these institutions change, while some disappear. Antoine de Caunes is no longer on teevee. Probably people used to take more drugs in the 90s. Everyone wanted to be an "art terrorist", like Jean Baudrillard. It used to be that it was "kool" to know people who made electro concept albums, about corporal punishment in English Public Schools, for the Mo Wax record label. People still feared Japan, not China.)
A more serious indictment of arts criticism is: that identifying the "real" meaning of "works of art" is a false operation. For example, Lukacs identifies the nineteenth century naturalistic novel as being about reification. This wasn't the dominant impression for the producers or consumers of these novels, so isn't the theory a sort of imposture?
What Lukacs has done, or what I have tried to do, is to assume these "works of art" "reflect", more or less loosely, the concrete conditions in which they have been produced, not just economic events, of course, but memories, the weather, events lost to history. Criticism, then, ideally ought to run parallel to the "art" in "reflecting" these circumstances. That a great deal of guesswork is involved makes approximation and error inevitable. This method is, in principle, formaliseable, hence scientific. It has this advantage over "dominant response" criticism: if the dominant response to a "work of art" is that it's a scam, or just rubbish, or an aspect of our society's totalitarian tendency, this fails to account for its conditions of production.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
the social background of confusionism
I used to work for a company that marketed office supplies, in which capacity I learned that you can get specially laminated Kandinsky prints for the walls of your office or factory, for the purpose of motivating your staff. Even though I am sympathetic to a future in which call centre workers might take their easels and pots of paint into work, and work on their pictures during their lunch hour, or even while they're on the phone, I have some reservations about this enterprise. After all, motivational pictures generally serve to dramatise management turning a deaf ear toward their workers' legitimate concerns.
Jean Arp, whose pictures, duly laminated, might well be available from the same company said: “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds”.
I suggested that the regulative idea of art that underlies Kandinsky's paintings follows from the attempt to apply functionalist logic to works that are supposed to have been produced in complete freedom. I don't just mean Kandinsky but his milieu, his class even, who took naturalistic conservatism for granted even as they became interested in the basically anti-bourgeois ideas of romantic anti-utilitarianism.
It is reasonable to explain a great many consumer products on functionalist grounds. A ballpoint pen, for example, can be understood as something that exists to solve a technical problem as efficiently as possible. It conforms to a technical limit, even if this limit involves criteria relating to its function as a commodity as well as as a writing implement. The same principle cannot be applied to so called cultured art, unless the ideas of art pour art are to be abandoned, and for all art to be treated as kitsch art, merely conforming to a need like any other product.
This culture, which could not accept inefficiency or kitsch, compelled its painters to imagine and to show a technical limit for art, at or around the point at which it becomes unintelligible. Such a limit was duly invented. Consequently we have a moral concept: "high art", and a descriptive concept: "abstract art", for the same sort of thing: the confusion and alterisation of culture.
Jean Arp, whose pictures, duly laminated, might well be available from the same company said: “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds”.
I suggested that the regulative idea of art that underlies Kandinsky's paintings follows from the attempt to apply functionalist logic to works that are supposed to have been produced in complete freedom. I don't just mean Kandinsky but his milieu, his class even, who took naturalistic conservatism for granted even as they became interested in the basically anti-bourgeois ideas of romantic anti-utilitarianism.
It is reasonable to explain a great many consumer products on functionalist grounds. A ballpoint pen, for example, can be understood as something that exists to solve a technical problem as efficiently as possible. It conforms to a technical limit, even if this limit involves criteria relating to its function as a commodity as well as as a writing implement. The same principle cannot be applied to so called cultured art, unless the ideas of art pour art are to be abandoned, and for all art to be treated as kitsch art, merely conforming to a need like any other product.
This culture, which could not accept inefficiency or kitsch, compelled its painters to imagine and to show a technical limit for art, at or around the point at which it becomes unintelligible. Such a limit was duly invented. Consequently we have a moral concept: "high art", and a descriptive concept: "abstract art", for the same sort of thing: the confusion and alterisation of culture.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Kandinsky's triangle
In 1911 the greatest modern painter wrote:
"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.
At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."
Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.
What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...
"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.
At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."
Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.
What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...
Monday, May 11, 2009
"the Talisman"
"Comparison of others' attempts to setting off on a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover that North Pole. What for others are deviations, for me are data by which to set my course."
- Walter Benjamin
Impressionism had always had a mannerist side. It wasn't all about optics. But the idea that it was all about optics was allowed to stand as a total explanation. Sérusier's, or Sérusier's and Gauguin's the Talisman, is meant as a sort of painted manifesto to a style where the mannerist side of impressionism is to be stressed exclusively, and the alibi of optics dropped. In one respect this style stresses the richness of human experience, by showing what would correspond to a superlative form of human experience, and as such can be understood as arguing against the real immiseration of human beings. On the other hand, what is actually shown as a possibility of human experience is an invention, an impossibility. It is as if the work "supposed" a superhuman author given to superperception. Sérusier had been reading Hegel, in whose works such contradictions abound. Gauguin's career in the financial sector had been ended by the recession. He had abandoned his family in Denmark and was working in Pont-Aven, Brittany, which became a sort of hipster Lourdes.
I wanted to explain the theory of avantgardism. If the lead up to this has concentrated exclusively on "celebrity masterpieces" this is because the theory of avantgardism is a theory of "celebrity masterpieces".
- Walter Benjamin
Impressionism had always had a mannerist side. It wasn't all about optics. But the idea that it was all about optics was allowed to stand as a total explanation. Sérusier's, or Sérusier's and Gauguin's the Talisman, is meant as a sort of painted manifesto to a style where the mannerist side of impressionism is to be stressed exclusively, and the alibi of optics dropped. In one respect this style stresses the richness of human experience, by showing what would correspond to a superlative form of human experience, and as such can be understood as arguing against the real immiseration of human beings. On the other hand, what is actually shown as a possibility of human experience is an invention, an impossibility. It is as if the work "supposed" a superhuman author given to superperception. Sérusier had been reading Hegel, in whose works such contradictions abound. Gauguin's career in the financial sector had been ended by the recession. He had abandoned his family in Denmark and was working in Pont-Aven, Brittany, which became a sort of hipster Lourdes.
I wanted to explain the theory of avantgardism. If the lead up to this has concentrated exclusively on "celebrity masterpieces" this is because the theory of avantgardism is a theory of "celebrity masterpieces".
Friday, May 08, 2009
British Art
When people refer to British Art they are not referring to something necessarily brilliant, though this possibility isn't definitively ruled out. The idea of British Art has an affinity with the idea of British Cooking. Some of it may be very poor, but this isn't an inevitability. Referring to British Cooking is not the same thing as referring to Italian Cooking, for example, which is generally considered to be unambiguously good; or Italian Art. The usage is different. For example if Balzac had written to Stendhal:
"what I do, is I do these frescoes; but you, my friend, have made British Art"
Our soldiers, returning from Afghanistan, are to be presented with the best of British Cooking, and the best of British Art.
But Britain did have a sophisticated visual culture at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, best exemplified by satirical cartoons. If these works don't convince enough people, or the right people, that they qualify as art proper, it's probably on account of the absence of obviously irreproducible skill, their opacity to modern viewers, and their puerility. The preponderance of figures engaging with the viewer also plays a part. If, in the style of Garfield minus Garfield, these figures were erased, at least some of these pictures would come across as great modernist renderings of the capitalist city, with the objectivity of Hiroshige prints.
"what I do, is I do these frescoes; but you, my friend, have made British Art"
Our soldiers, returning from Afghanistan, are to be presented with the best of British Cooking, and the best of British Art.
But Britain did have a sophisticated visual culture at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, best exemplified by satirical cartoons. If these works don't convince enough people, or the right people, that they qualify as art proper, it's probably on account of the absence of obviously irreproducible skill, their opacity to modern viewers, and their puerility. The preponderance of figures engaging with the viewer also plays a part. If, in the style of Garfield minus Garfield, these figures were erased, at least some of these pictures would come across as great modernist renderings of the capitalist city, with the objectivity of Hiroshige prints.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
"a great humanist gesture"
There's a kind of Marxist history where the principal classes in society fight over a common means of cultural production, like a rowing couple each trying to drag a disconsolate baby from the other ones grasp. Intellectual conflict is mapped onto social conflict. This wasn't the Marxism of Edward Thompson, who, in The Making of the English Working Class described the following:
"A witness before the parliamentary committee enquiring into the hand-loom weavers (1835) was asked to state the view of his fellows on the Reform Bill:
Q. Are the working classes better satisfied with the institutions of the country since the change has taken place?
A. I do not think they are. They viewed the Reform Bill as a measure calculated to join the middle and upper classes to Government, and leave them in the hands of Government as a sort of machine to work according to the pleasure of Government.
Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. They fought, not the machine, but the exploititive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years , the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other."
...which in one way suggests two and only two rival positions of two rival classes, but also something else. Because, on what grounds could the workers' criticism of Utilitarianism have been made, if not those underlying "the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism"? That political economy represented the final denial of man?
The establishment at the time believed and made use of several kinds of ideology. Thompson analyses the traditional or induced attachment to "Church and King" and religious revivalism as well as the much vilified Utilitarianism. I tried to demonstrate that the "modern conservatism" exemplified by Burke's arguments against the French Revolution, selectively and retroactively naturalistic, represented an important innovation, quite distinct from a genuine attachment to tradition or utilitarianism, even if the "spiritualising" tendency of this "modern conservatism" is employed alongside utilitarian arguments, as in most economics texts.
This is to slight the venerable historian somewhat, whose book is pretty good, but the multiplicity of conservative ideologies is a development that underlies and informs the modern political aesthetic, and as such is of some importance.
The great difference between Manet's and Gauguin's treatment of similar subjects is not just historical. The political situation is no longer that of the Second Empire. Gauguin's Anna the Javanese is a depiction of someone on the margins of society, perhaps even defiantly so. The old bourgois conception of sex work has been restored, somewhat. It would be an outrageous insult to call this woman a prostitute. The picture doesn't convince us about where and when it was painted, other than in its style and celebrity. It all looks a bit like a theatre set. It couldn't really be described as a criticism of modern life, unless blurishness is taken to be a political statement.
I used to work nights in a petrol station, and this kid came in about four in the morning to clean the forecourt and replenish the stock. The storeroom in which the stock was kept was a windowless concrete cell impregnated with motor oil. Imagine, it's full of old boxes and cobwebs. And this kid just went to sleep in there. The great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. It's got to have been like an Eritrean prison cell, except with bottles of Pepsi Max and old boxes of Quavers. And this kid just used to sleep in there. I understand he smoked a lot of weed, but even so.
The pre-critical ambivalence underlying Manet's Olympia is ordinarily political: the vexed relation between bourgeois culture and the sex industry, so the picture can be understood as a partial criticism of society. For Gauguin, ordinary political considerations seem of less importance than the "truth" underlying the "great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism": the defiant assertion of man in the abstract. Even in Gauguin's pictures with "cut out" figures, the mystery of internal depth seems to have a decisive weight: the eyes of the doll rolling back in its head.
If Gauguin isn't quite, or not always asserting the idealism of Berkeley, the impression that comes across is something like Heidegger's overidealised politics: the mystery of Mankind's relation with the Cosmos. As if the frills of Javanese Pagodas, or Gothic Cathedrals, or the frills of this woman's costume, which she is momentarily without, prefigured the intermediate world of Heideggarian froth.
"A witness before the parliamentary committee enquiring into the hand-loom weavers (1835) was asked to state the view of his fellows on the Reform Bill:
Q. Are the working classes better satisfied with the institutions of the country since the change has taken place?
A. I do not think they are. They viewed the Reform Bill as a measure calculated to join the middle and upper classes to Government, and leave them in the hands of Government as a sort of machine to work according to the pleasure of Government.
Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. They fought, not the machine, but the exploititive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years , the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other."
...which in one way suggests two and only two rival positions of two rival classes, but also something else. Because, on what grounds could the workers' criticism of Utilitarianism have been made, if not those underlying "the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism"? That political economy represented the final denial of man?
The establishment at the time believed and made use of several kinds of ideology. Thompson analyses the traditional or induced attachment to "Church and King" and religious revivalism as well as the much vilified Utilitarianism. I tried to demonstrate that the "modern conservatism" exemplified by Burke's arguments against the French Revolution, selectively and retroactively naturalistic, represented an important innovation, quite distinct from a genuine attachment to tradition or utilitarianism, even if the "spiritualising" tendency of this "modern conservatism" is employed alongside utilitarian arguments, as in most economics texts.
This is to slight the venerable historian somewhat, whose book is pretty good, but the multiplicity of conservative ideologies is a development that underlies and informs the modern political aesthetic, and as such is of some importance.
The great difference between Manet's and Gauguin's treatment of similar subjects is not just historical. The political situation is no longer that of the Second Empire. Gauguin's Anna the Javanese is a depiction of someone on the margins of society, perhaps even defiantly so. The old bourgois conception of sex work has been restored, somewhat. It would be an outrageous insult to call this woman a prostitute. The picture doesn't convince us about where and when it was painted, other than in its style and celebrity. It all looks a bit like a theatre set. It couldn't really be described as a criticism of modern life, unless blurishness is taken to be a political statement.
I used to work nights in a petrol station, and this kid came in about four in the morning to clean the forecourt and replenish the stock. The storeroom in which the stock was kept was a windowless concrete cell impregnated with motor oil. Imagine, it's full of old boxes and cobwebs. And this kid just went to sleep in there. The great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. It's got to have been like an Eritrean prison cell, except with bottles of Pepsi Max and old boxes of Quavers. And this kid just used to sleep in there. I understand he smoked a lot of weed, but even so.
The pre-critical ambivalence underlying Manet's Olympia is ordinarily political: the vexed relation between bourgeois culture and the sex industry, so the picture can be understood as a partial criticism of society. For Gauguin, ordinary political considerations seem of less importance than the "truth" underlying the "great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism": the defiant assertion of man in the abstract. Even in Gauguin's pictures with "cut out" figures, the mystery of internal depth seems to have a decisive weight: the eyes of the doll rolling back in its head.
If Gauguin isn't quite, or not always asserting the idealism of Berkeley, the impression that comes across is something like Heidegger's overidealised politics: the mystery of Mankind's relation with the Cosmos. As if the frills of Javanese Pagodas, or Gothic Cathedrals, or the frills of this woman's costume, which she is momentarily without, prefigured the intermediate world of Heideggarian froth.
Monday, May 04, 2009
the anti-political communist tendency
One might have expected the anticapitalist disturbances of the 90s to have generated a voluminous critical literature with the sangfoid of the two undated, apparently online only issues of Letters Journal (whether pro or con):
"With this journal we wish to understand and analyze capitalism and crisis, attack the Left, critically engage with our own ideas and practices, and develop a more dynamic transgression from the political."
The "anti-political communist" tendency might involve a dozen people or so. It has also been articulated in articles under the pen name Monsieur Dupont, the best of which is probably the theory masterpiece Do you want to be or don't you want to be soft like me?
"With this journal we wish to understand and analyze capitalism and crisis, attack the Left, critically engage with our own ideas and practices, and develop a more dynamic transgression from the political."
The "anti-political communist" tendency might involve a dozen people or so. It has also been articulated in articles under the pen name Monsieur Dupont, the best of which is probably the theory masterpiece Do you want to be or don't you want to be soft like me?
Saturday, May 02, 2009
ten franc historical research: Manet's Olympia
The object of our study is not the nineteenth century, which we have hardly researched, but the contradictions of the present.
In 1864, the year after Manet painted Olympia, and the year before it was exhibited, the Goncourt brothers reflected on the history of prostitution in Paris:
"Our little cousin Labille came to see us this morning. He had a rendezvous with a cocotte who was going to take him out to Asnières in her carriage. There exists a peculiar type of high-class prostitute nowadays who finds her custom among boys still at school, emptying their pocket-books and building up a reserve of men who will keep her in later years.
When the boy had gone, we reflected on the course taken by love in our three generations. The elder of us, at our cousins age, had a girl who stitched shoes for a living. I had a tart who always had a few sous in her chest of drawers. And this youngster has a woman who keeps her own carriage and horses. The world progresses. Here we have the three periods: Louis-Philippe, 1848, and the Second Empire."
In the early years of the nineteenth century conditions were markedly worse. Jules Janin wrote in 1839, with reference to Parent-Duchatelet's earlier study:
"If all orders of society are represented in the convict prisons of Toulon and Brest, just as they are in the Golden Book of the Legion of Honor, does that mean that the novel and the play may concern themselves with those vile heroes, ever cowering beneath the public's contempt or the warder's truncheon? In his Histoire de la prostitution publique M. Parent-Duchatelet , the learned gentleman who, out of pure charity, lived amid filth, that rigid Port-Royal Christian who lived out his whole life in haunts of ill fame out of sheer virtue, tells us that in order to perfect his frightful knowledge of Parisian vice he was once taken to a house where five-score ladies of the night were sleeping promiscuously with thieves on a great pile of rags gathered from all the garbage heaps in the kingdom. M. Parent-Duchatelet saw it; he tells us so; we must credit him. And yet, merely because the thing exists, does that mean that the novel and the play may pore over this den of vice to dredge up choice morsels? No, no, there are some things from which we must avert our eyes..."
Janin's first sentence is reflected years later in Lautrec's obituary notice, whose writer peevishly observed that the list of the artist's thousand conquests could also be found on the desk of the chief of police.
I suppose it is a question at the back of Janin's mind whether Parisian prostitutes constitute a particular "estate" within the social order, and the answer is that they do not.
During the Second Empire prostitution was legalised and subject to police regulation. The Emperor had the character of a procurer, and the bases of the bourgeois conception of prostitution altered. Syphilis was pandemic. Beyond the celebrated courtesans, the Second Empire filles publiques were multiplied and massed together in barracks, like artisans in factories or the destitute in the poorhouse. Prostitution became an integral part of the social machine of the Second Empire.
Political ideas inevitably lagged behind these social changes. Conservatism, admittedly, had already ceased to be purely dogmatic and had become more often reactive and naturalistic. But the idea of a social estate of prostitutes engaged in great factories devoted to their trade must have been necessarily disquieting. Because of the special status these women had, the Second Empire prostitutes, whose profession was somewhat naturalised and somewhat denaturalising, dramatise the contradictions of industrial civilisation as a whole, itself naturalised and unnatural.
If we accept that, intellectually at least, someone like Manet could have contemplated the Parisian prostitute with a kind of excited ambivalence, we can reapply the analysis of Alfred Jarry's poster.
A moment of everyday paranoia is pictured which threatens to be indissociable from paranoia about the whole of society. I have tried to show that this paranoia is the opposite of extreme psychopathology. It is, rather, the excited indifference of the pre-critical mindset. The type of representation involved conveys this paranoia. In place of Jarry's exaggerated double take, Manet has three figures in distinct registers: Olympia, her maid, her cat. The whole effect is something like three seperate "cut outs", assembled in the same picture, or three offkey figures from a diorama, indicating simultaneously the perspectives in which they appear realistic and nonrealistic.
In 1864, the year after Manet painted Olympia, and the year before it was exhibited, the Goncourt brothers reflected on the history of prostitution in Paris:
"Our little cousin Labille came to see us this morning. He had a rendezvous with a cocotte who was going to take him out to Asnières in her carriage. There exists a peculiar type of high-class prostitute nowadays who finds her custom among boys still at school, emptying their pocket-books and building up a reserve of men who will keep her in later years.
When the boy had gone, we reflected on the course taken by love in our three generations. The elder of us, at our cousins age, had a girl who stitched shoes for a living. I had a tart who always had a few sous in her chest of drawers. And this youngster has a woman who keeps her own carriage and horses. The world progresses. Here we have the three periods: Louis-Philippe, 1848, and the Second Empire."
In the early years of the nineteenth century conditions were markedly worse. Jules Janin wrote in 1839, with reference to Parent-Duchatelet's earlier study:
"If all orders of society are represented in the convict prisons of Toulon and Brest, just as they are in the Golden Book of the Legion of Honor, does that mean that the novel and the play may concern themselves with those vile heroes, ever cowering beneath the public's contempt or the warder's truncheon? In his Histoire de la prostitution publique M. Parent-Duchatelet , the learned gentleman who, out of pure charity, lived amid filth, that rigid Port-Royal Christian who lived out his whole life in haunts of ill fame out of sheer virtue, tells us that in order to perfect his frightful knowledge of Parisian vice he was once taken to a house where five-score ladies of the night were sleeping promiscuously with thieves on a great pile of rags gathered from all the garbage heaps in the kingdom. M. Parent-Duchatelet saw it; he tells us so; we must credit him. And yet, merely because the thing exists, does that mean that the novel and the play may pore over this den of vice to dredge up choice morsels? No, no, there are some things from which we must avert our eyes..."
Janin's first sentence is reflected years later in Lautrec's obituary notice, whose writer peevishly observed that the list of the artist's thousand conquests could also be found on the desk of the chief of police.
I suppose it is a question at the back of Janin's mind whether Parisian prostitutes constitute a particular "estate" within the social order, and the answer is that they do not.
During the Second Empire prostitution was legalised and subject to police regulation. The Emperor had the character of a procurer, and the bases of the bourgeois conception of prostitution altered. Syphilis was pandemic. Beyond the celebrated courtesans, the Second Empire filles publiques were multiplied and massed together in barracks, like artisans in factories or the destitute in the poorhouse. Prostitution became an integral part of the social machine of the Second Empire.
Political ideas inevitably lagged behind these social changes. Conservatism, admittedly, had already ceased to be purely dogmatic and had become more often reactive and naturalistic. But the idea of a social estate of prostitutes engaged in great factories devoted to their trade must have been necessarily disquieting. Because of the special status these women had, the Second Empire prostitutes, whose profession was somewhat naturalised and somewhat denaturalising, dramatise the contradictions of industrial civilisation as a whole, itself naturalised and unnatural.
If we accept that, intellectually at least, someone like Manet could have contemplated the Parisian prostitute with a kind of excited ambivalence, we can reapply the analysis of Alfred Jarry's poster.
A moment of everyday paranoia is pictured which threatens to be indissociable from paranoia about the whole of society. I have tried to show that this paranoia is the opposite of extreme psychopathology. It is, rather, the excited indifference of the pre-critical mindset. The type of representation involved conveys this paranoia. In place of Jarry's exaggerated double take, Manet has three figures in distinct registers: Olympia, her maid, her cat. The whole effect is something like three seperate "cut outs", assembled in the same picture, or three offkey figures from a diorama, indicating simultaneously the perspectives in which they appear realistic and nonrealistic.
Friday, May 01, 2009
caveat mutant
Franco Moretti has an ideosyncratic take on "modern monsters": Frankenstein and Dracula. This is from Signs taken for Wonders:
"The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big rko productions in America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture."
"They are indivisible, because complementary"? Strangely enough, when I was at school the class was split between two rival gangs. The leaders of the gangs were called Elephant and Dracula. I never learnt their real names!
The main point of my criticism of this piece is, it's all very clever but is Mary Shelley really anticipating Marx's theory of the decomposition of Nineteenth Century class society, which actually didn't pan out exactly as Marx anticipated? Isn't the operative political faultline in 1816 still Radical against Conservative rather than proletariat against bourgeoisie? Why is there only one monster who hardly interferes in society at all, but rather remotely terrorises it? Why doesn't this terrorism relate to the social relations made possible by capitalism, and that made possible the assassination of Spencer Percival, for example?
There might be something in the correspondence between the monster in Frankenstein and a certain way of looking at the destitute, but it surely requires the complete abstraction of the "disfigured wretch" from economic, social and familial relations.
The personal history of the author of Frankenstein ought to be asserted here.
Mary Shelley's mother was involved in a famous controversy of the period whose theme coincides with the theme of the book. More or less, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense arguing for a rational society. The French Revolution took place, offstage. Edmund Burke came up with a very strange argument against the ideas of Paine and the actions of the revolutionaries. Certain institutions in society should be accepted as being unfathomably efficacious. Acting against these institutions, apparently rationally, would be either futile or disasterous. Reality is a mousetrap; Enlightenment a piece of cheese. Mary Wollstonecraft responded to Burke's pamphlet with Vindication of the Rights of Men. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein appropriates Burke's theme of the horrific aspect of the new: in modern language, the "mutant".
This is a fairly conventional analysis of Frankenstein. It might appear, from this, that Moretti has failed to understand the significance of the "Burkean" theme. In fact he goes over just this theme later on in his book, in a chapter on Sherlock Holmes.
Having established certain similarities between the treatment of the same theme by Burke and Mary Shelley, it's relevant to stress their differences. The same theme that served as the basis for a polemic by Burke serves as the basis for an imaginitive work by Mary Shelley. It has ceased to be a doctrine to be argued for or against and become somewhat naturalised itself. It has become possible for it to be contemplated with a kind of excited indifference.
"The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big rko productions in America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture."
"They are indivisible, because complementary"? Strangely enough, when I was at school the class was split between two rival gangs. The leaders of the gangs were called Elephant and Dracula. I never learnt their real names!
The main point of my criticism of this piece is, it's all very clever but is Mary Shelley really anticipating Marx's theory of the decomposition of Nineteenth Century class society, which actually didn't pan out exactly as Marx anticipated? Isn't the operative political faultline in 1816 still Radical against Conservative rather than proletariat against bourgeoisie? Why is there only one monster who hardly interferes in society at all, but rather remotely terrorises it? Why doesn't this terrorism relate to the social relations made possible by capitalism, and that made possible the assassination of Spencer Percival, for example?
There might be something in the correspondence between the monster in Frankenstein and a certain way of looking at the destitute, but it surely requires the complete abstraction of the "disfigured wretch" from economic, social and familial relations.
The personal history of the author of Frankenstein ought to be asserted here.
Mary Shelley's mother was involved in a famous controversy of the period whose theme coincides with the theme of the book. More or less, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense arguing for a rational society. The French Revolution took place, offstage. Edmund Burke came up with a very strange argument against the ideas of Paine and the actions of the revolutionaries. Certain institutions in society should be accepted as being unfathomably efficacious. Acting against these institutions, apparently rationally, would be either futile or disasterous. Reality is a mousetrap; Enlightenment a piece of cheese. Mary Wollstonecraft responded to Burke's pamphlet with Vindication of the Rights of Men. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein appropriates Burke's theme of the horrific aspect of the new: in modern language, the "mutant".
This is a fairly conventional analysis of Frankenstein. It might appear, from this, that Moretti has failed to understand the significance of the "Burkean" theme. In fact he goes over just this theme later on in his book, in a chapter on Sherlock Holmes.
Having established certain similarities between the treatment of the same theme by Burke and Mary Shelley, it's relevant to stress their differences. The same theme that served as the basis for a polemic by Burke serves as the basis for an imaginitive work by Mary Shelley. It has ceased to be a doctrine to be argued for or against and become somewhat naturalised itself. It has become possible for it to be contemplated with a kind of excited indifference.
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