Material Language

I rewrite extensively sometimes. If it's anything topical I don't hide anything. Still working on this one. All notes.

What offended me about the original post at Savage Minds was that those for whom a sophisticated understanding of language is supposedly part of their job -for whom language is a tool- would find it necessary to study a minor decorative art to gain an understanding of craft. From the draft of an article linked in the post [PDF]

Through understanding imagination as a generative force in practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine, the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice itself is constitutive, not expressive, of culture- imagination, the lungs of culture. "

The author's mistake is in forgetting that language is material
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Posted elsewhere but rewritten, and expanded (and expanding)
Art and criticism are joined in a fruitful antagonism, and historians and biographers are in a similar relation to those they study. But while artists may hate critics and biographers may dream secretly of supplanting their subjects in authority, only Theory as presently constituted is seen by its adherents as preceding and superior to practice.

What place do arguments from a "naturalized" epistemology have in artmaking? What place have they had in theories of Modernism and of modernist culture-making?
The foundation of theory is in its analogical relation to the sciences. Intellectual design is intellectual engineering, words replacing numbers. Theory reverses the connoisseur's placement of cause and effect, not in defense of a preferred moral truth but of a proposed logical one, and doing so attempts to undermine the role of historical/retrospective knowledge.

Theory has its origin in the prerogatives of Modern criticism, and in a very specific variant of Modernism. My experience, and here I'm publicly treading private ground, is with what I've come to think of as something post-Talmudic. "In the beginning was the word." If the first man was a believer, the second was a critic. The artist was at worst a maker of graven images, at best no more than secondary. Combined with the Modern telos of progress we get the myth of the critic as "social" scientist and not as describer but prescriber.

If art is defined as a free imagination at play, it is defended because that freedom is assumed to perform an important function in society. Action and exegesis are divided not absolutely but unevenly between artist and critic as between history and historian. Theory argues against this division of labor in both cases: history is secondary and a free imagination is unnecessary (often leading to irrationalism.) Art under theory, as culture under neoliberalism, is illustration, advertising, or indulgence.

I want to write something on Yi Yi as pattern making -invention- and observation. Good art as good empiricism always defeats theory.

As a general comment for those who are having trouble following along:
The best art in the romantic tradition, and I'm using this example only because it would otherwise seem to contradict my point, is the art that best describes romantic desire to those who would otherwise have no interest. The art that has come down to us as the most sincerely romantic has also come down to us as minor, at most secondary. That includes bad Beethoven.
Got me?

The last generation has marked the ascendency of technics in the social sciences. In the past few years I've run into a lot of melancholy if not openly miserable technicians. What am I supposed to say, I told you so?

Clark refers often to the origins of Modernism in the striving of the petty bourgeoisie, caught in the push-pull antagonism of individual and community. By the end of the book we find him celebrating the lyrical overreach of Adolph Gottlieb.

If successful Modernism is overreach laced with irony, then the next step is to admit that Modernism was from the beginning caught in a dance of or to the death with Kitsch. Modernism at it's best was nothing more than a formally subtle (rigorously beautiful) argument for the efficacy of kitsch desire: an intensely, desperately, mediated dithyramb against mediation. And Fascism was nothing less than Modernist desire, replacing the formal argument with the fist in the face.

John Wayne in The Searchers. John Ford, 1956


Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4"

On the one hand the comparison is obvious to the point of banality; on the other it's a secret, hidden in plain sight. The image of John Wayne in the doorway has become iconic but has to be seen as synecdochic. A movie frame is not a movie. It is by definition a mediocre photograph, incomplete. Films are built in overlapping images of action and out of a variety of perspectives and contexts. Time is the primary constitutive element.

Both images above are arguments for something, but Newman's is less argument than statement or aphorism. Not predicated on context itself it nonetheless requires one to be understood. Claiming to stand alone, it doesn't. By comparison, and this is dangerously glib, the Searchers is about the claim itself. Both works may come to the same conclusions but only one is loaded with caveats and doubts. One is made to be iconic, and the other is a description of how that same icon is constructed

Klub Kid Kollectivity: I'm alone, I'm everyone

I'm expanding this and including all of Bertram's post, for the record and just to make it clear. The italics are mine.

2003: Chris Bertram hearts Colin McGinn.

Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, writing in the latest Prospect about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel

The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.

2008: Henry Farrell hearts My Bloody Valentine.



...not even as a guilty pleasure. Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum -the violence and warmth- of neurological overload. Henry Farrell as rationalist, rational actor, and club kid.

Clark on Jackson Pollock [Farewell to an Idea. Chapter 6] makes arguments for Pollock's Modernism rather than concerning it.


Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, National Gallery of Art
When he refers to "the nightmare of Modernism" his Modernism is the dreamer, not the dream. The nightmare is that Cecil Beaton was right.

Cecil Beaton for Vogue, The New Soft Look, 1951

The nightmare for Colin McGinn is that My Bloody Valentine was right.
[No. The nightmare for Colin McGinn is that they would be seen as his rightful descendants. And they are.
Cecil Beaton was right.]

I added and then removed a fact that I think belongs here. Unless I'm misremembering the song above is the one that was playing when I ended up in the emergency ward -outpatient- with a self-inflicted knife wound. I was dancing.
It's not a question of indifference to experience, but of an a necessary return to a questioning empiricism.
I have memories of a childhood ecstasy that the closest I'm come to seeing described in print was a paragraph from one woman's description of the onset as a young girl of schizophrenia. Soon is basically one sonic image of the dance of death as led by the skipping children - "unkillable infants"- of a laughing god: it works on those attuned to it first and foremost as reflex. And awareness of that does as much damage to its dream as Chris Farley's radical recontextualizations of Goth Talk. And isn't that also what Beaton does to Pollock?

It's not a question of philosophical truth. One of the mistakes of Modernism is to imagine that questions of right and wrong, or correct and incorrect, apply to art. In the end art is always no more or less then a record of our preoccupations, whatever they may be. At it's best it exists, after the fact of its making, as both the most honest and most intimate description of ourselves and our failures. Preoccupations are not truths except to admit that we have them. The question for Pollock, or My Bloody Valentine, or Cecil Beaton is whether they are giving us a rich description. I would say Beaton undermines Pollock without offering us anything better. What that would be, and who would supply it?

I had a more cutting, more glib, version of this up. I probably should have left it.

Atrios: "I Roll My Eyes. Nothing else to do."
In response to this:

"Uniformity of style is one of the depressing aspects of globalization, and nowhere more so than in the [...] business."

I'd agree that wine isn't the most important example, but connoisseurship is not simply refined taste -or even refined taste in inessentials- its refined awareness and the ability to communicate that awareness to others: it's both awareness and description. Written with a capital "C" it implies snobbery, but otherwise it's simply the most complex manifestation of social engagement we have: not simply a record of preferences, but of the enjoyment of sharing them, and of refining or altering them through discussion. It's a form of observation that reflects back on us as self-awareness, beginning with a very simple question simultaneously about the world and oneself. "Why do I like X? " "Why do I like Tolstoy?" "Why do I like blondes?." Fandom or unquestioning enthusiasm by comparison is little more than narcissistic (passive) self-obliteration.

Expertise of course is not based on self-reflection at all. It's an interest in externalities in which the very notion of preference is elided. I'll repost this from a few days ago:

There's a mode of argument that renders one passive and irresponsible before an ideology. If one assumes American exceptionalism one doesn't even have to argue for it, and in arguments on foreign policy one then becomes merely a calculator, objective and neutral, or just indifferent. Arguing for what you believe rather than from it makes you human: reengages you and reminds you that you're responsible for your choices. We're all capable of sliding into unreason. Those who imagine themselves -who analogize themselves- as calculating machines are capable of greater errors, and greater crimes, because they've insulated themselves from doubt.

Connoisseurship is the foundation of intellectualism. Expertise without it is just itself (or even less: a symptom). Anyone is capable of sliding into arguments for or from unreason. But of the two anti-social unreason is far more dangerous.

Again "Awaiting moderation"

Excuse me Daniel, I posted a link concerning a war between a nominally secular state (one backed by secularists as a triumph of modernity) and those whom that state has thrown off their land. First came "waiting for moderation," then nothing: gone. Or does a military occupation by the champions of modernity and democracy not warrant a reply?

In a related note: Eric Shinseki writes a letter

I am greatly concerned that OSD processes have often become ad hoc and long established conventional processes are atrophying. Specifically, there are areas that need your attention as the ad hoc processes often do not adequately consider professional military judgment and advice. . . . . Second, there is a lack of strategic review to frame our day-to-day issues . . . . Third, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on risk in most decisions. . . . Finally, I find it unhelpful to participate in senior level decision-making meetings without structured agendas, objectives, pending decisions and other traditional means of time management.

The military isn't run on democratic process, but its a process nonetheless. And Rumsfeld never thought it was necessary. We use processes because no one has a monopoly on reason. I don't give a shit if my neighbors think the moon is made of green cheese. I do give a shit if they think they have a right to barge in my house and put a gun to my head and steal everything I own. Cracker or Body of Christ, neither is the point except to absolutists; and absolutism makes for lousy politics. 300 comments fighting over that obvious point.

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On another post at CT Henry Farrell writes

A bunch of Democratic foreign policy types, which once included Susan Rice of the Obama campaign, have come out with a new document, the so-called Phoenix Initiative. Now in one sense, manifestoes like this are ten a penny at this stage of the election cycle – they’re the calling cards that foreign policy elites use to try to sell themselves to a potential incoming administration. But what’s unusual about this one is the near total lack of self-congratulation about the US as the one essential nation, leader of the free world etc. Instead, the document’s main message...

is not the point here. Here the main thing is a question: How would one define "American Exceptionalism" as anything but a faith, now gratefully becoming but not yet a shibboleth?
The best argument for leaving others alone in their bizarre beliefs, for being curious but not contemptuous, is the recognition of your own capacity to believe things equally as odd. That argument -that possibility- never occurs to some people. DD was unable to articulate it.
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Rereading. The Painting of Modern Life. Discussion of the Goncourts. Their critical observations of the changes around them being picked apart by Clark through critical observations of their work and what they represented. And me observing Clark: a never ending process of review.

There's a mode of argument that renders one passive and irresponsible before an ideology. If one assumes American exceptionalism one doesn't even have to argue for it, and in arguments on foreign policy one then becomes merely a calculator, objective and neutral, or just indifferent. Arguing for what you believe rather than from it makes you human: reengages you and reminds you that you're responsible for your choices. We're all capable of sliding into unreason. Those who imagine themselves -who analogize themselves- as calculating machines are capable of greater errors, and greater crimes, because they've insulated themselves from doubt.

"Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment..." but not steadily.
The moral chaos and narrative confusion of Hong Kong cinema. Both memorable and forgettable, shallow and rich. The shot of The Joker leaning out the car window feeling the wind on his face really is a moment of "pure cinema," of silent, filmic, poetry. The naturalism in the hospital scene of The Joker and Harvey Dent, Two Face, is unnerving: the two characters simultaneously grotesque cartoons and fully human, the rage so obviously specific and personal.

Terminator II was a sort of collective artwork. Hollywood qua Hollywood and America, occasionally produce a kind of one-off epic cinema. The Dark Knight is smaller, intimate by comparison, and stranger.



You could call Heath Ledger's performance "Stuart's Revenge," (compare the voices) but Franken's character is a cartoon. Cartoon villains show no fear until their last moments. Mostly they die cowards. Ledger's Joker is terrified throughout, but conquers fear by running towards it without stopping. To call him "evil" is to make him a cartoon when the film does the reverse. The Joker is played as human in the depths of psychosis and only from there as our dream. Seeing the touches of skin where the makeup is smeared off his forehead makes the terror that much greater. And as at least one critic has noted Aaron Eckhart's Two Face, goes even deeper.

Notes towards something

The esthetics of oratory- the beautiful argument
The esthetics of sense: the beautiful shape.
TJ Clark: The falseness of the courtesan/The falseness of cubism
The falseness of language in TJ Clarks late writing: the beauty of ideas not as representations but as things. politics is being absorbed back into esthetics as an esthetic criterion. The esthetization of politics, politics for art's sake, so no longer "representative" of anything other than itself as idea.
Eliot, Duchamp, Reactionary Modernism. The preference for language over the world. TJ Clark in his labyrinth.

There's the world and there's what we make of it. The greatest poetry allows each person to experience the gap between the author's representations and the external (and unknowable) but the greatest poetry is always representative. Ming vases are secondary form Architectural is primary (as mimetic.) The poetry of ideas as opposed to representations is secondary and a perverse hybrid, sometimes wonderfully so.
The best Modern art is the art of crisis: of dubious representation overcome by slight of hand: by formal tricks.

The imagery of Modernism is often kitsch [Avant-Garde is Kitsch] Often its mode is pornographic -illustrational- kitsch representation. with the poetry/esthetics recuperated by other means. Duchamp's Fountain is a porcelain figurine; cut to the chase: it's a pussy


It's figurative art: "Manet's Olympia, for 1917"; but it's also a step backwards. It's a step backwards from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, as an act of representation. Les Demoiselles was "Manet's Olympia for 1907." though the painting wasn't shown until 1916, and even then was labeled obscene.
Duchamp's sexuality is closer to Gerome's than Courbet's. He was always the schoolboy, mischievous or twittering (your pick). The curves of his porcelain whore were as blandly stylized as Picasso's beatific bathers from the 20's.


Kitsch: the choice for desire over craft; the short circuiting of process to get results, results that lets face it are always silly. What's a happy ending without a story? Cezanne begins with kitsch, and struggles with it. He was a failed painter before he decided to make his limitations his subject. If his work succeeds as representation it's only in the representation of the space -physical and psychological- between the object and the eye. Only one step away from the representation of "ideas."
Clark is doing Pynchon in reverse: tightening up, ending up Harold Pinter. Ending up a Modernist.

To any readers from Savage Minds, if you want, type McGinn's or Leiter's last name in the search bar above. Otherwise this is just note taking: The same shit, but some good lines:

Language is public. Numbers are impersonal, indeed anti-personal, but are also private.

There's a lot in that one. Definitely a keeper.

Technical disciplines make status definitions relatively simple, and if anything tend to encourage competition to the point that competition becomes a central aspect of the discipline itself. Any culture of technical expertise is a bubble culture and of limited interest to outsiders; but If you seek to generalize from that bubble out into the world, as if it were the world, it becomes what’s called a ghetto culture. But the world is not the lens through which you choose to see it.

Leiter’s academia is a ghetto culture, and he spends as much time discussing gossip and academic bed-hopping as philosophy. But he does not discuss the philosophy of bed-hopping. If he were I’d have more interest.
It’s not status-seeking that annoys me it’s the status-seeking of moralizing priests. McGinn like Leiter claims to be an atheist and a freethinker, but neither come close. McGinn is obviously a product of his experience and of his time, in ways that he will not admit. He’s blind. We’re all products of culture. We’re not all hypocrites.
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The rule of law is the rule of chosen words in the common language and the rule of argument over their meaning. That argument itself is constitutive of democratic society. Language is public. Numbers are impersonal, indeed anti-personal, but are also private.

“I remember… when we used to sit
In the government yard…
in Zagreb,”

"To Justify Something Is To Diminish It?"
Yes, of course.

Fish's arguments, and their weaknesses, are pretty clear. It's easy to understand if you know the antecedents -and isn't that part of Holbo's job description to know them?- But Holbo is "vexed."
The only example he can come up with to parallel Fish's argument is etiquette. Etiquette comes at the end of the line. It's the argument for manners when they're no longer founded on anything but themselves. Mozart's music is founded on and is considered the high point of a tradition. T.S. Eliot and Kentucky Bluegrass Banjo players are inheritors of tradition. Sonata form, lyric poetry, meter and rhyme scheme, and on and on. It's not that Holbo wants to make an argument against these things and their role in the academy, or even that he's accusing Fish of overreaching, it's that he arguing from an ignorance that they ever had a role. That's just bizarre.
I quoted Eliot:" He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"
You may not agree with the sentiment but ignorance is no excuse.

As I said in a comment It struck me for the first time how the contemporary culture these people are most attracted to is basically Pre-Raphaelite. Proto-fascist and borderline kitsch. Randian, Life as Art/ Art as Life. Life/Art ordered by Intention.

I don't know anything about Jenny Scheinman or her fiddle playing, though I'm not much of a fan of Norah Jones, but this quote from Bill Frisell caught my eye.
“A song isn’t just a sort of mathematical puzzle for her; it has a real emotional meaning,”
I had this labeled "Autism Watch." I don't know what else to say.
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Another note: Roy Lichtenstein called the romance and war comics he cribbed his images from "fascist." That his paintings aren't is what makes them interesting. That transformation is their subject.

I:Cube. Adore
I experienced the modern version of The Floating World for the first time in the late 90's, at a small private party in a rented room on the lower east side. I said to someone it felt like Limbo as an airport lounge in 1974. The soundrtack was Air, and I amused myself a bit more by deciding that Prada was Halston in brown.
The effect is akin to a narcosis that not only slows but regulates motion. It's Chaplin's Hard Times at 5 frames per second, with the gears wrapped in fine silk: aestheticized anesthetic motion. The rhythms, bass and snare and little clicks invite improvisatory response, touches of free will in a rigidly deterministic world. At 1:20 when the strings come in and at 1:29 when they modulate and the plane begins to glide across the screen I get a shiver of aphasia.
And the the scream at 0:26 is Hitchcock.

"The best part of this experience came after the fact - my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork"

noted

From Crooked Timber

Viel hat von Morgen an,
Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander,
erfahren der Mensch, bald sind wir aber Gesang

Starting from the morning
when we became a conversation, and hear from each other
much have we experienced but soon we shall be song.

Of course, one could try to remain unimpressed by this, and insist that this is, after all, just poetic hyperbole. The idea that song could replace conversation is a Romantic conceit, not something to be taken too seriously. If one is going to take this tack at the point, though, why start by appealing to poetry in the first place?

Poetic hyperbole? Isn't the implication here that soon we shall be dead, and that song, or story, or history - recorded language- will be all that's left?

Idea? Ideology? Philosophy? Aesthetic? What or how does this song mean? Is it an argument for rational action? For technocracy? Is it an argument against individualism? If so it's a pretty idiosyncratic argument. Is it fascist, or democratic in origin? In principle?

From the archives:
"Something can be judged a work of it art if its arguments are rendered with an idiosyncratic subtlety beyond what is necessary to communicate its ideas, and which may even oppose them, but which so colors our perceptions that we can not separate the sensibility from the idea without feeling a loss."

I wrote somewhere that art is made by loving something so much you see it honestly or hating something so much you see it in its complexity. Eliot was among other things a philosopher and Marx a novelist.

The subtext of numbers in use (the subtext of an application of number) is in the form of language: extrinsic. The subtext of language in use is in another form of itself. Any use of language engages both. There is no linguistic argument against context -rhetoric and history- that is not self-defeating. The arguments of the self-described "reality based" community are predicated on standard American (now neoliberal) tropes. Self-interest is conflated with reason because the possibility of unreason has been removed from the "equation." A work of art made as such is an engagement in both reason and unreason, of argument and -even contradictory- subtext; a unification, a magnification and negation of opposing forces and arguments.

Just in case you thought I was joking,





The expression on the face of the Viking before he starts to sing is hilarious.

This ties into earlier comments, and responses to McCracken, among others,
here, and here.

As I said in the earlier posts: instead of the piggybacking on half or one hour television shows, the product pitch is now piggybacking on 20 second narratives. Advertising now deals in McGuffins. That's new. And the implications are the opposite of what MIT and Grant McCracken would say they are. Instrumentalism is undermined, made obvious and also mocked, even in those forms developed to serve its purpose.
While discussed by its intellectual defenders in terms of objective reason and science, in the eyes of the world Capitalism has simply -finally- replaced the Church: it's omnipresent but subject to mockery.
This is progress. And I'm not joking about that either.

Ultimately, though, the article isn't so much about class as it is about race. It's about white people. Which makes it quite a bit weirder.

Strange response.
It's about class, race, and assholes who render every form of thought into the self-justifying rationalism and glassy-eyed optimism of socializing monads.
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Fast Company
The Convergence Culture Consortium
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics
Grant McCracken makes DeLong seem like Tiresias

Intellectual complexity is the complexity of relations among various perspectives. Intellectual complexity to those who see marketing as a philosophically rewarding activity is the complexity of myopia and narcissism: the collapsing of the interplay of formal and emotional relations in language and communication into the "reciprocity" of a moving fan.
All curiosity is curiosity regarding "X." How to perform the necessary actions more quickly and cleanly? The definition of thinking only and always inside the box. Manic functionalism and unquestioned values.
We don't look at Giotto because of how well he branded the Catholic Church but because of how well he described it and his world: well enough that we who have little relation to either still imagine we have some understanding of both. We're more interested in Giotto than in the men who told him what to paint.

And in LA, the Madison Avenue intellectuals are laughed at by the men and women who bring their dreams to life. What McCracken and the others listed above don't realize is that it's the theater that will be remembered long after they're forgotten.

"The scientific work of our countrymen has probably
evoked less scepticism on the part of foreign judges than
their achievements in other departments of cultural activity.
There is one obvious reason for this difference. When our
letters, our art, our music are criticized with disdainfully faint
commendation, it is because they have failed to attain the
higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in
art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings,
yet from what might be called the consumer's angle, mediocrity
is worthless and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But
in science it is otherwise. Here every bit of sound work... counts."

From Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans

George Santayana responds in his review, published as Marginal Notes on Civilization

It counts in art also, when art is alive. In a thoroughly humanized society everything -clothes speech manners, government- is a work of art, being so done as to be a pleasure and a stimulus in itself. There seems to be an impression in America that art is fed on the history of art, and is what is found in museums. But museums are mausoleums, only dead art is there, and only ghosts of artists flit about them. The priggish notion that an artist is a person undertaking to produce immortal works suffices to show that art has become a foreign thing, an hors-d'oeuvre and that it is probably doomed to affectation and sterility.

Among other things the above counts as my review of the Biennial

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino (1503 – 1540),
Antea, c. 1531–34, oil on canvas, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
At the Frick


An unsure amalgam of observation and idealization. The accompanying text says that the viewer in receiving her gaze stands in for her lover, but that's mistaken. Her gaze and posture are defensive: her lover is someone else.