I've said it before, here or elsewhere; I've never forgotten Sauerländer's review: describing an art historian manifesting his own sense of the present in his description of the past. And now the historian has moved from a description of faded, decadent, idealism to a new acceptance of the multiform. Koerner's claims for Bruegel vis-a-vis Titian and Velázquez are silly, but I love Bruegel. I feel for his work as Koerner does.
And it all follows the transition I've been watching and describing since I was a teenager. I smiled in 1996, and I smiled today. And everything I write is unpublishable.
Koerner
The exhibition celebrated the master’s hand by detailing, in explanatory displays and photographs in the side galleries, Bruegel’s artistic process layer by layer. This new emphasis on materials and making was a welcome corrective to most previous scholarship, which had been concerned with meanings. There has never been a better painter than Bruegel. Always flawless in his design and execution yet different in each of his works, the peerless painter of the low-life genre yet attaining a monumental vision of the whole, a virtuoso in the ways he manipulates paint yet never contrived, he makes his only rivals (Jan van Eyck, Titian, and Velázquez) seem limited, repetitive, or artificial by comparison.
Along the entire left edge of Christ Carrying the Cross, a framing tree curves in and out of the unpainted edge of the panel, its bark roughly the color of that naked wood. Bruegel has so much to say that presses up against this narrow strip: in details that only the closest inspection brings to light, he has squeezed in a little gallery of everyday life, including a poor young couple dragging a basket with newborn calves toward town, in reverse of the great counterclockwise parade. He captures the quiet resistance of the ordinary—what W.H. Auden celebrated in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” his poem about Bruegel: the “untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
The exhibition obscured this important aspect of his work by making Habsburg sovereignty the starting point and frame of Bruegel’s oeuvre. In the first gallery, the artist’s earliest sketches followed visual documents showing how his works had hung in the imperial collections. This made the Habsburgs seem as if they had been his patrons, when of course he pitched his prints to a very broad audience, and the main client for his paintings was a well-to-do burgher not unlike himself—Jonghelinck’s brother Jacques, who made his living as a sculptor and medalist.
Much more crucially, Bruegel was profoundly skeptical of sovereign power. In his world, attempts at mastery inevitably fail: Icarus plunges unnoticed into the sea, King Saul falls on his sword, and the Tower of Babel leans as it spirals into the sky, structurally flawed and doomed to fall even without divine intervention. And meanwhile the powerful are foolish, violent, and cruel. In Christ Carrying the Cross, soldiers wearing the red garb of Habsburg mercenaries force Christ to crawl to Calvary; in Massacre of the Innocents, Herod’s army wears Habsburg uniforms. After the Protestant revolt of 1566, Spanish forces marched on the Netherlands to crush dissent and stamp out heresy. Arriving in 1567, the Duke of Alba placed the region under martial law, disbanding citizen militias, replacing native officials with Spanish ones, and executing many thousands, including the Counts of Egmond and Horn, who were beheaded in the Grand-Palace of Brussels, just a few blocks from Bruegel’s workshop on the rue Haute. Alba also clamped down on peasant customs and festivals, like the ones the artist lovingly portrayed.
Sauerländer
In Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Fitelberg, a Jew from Lublin living in Paris, says to Leverkühn, the German composer: “You probably do not realize, cher Maître, how German is your répugnance, which…I find characteristically made up of arrogance and a sense of inferiority….” Like Mann’s novel, Koerner’s discussion of the tension between the godlike self-elevation and the sinful fallen state of the artist is a commentary on the intellectual and spiritual turmoil of German art. One certainly cannot imagine a similar book being written on Venetian or Florentine art of the same period. And in a curious way Koerner himself seems deeply—or should we say narcissistically?—involved in the ambivalences of the obscure topic he has chosen for his remarkable book. It is this involvement which makes one think not only of Leverkühn but also of Thomas Mann.
Koerner’s book is difficult to argue with. It is enormously learned but it proceeds less by arguments than through the use of an evocative rhetoric and ingeniously chosen associations. Koerner himself is well aware of his own suggestive technique and illuminates it with a telling biblical metaphor:
Does not the whole character of our interpretation represent the kind of knowledge precipitated by the bite into the apple: fallen knowledge as the advent of a plethora of meanings without the authority of a meaning, and as the loss of an unequivocal and “natural” access to things and to the meaning of things?
The loss of stable meanings and established authority, and the resulting uncertainties about truth and falsehood, according to Koerner, are thus not simply the product of our postmodern and poststructuralist age, but have been with us since the Fall. Against “a plethora of meanings,” arguments are of little help. But Koerner is much too intelligent and self-conscious a writer not to see the traps in which fallen knowledge may be caught. “One sometimes wonders,” he writes, “whether what art historians discover as the implied beholder is not really a reflection of themselves transposed in the historical material.” Turning narcissism into a method of interpretation was perhaps the price he has had to pay for writing a stimulating book that offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship.
There are other examples both more extreme than Frampton’s, and less. Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,N,G restages Duchamp’s demispheres and Anemic Cinema, as desperation. The flickering image of a man with his tongue sticking out between the blades of a pair of scissors is such an obvious image of castration that it renders anything else secondary. Add to that the voice repeating the word “destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy…” –the auditory equivalent of a flicker– and you get an art of symptom described by the artist and appreciative critics as “structuralism”.
I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy is released to create its own objects, shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms. create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color- space (rather than picture it). and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).[i]
This is the denial of representation in the presence of representation in its most blunt form. It’s not the elision and denial of Eliot or James; it’s exhibitionismand denial, more absurd than the earnest description of Mapplethorpe photographs, if only because Mapplethorpe himself didn’t write them. T,O,U,C,H,N,G, likeso much 20thcentury art –Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, like all philosophy is the theological literature of rationalism – is about the desire and refusal of contact, wanting and refusing to be touched. It didn’t shock me or offend me the first time I saw it. I saw the antecedents. I’d never go out of my way to argue that it was ‘bad’. But I was shocked to hear the film described as formal and not pathology and ritual.
…Paul went to the piano and he sat down at the piano and he had a wine glass and he was out of his mind and he beat the wine glass on the piano and then he beat his hands on the glass until he was just bleeding and numb and dizzy. He started to get up and I happened to be at his elbow and I said “Whoa, whoa, Paul, wait, whoa wait a minute,” because he was gushing blood everywhere, and I said, “Is anyone a doctor here? Is anyone a doctor?” And the place was completely packed shoulder to shoulder at this party, so one of the people near by was a doctor. Paul was just in a daze and I said, “Look at this—is this life-threatening?” And he said, “No, it’s not life-threatening, it’s O.K.,” and I said “Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” And Paul went around bleeding out of his hands with his hands held in front of him, almost like Frankenstein and created a swath of horror in front of him. It was a very startling moment, and there were other episodes that people will happily relate to you, in which Paul wrecks a car or climbs up on top of a roof and drops off and breaks his this or that. Paul went through a series of things where he acted out and finally what I began to notice about these things is that Paul would never hurt anybody else. He may have once or twice actually done something that was importune, but only secondarily, and it was mainly something that hurt Paul somehow, and always in a very flamboyant situation. He liked to live dangerously. Paul liked life. He seemed like he needed this kind of way of doing things. He really did.
He lived on a special plane somehow that normal people can’t touch.[ii]
Sharits behavior is less unnerving than the equally pathological response of his friend and fellow avant-gardist Tony Conrad. This is the hip, underground, American Modernist version of the American straight-world, Time-Life–CBS view of Warhol as a celebrant of style. But glamour is vanity. Warhol's Jackies and Marilyns, Disastersand Electric Chairs, his films with his Superstarswere all equally memento mori. He watched people who were out of control and let them be, as Callie Angell put it, out of a Catholic understanding of free will, while Conrad is a voyeur blind to his own desires. The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny.
“Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.” A medical professional would call it enabling.
But Hawthorne and Lawrence, and Tarantino, Spielberg and Pynchon, novelists and filmmakers, are not ‘artists’, and Frampton and Sharits are. Their work is shown only in the context of the contemporary art world as defined by Arthur Danto, which American philosophy is optimistic.
It’s telling that Fried makes an exception for film, which he refers as “the movies”, ignoring the avant-garde entirely.
It is the overcoming of theatre that modernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theatre entirely—the movies.* This helps explain why movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre— automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge—more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.
*Exactly how the movies escape theatre is a beautiful question, and there is no doubt but that a phenomenology of the cinema that concentrated on the similarities and differences between it and the theatre—eg., that in the movies the actors are mot physically present, the film itself is projected away from us, the screen is mot experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific physical relation to us, etc. –would be extremely rewarding. Cavell, again, has called attention, in conversation, to the sort of remembering that goes into giving an account of a movie, and more generally to the nature of the difficulties that are involved in giving such an account.[iii]
The footnote is taken from the essay as published in Artforumand later in Battcock's anthology. Reprinted in 1998, beautifulis replaced with difficult, rewarding has been stripped on its modifier, and the last sentence with the reference to Cavell and memory has been removed.[iv]
The last paragraph
This essay will be read as an attack on certain artists (and critics) and as a defense of others. And of course it is true that the desire to distinguish between what is to me the authentic art of our time and other work, which, whatever the dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators, seems to me to share certain characteristics associated here with the concepts of literalism and theatre,' has largely motivated what I have written. In these last sentences, how ever, I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theatre. We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.
The final sentence almost makes me laugh… Sharits’ “immediate presence”.
In 2004 MIT press published Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Chronophobia: the fear of time. The author calls it a neologism, but it isn’t. It’s also at the core to the author’s own writing. Pamela M Lee, now at Yale has the title “historian and theorist of contemporary art”. She’s a historian of the present. Forgetting the Art World, came out in 2012, 48 years after Danto named it. Her most recent book is The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption, “How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.”
Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of “disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.
The foreword is written by a curator at MoMA. Again it’s the aestheticization of politics, and the aesthetic shared by philosophy and luxury commodities, but also now an almost explicit combination of (ersatz) moralism and technocratic decadence. No longer even sincere hypocrisy or earnest contradiction, it’s a blank obliviousness, the innocence of the children of the conflicted and hypocritical who’ve never had to even pretend to face real politics.
Chronophobia isn’t wrong about the 60s any more than the curators of the Duchamp exhibition were wrong to mention David Lynch. But they ignored Hitchcock, and so does Lee. There’s plenty of discussion here of “nuclear apocalypse and entertainment”; there’s an interesting chapter on Tinguely and Homage to New York, but no mention of Kubrick and Strangelove. There’s discussion of the Jonathan Edwards and Fried’s earnest academic moralism –hard to ignore since Fried begins and ends with him– but none of the deeper because visceral Puritanism in the work of Judd or Andre.
Lee ignores Hitchcock, but So does Barbara Rose. Lee has a chapter on Bridget Riley and on Op art, describing an art not of communication but effect. The connections by now should be clear.
To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it but feel it, experience the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body—a body endlessly subjected to the vagaries of time? Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colors—psychedelic phantoms—emanate from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids, rattling the skull. The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache.
…Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture and, more to the point, how the time of that body speaks to the repressive consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. The body, I want to argue, is the blind spot to Op’s obsession with the technological; and it is its temporality that gives the lie to this. The body performs what Op’s supporters insistently failed to see. More often than not, this body is a specifically gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent.
Lee, following the logic of the academic culture that made her, she’s now an editor at October, both condescends to Riley and defends her: critics’ description of passivity and impotence is merely the dismissing of the female. We’re back to another version of the art of the index, an art that can be read as an art of ideas, of intention, whether admitted or not. Somehow or other, art has to have a program, a “project” and a core of optimism.
This notion is critical to the deepening suspicion, even paranoia, about Op. Nevertheless, Op was considered user-friendly stuff in spite of the aggression attributed to it, its eye-hurting glare, virtually hypnotic powers, and nausea-inducing effects. As Barbara Rose put it cynically: “Op is absolutely gratifying in this respect because you know that you have gotten the message once nausea or vertigo set in.”
The title of Rose’s review is “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art At The Modern”. Lee makes one reference to Hitchcock elsewhere, mentioning him in his connection Saul Bass—“the graphic designer best known for his title sequences to Alfred Hitchcock”, but no mention of their most famous collaboration. I dealt with this more than 30 years ago, linking Duchamp to Hitchcock to mechanically ‘optical’ abstraction:
Vertigo is an early precedent here as it is to all later artistic use of psychedelic imagery, images of the subconscious, Op-Art patterning or illustrations of drug-induced states. Pynchon uses similar terms, central to the American romance –what it has become– and its relations with the physical world and the psychosis of modern life. These are images of the loss of the self, unable to define its surroundings, to distinguish itself from them, and thus being relegated to passive observation.
My language is stilted but it makes the point. The illustration –graphic stimulus– of immediate sensorial effect is experience without effort, passive. Much of the art of the 1960s describes that experience, because much of popular visual culture manifests it. Lee quotes a newspaper editorial responding to the show.
And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this, that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our time have the same effect on our observers: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled grey. The distortion of old values, and the crowding of new cultures, presents a peculiar aspect to the eye. It is painful.
Who is to tell what are the facts in Viet Nam, for instance? The government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions of our own officials there are deliberately distorted, and friend slips into foe and back again. The alliances with Europe are not what they seem, and the image of the Communist world clashes with reality. . . . It is all painful.
Lee adds, “One might forgive the authorless editorial its tired clichés about art (‘art is the expression of the age’)" .
And what else is it?
And what else is she? Lee is roughly my age. After undergraduate years at Yale she went to The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, at the time a hotbed of artistic and political radicalism, where academic theory met luxury commodities. We have mutual acquaintances if not friends: people who are now curators at major US Museums and the people who told me I couldn’t be a leftist because I worked with my hands, who condescended to me even as I built their projects, since they designed their art and were proudly manually incompetent. They dealt as she does with ideas and concepts, the idea of art and the of idea of politics, neither of which are synonyms for the things themselves; the aestheticization of politics is the politics of design. Immateriality is clean by definition. The curatorial and critical studies program at the ISP has been rebranded. and students are now “Helena Rubinstein Fellows”, fitting culture of vanguardism and culture of “disruption”of Madison avenue.
The weakness of Chronophobia becomes clear once you realize she needs to take “Art and Objecthood” seriously as anything more than a relic, her belief that it must be more than a product of its age, because it was written by an academic, about fine art.
This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time. Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,” time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal something about technological change.
The “richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making” includes The Rolling Stones, Pierrot le Fou, The Armies of the Night, The Flintstones, Albert Ayler, and Woodstock. That list is a joke because any list would be. Lee refers to Slaughterhouse Five and an article by Pynchon from 1984 but as with her discussion of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, she focuses on things that are now seen by most people as relics. And Snow is a relic too
Snow’s position was critical in articulating the historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia.
This is the academia of “modernist projects”, of Weber and von Neumann, of post war rationalism and the capitalism of the golden age, the technophilia of Daston and Galison, and MIT, the home now of “The Futures of Entertainment”
The Futures of Entertainment is an annual event which explores the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences and the way these groups interact and intersect with one another. By combining a mix of leading media studies scholars and cutting-edge media and marketing practitioners from a diverse range of locations and sectors--in conjunction with fans, activists, journalists, analysts, and other voices--in lengthy discussion, this two-day conference explores how the media industries are evolving, how storytelling is changing and the shifting dynamics in how people relate to media properties and brands.
The tagline for these events is that they are “at the intersection of industry and academia”.
The positivist definition of art is illustration. If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of Paul Sharits. For all the discussion of the delivery of content, the content itself is seen as meaningless. This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism, revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue. But for all the empty pretension of the technocratic intellectual elite, most of life, one way or another, is craft.
I remember once, long ago, I used to not do commercials and said I didn’t believe in them. And then they said, “Ken Loach has done quite a few of them.” So I phoned up Ken and he said, “If you don’t take money out of those capitalist pockets, then someone else will, and you’ve got mouths to feed. Do it!”[v]
Mike Leigh, just like the biggest Hollywood directors, production designers and cinematographers, makes commercials. The money flows like water. You can have a lot of fun spending three million dollars for a 30 second spot.But as with cathedral ceilings, it’s not the dogma that matters, but what you do with it.As I tried to explain to one of the leaders of the MIT symposia, an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, the interesting thing about ads now is that they’ve become almost independent of their function: a good spot can by no more than a 30 second movie with a name at the end; the actual “ad” is 2 seconds, now associated with the 28 second comedy that preceded it. Or it’s tiny film with "product placement". The definition of art hasn’t changed, because people haven’t changed. And the men and women, the craftspeople, some with hand tools and paint who get their hands dirty, and some with electronics, who together make the ads that the intellectuals of Madison avenue dream up, laugh. And if the ads are remembered they’ll be remembered as cathedral ceilings are, by people who have no interest in Jesus Christ or Alka Seltzer.Beyond that of course, all comparisons fall apart. Ads are art, but they’re disposable, what jingles are to pop songs. But to the academics who study and serve Madison Avenue, corporate communication is art in the service of a cause. Instead of Church censors’ stamp of approval, or Diderot’s defense of Greuze’ moralism, or the bromides ofsocialist realism, or theart of the “Modern Project”, we get a new brand of philosophic art, the vanguardism of the marketplace.
[i] Paul Sharits, "Notes on Films/1966-1968”, Film Culture 47(Summer 1969) p.13.
[ii] Tony Conrad, “On Paul Sharits: An Excerpt from ‘I Was a Flawed Modernist’”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 1 2017,
[iv] Jonathan T. D. Neil, “’Structural Film,’ as Technique of History”, 2004 unpublished http://jonathantdneil.com/pdfs/StructuralFilmAsTechniqueOfHistory.pdf
I teach a standard Contemporary Moral Issues/Applied Ethics course once a year, usually in the Spring, in lecture format, usually with 80-100 students (but this year with 170). Normally about 70% of the students are seniors, and about 70% are business majors (it meets an ethics requirement in the business major). We discuss topics such as abortion, inequality in education, parental licensing,...
Technocracy
Opposition to freedom of speech.
"Epistocracy"
Liberal Fascism: Jonah Goldberg is the poor man's Foucault.
Some people would want children taken away from parents for teaching them that Zionism is racist.
Literacy tests for voting, since the American people are responsible for the deaths for millions.
How about abortion licenses, since some women are just irresponsible.
Abortion is legal because it's better to allow an irresponsible woman to abort a fetus that may be near viable than have the state chain her to a bed till she gives birth; a trimester is a measure of time not moral truth. We do not grant the state the right to micro-manage. Democracy's a bloody mess and needs to be.
Freedom of speech is predicated on the assumption that experts are not what they pretend. It is not about personal freedom but self-government.
"The focus is on the freedom of a people, not on freedom of persons: on the plural, not the singular."
I wrote that before I'd read Arendt on plurality. I was raised with it.
Liberalism is garbage.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
The modern definition of individualism expands out of the private realm that Arendt calls the 'social', as opposed to the public and political. The individualism of the Greeks was public. She uses the same word for both. Modern individualism includes the realm of business, private gain as public goal. Mixed with this is the sense that the new model brings with it an immunity from judgment, at least if you follow the law. Law becomes a border best handled by pedants. Modern individualism is Liberal as opposed to republican, no longer founded on a public/political model of individualism, of debate beyond self-interest. Virtue has been replaced by regulations. Greek political debate was debate among equals.
Liberalism spawned libertarianism, but sports are a public activity following the older model. Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument only works in the context of formalist liberalism and liberals have no logical answer. But Chamberlain wasn’t interested only in money—the private realm—but in money and fame and glory and respect. He needed his audience as they needed him. If he did something to really annoy them, they’d walk away, no matter how good he was. People didn’t pay money to watch Evel Knievel jump over a row of trucks, they paid for the right to watch him die trying. Performance is a social activity, not simply a financial one. We're back to the distinction between law as idea and law as practice, between philosophers and lawyers, academics and actors, in politics or on the stage, between pedants and comedians.
The Human Condition
The Rise of the Social
The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age.
This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the bar- barian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related....
This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek city-states. To belong to the few "equals" (homoioi) meant to be permitted to live among one's peers; but the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all (aien aristeuein).34 The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or less willing to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public affairs.
It is the same conformism, the assumption that men behave and do not act with respect to each other, that lies at the root of the modern science of economics, whose birth coincided with the rise of society and which, together with its chief technical tool, statistics, became the social science par excellence. Economics—until the modern age a not too important part of ethics and politics and based on the assumption that men act with respect to their economic activities as they act in every other respect35—could achieve a scientific character only when men had become social beings and unanimously followed certain patterns of behavior, so that those who did not keep the rules could be considered to be asocial or abnormal.
The laws of statistics are valid only where large numbers or long periods are involved, and acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations or fluctuations. The justification of sta- tistics is that deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history. Yet the meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare deeds, just as the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the willful obliteration of their very subject matter, and it is a hopeless enterprise to search for meaning in politics or significance in history when everything that is not everyday behavior or automatic trends has been ruled out as immaterial.
However, since the laws of statistics are perfectly valid where we deal with large numbers, it is obvious that every increase in population means an increased validity and a marked decrease of "deviation." Politically, this means that the larger the population in any given body politic, the more likely it will be the social rather than the political that constitutes the public realm. The Greeks, whose city-state was the most individualistic and least conformable body politic known to us, were quite aware of the fact that the polls, with its emphasis on action and speech, could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted. Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule; and although statistics, that is, the mathematical treatment of reality, was unknown prior to the modern age, the social phenomena which make such treatment possible—great numbers, accounting for conformism, behavior- ism, and automatism in human affairs—were precisely those traits which, in Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own.
The unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its "laws" is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely to tolerate non-behavior. Statistically, this will be shown in the leveling out of fluctuation. In reality, deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time. Statistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.
The uniform behavior that lends itself to statistical determination, and therefore to scientifically correct prediction, can hardly be explained by the liberal hypothesis of a natural "harmony of interests," the foundation of "classical" economics; it was not Karl Marx but the liberal economists themselves who had to introduce the "communistic fiction," that is, to assume that there is one interest of society as a whole which with "an invisible hand" guides the behavior of men and produces the harmony of their conflicting interests.36 The difference between Marx and his fore- runners was only that he took the reality of conflict, as it pre- sented itself in the society of his time, as seriously as the hypothetical fiction of harmony; he was right in concluding that the "socialization of man" would produce automatically a harmony of all interests, and was only more courageous than his liberal teachers when he proposed to establish in reality the "communistic fiction" underlying all economic theories. What Marx did not— and, at his time, could not—understand was that the germs of communistic society were present in the reality of a national household, and that their full development was not hindered by any class-interest as such, but only by the already obsolete monarchical structure of the nation-state. Obviously, what pre- vented society from smooth functioning was only certain tradi- tional remnants that interfered and still influenced the behavior of "backward" classes. From the viewpoint of society, these were merely disturbing factors in the way of a full development of "social forces"; they no longer corresponded to reality and were therefore, in a sense, much more "fictitious" than the scientific "fiction" of one interest.
A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of "communistic fiction," whose outstanding political characteris- tic is that it is indeed ruled by an "invisible hand," namely, by nobody. What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration—a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the "withering away of the state," though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the "realm of freedom."37
To gauge the extent of society's victory in the modern age, its early substitution of behavior for action and its eventual substitu- tion of bureaucracy, the rule of nobody, for personal rulership, it may be well to recall that its initial science of economics, which substitutes patterns of behavior only in this rather limited field of human activity, was finally followed by the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as "behavioral sciences," aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal. If economics is the science of society in its early stages, when it could impose its rules of be- havior only on sections of the population and on parts of their activities, the rise of the "behavioral sciences" indicates clearly the final stage of this development, when mass society has devoured all strata of the nation and "social behavior" has become the stand- ard for all regions of life.
----
34. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochm emmenai allon ("always to be the best and to rise above others") is the central concern of Homer's heroes (Iliad vi. 208), and Homer was "the educator of Hellas."
35. "The conception of political economy as primarily a 'science' dates only from Adam Smith" and was unknown not only to antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also to canonist doctrine, the first "complete and economic doctrine" which "differed from modern economics in being an 'art' rather than a 'science' " (W. J. Ashley, of. tit., pp. 379 ff.). Classical economics assumed that man, in so far as he is an active being, acts exclusively from self-interest and is driven by only one desire, the desire for acquisition. Adam Smith's introduction of an "invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [anybody's] intention" proves that even this minimum of action with its uniform motivation still con- tains too much unpredictable initiative for the establishment of a science. Marx developed classical economics further by substituting group or class interests for individual and personal interests and by reducing these class interests to two ma- jor classes, capitalists and workers, so that he was left with one conflict, where classical economics had seen a multitude of contradictory conflicts. The reason why the Marxian economic system is more consistent and coherent, and there- fore apparently so much more "scientific" than those of his predecessors, lies primarily in the construction of "socialized man," who is even less an acting being than the "economic man" of liberal economics.
36. That liberal utilitarianism, and not socialism, is "forced into an un- tenable 'communistic fiction' about the unity of society" and that "the com- munist fiction [is] implicit in most writings on economics" constitutes one of the chief theses of Myrdal's brilliant work {op. ck., pp. 54 and 150). He shows con- clusively that economics can be a science only if one assumes that one interest pervades society as a whole. Behind the "harmony of interests" stands always the "communistic fiction" of one interest, which may then be called welfare or commonwealth. Liberal economists consequently were always guided by a "communistic" ideal, namely, by "interest of society as a whole" (pp. 194—95). The crux of the argument is that this "amounts to the assertion that society must be conceived as a single subject. This, however, is precisely what cannot be conceived. If we tried, we would be attempting to abstract from the essential fact that social activity is the result of the intentions of several individuals" (p. 154).
37. For a brilliant exposition of this usually neglected aspect of Marx's rele- vance for modern society, see Siegfried Landshut, "Die Gegenwart im Lichte derMarxschen Lehre," Hamburger Jahrbuch fitr Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik,Vol. I (1956)
Arendt, Truth and Politics
Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.
(It is this capacity for an "enlarged mentality" that enables men to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of his Critique of Judgment, though he did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery.) The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one's own private interests. Hence, even if I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not sim- ply together only with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative o f everybody else. Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge. But the very quality ofan opinion, as ofajudgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality.
Baehr, editor's introduction, The Portable Hannah Arendt
To make matters worse, compassion tends to generate an attitude of suspicion whose paranoia is exceeded only by the zeal that accompanies it. Whereas deeds and words have an "objective" reality (they can be seen and heard), emotions such as compassion reside in the invisible recesses of our inner life. If they are to shine in public as a beacon of policy, they must be professed, but the more a person feels bound to profess his sin- cerity the more it appears that his action is prompted by ulterior motives: "me thinks he doth protest too much." So begins the search to find the hypocrites, a quest that can have no intrinsic terminus because the feelings of the heart are ultimately immeasurable and constantly in flux. Further- more, the bloodhounds of suspicion follow a scent that all too often turns out to be their own. Because compassion is a matter of changing mood and sensation rather than something stable like a physical artifact or visible like ahuman deed, even its exponents can never feel certain ofwhether they are paragons of empathy, or just phonies in disguise. The result is an even greater desire to demonstrate their feelings as unfeigned and to continue a cycle of behavior that is at once bloody and self-destructive. For Arendt, the opposite of compassion is not cynical indifference to the plight of those who suffer, but rather solidarity and respect, principles that may be occasioned by an emotion, but which in their generalized concern for human dignity (of the fortunate and of the unfortunate alike), their rejection of condescension and self-righteousness, their realism and sense of perspective offer superior resources for dealing with oppression and exploitation than the passions and sentiments of the heart.
Arendt On Violence
Progress, to be sure, is a more serious and a more complex item offered at the superstition fair of our time. The irrational nineteenth-century belief in unlimited progress has found universal acceptance chiefly because of the astounding development of the natural sciences, which, since the rise of the modern age, actually have been "universal" sciences and therefore could look forward to an unending task in exploring the immensity of the universe. That science, even though no longer limited by the finitude of the earth and its nature, should be subject to never-ending progress is by no means certain; that strictly scientific research in the humanities, the so-called Geisteswissenschaften that deal with the products of the human spirit, must come to an end by definition is obvious. The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.* It is noteworthy that the rebellion of the young, to the extent that it is not exclusively morally or politically motivated, has been chiefly directed against the academic glorification of scholarship and science, both of which, though for different reasons, are gravely compromised in their eyes. And it is true that it is by no means impossible that we have reached in both cases a turning point, the point of destructive returns. Not only has the progress of science ceased to coincide with the progress of mankind (whatever that may mean), but it could even spell mankind's end, just as the further progress of scholarship may well end with the destruction of everything that made scholarship worth our while. Progress, in other words, can no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes we have let loose.
*for a splendid exemplification of these not merely superfluous but pernicious enterprises, see Edmund Wilson, The Fruits of the MLA, NY 1968
[I've removed other footnotes]
Sunday, April 14, 2019
At this point it's been seven years, reworking the first two minutes, and a few things later on. I think again at least for now I've solved the biggest problems I was having.
The point was always to move from overtly formal to 'formless'. After about seven minutes it's the straight footage in the order it was shot, recording my decisions, without color manipulation or correction. But I didn't wait for things to happen. I pushed record when I saw something interesting and pushed stop when I got bored with it.
Early on when I had someone else do the color work I realized he'd darkened a shot to hide the fact that someone was looking at the camera. But I realized that I'd used it on purpose. I was cutting the first section for comedy; it made me laugh but I hadn't thought about why. The footage is full of them and I'd telegraphed them all. I was making something theatrical and also voyeuristic, as street photography is, making art out of people's lives and their annoyance is the counterpoint, the world looking back, the gaze photojournalism ignores. If I didn't have actors at least I could give the strangers I photographed without permission the chance to say fuck you. And they do.
Art is a lie, but Baudelaire was right to say that good art acknowledges both object and subject, "the world external to the artist and the artist himself."
Two, or three, very different forms of artifice, artificiality. The change as the music changes between the second and third section is clear enough. And the last two sections may get boring. That's ok.
And since I'm putting it up again I might as well repost this as well. The two films, videos whatever you want to call them, that I've completed, more or less, in the past ten years
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Last week on a whim I approached the Resnick-Passlof Foundation with a proposal for an exhibition, putting the abstractions for which Resnick became famous next to his last figurative works, and putting both in a larger historical context. I referred half-jokingly to a Jewish sense of materialism, a vulgar as opposed to idealist physicality. I mentioned Pissarro but also specifically, given the overlap, Soutine. I was thinking also of Titian and Rembrandt, the materialism of trading cultures.
Soutine's name brought out a surprisingly enthusiastic response. Resnick loved Soutine's work, and I read later in the week that Resnick had said he'd been a huge influence for painters in the late 1940s. Picasso's work had become stale and Soutine's paint handing had been a revelation.
This fit with something else I'd been thinking about: the interest in the tactile as opposed to the merely visual in post-war art. The sense that physicality in paint, impasto, often but not always coincides with a sense of pictorial depth, not geometrical but the perception of distance from the human viewer. Wölfflin etc. Also a relationship between the formal simplicity of iconographic art and serialism, minimalism etc: the sense that structure is a given, a ground, allowing other interests to come to the fore. See the relation Fontana's abstract 'paintings' to his figurative sculpture. And in the age of photography and film, paintings are still things, not images of things. For sculpture, see my responses to Fried et al.
And then there's the odd mix of personal and impersonal, the subjectivism of CoBrA the emptiness or void of the Zero school being the technocratic grid within which individual human beings live their lives, see: Kubrick/Piranesi.
As I said in a letter to the foundation director
Some of the work is cool, some is hot, much of it is dark again responding to post-war optimism of the boom years, but the focus on physicality is a common trait.
My mistake was to say that all of this went against 'formalism'. I said specifically that it separated de Kooning's women from this abstractions, which although I didn't say it, quickly became mannered.
After the meeting I'd sent a thank-you note and received a detailed reply, cc'd to a trustee. My response to that a day later, with a more detailed description and a link to images on a private page I'd set up got no reply. I dropped in after work on Friday, since I'm working in the neighborhood, and it was clear immediately that I had no reason to be there. The director barely looked up from his computer screen. My proposal was "interesting"; his tone was curt. I mumbled a few words, an attempt at something if only to lead into a goodbye, but the conversation was over.
Resnick's late switch to figuration surprised people, but not as much as Guston's switch to cartoons and black comedy. I remember people being nonplussed. It was seen as a step backwards, a betrayal of progress.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the stupidity of what happened this week.
Resnick
Resnick
Soutine
de Kooning
Ryman (L) Fontana (R)
Fontana
Resnick
Bacon
Guston
Appel(L) Dubuffet (R)
Guston
Soutine
Ryman (L) Manzoni (R)
Manzoni
Uecker
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus. It means just what it says. Ferdinand I was a Catholic absolutist.
Justice is for and of god. Kant's twist is silly, Arendt's obliviousness to history is just odd. Spinoza was writing after Westphalia.
Arendt, Truth and Politics
The subject of these reflections is a commonplace. No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men–that is, to beings who know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again disappear into it? Finally, is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth? These are uncomfortable questions, but they arise necessarily out of our current convictions in this matter.
What lends this commonplace its high plausibility can still be summed up in the old Latin adage "Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus" ("Let justice be done though the world may perish"). Apart from its probable author in the sixteenth century (Ferdinand I, successor to Charles V), no one has used it except as a rhetorical question: Should justice be done if the world's survival is at stake? And the only great thinker who dared to go against the grain of the question was Immanuel Kant, who boldly explained that the "proverbial saying ... means in simple language: 'Justice shall prevail, even though all the rascals in the world should perish as a result.' " Since men would not find it worth while to live in a world utterly deprived of justice, this "human right must be held sacred, regardless of how much sacrifice is required of the powers that be . . . regardless of what might be the physical consequences thereof."[1] But isn't this answer absurd? Doesn't the care for existence clearly precede everything else–every virtue and every principle? Is it not obvious that they become mere chimeras if the world, where alone they can be manifested, is in jeopardy? Wasn't the seventeenth century right when it almost unanimously declared that every commonwealth was duty bound to recognize, in Spinoza's words, "no higher law than the safety of [its] own realm"? [2] For surely every principle that transcends sheer existence can be put in the place of justice, anq if we put truth in its place–"Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus"–the old saying sounds even more plausible. If we understand political action in terms of the means-end category, we may even come to the only seemingly paradoxical conclusion that lying can very well serve to establish or safeguard the conditions for the search after truth–as Hobbes, whose relentless logic never fails to carry arguments to those extremes where their absurdity becomes obvious, pointed out long ago.[3] And lies, since they are often used as substitutes for more violent means, are apt to be considered relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action.
Reconsidering the old Latin saying, it will therefore come as something of a surprise that the sacrifice of truth for the survival of the world would be more futile than the sacrifice of any other principle or virtue. For while we may refuse even to ask ourselves whether life would still be worth living in a world deprived of such notions as justice and freedom, the same, curiously, is not possible with respect to the seemingly so much less political idea of truth. What is at stake is survival, the perseverance in existence (in suo esse perseverare), and no human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously–namely λἐγειν τα ἐὀντα, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.
---
1. Eternal Peace, Appendix I
2. I quote from Spinoza's Political Treatise because it is noteworthy that even
Spinoza, for whom the libertas philosophandi was the true end of government,
should have taken so radical a position.
3. In the Leviathan (ch. 46) Hobbes explains that "disobedience may lawfully be
punished in them, that against the laws teach even true philosophy." For is not "leisure the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth the mother of peace and leisure"? And does it not follow that the Commonwealth will act in the interest ofphilosophy when it suppresses a truth which undermines peace? Hence the truthteller, in order to cooperate in an enterprise which is so necessary for his own peace of body and decides to write what he knows "to be false philosophy." Of this Hobbes suspected Aristotle of all people, who according to him "writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of [the Greeks'] religion; fearing the fate of Socrates." It never occurred to Hobbes that all search for truth would be self-defeating if its conditions could be guaranteed only by deliberate falsehoods. Then, indeed, everybody may turn out to be a liar like Hobbes' Aristode. Unlike this figment of Hobbes' logical fantasy, the real Aristotle was of course sensible enough to leave Athens when he came to fear the fate of Socrates; he was not wicked enough to write what he knew to be false, nor was he stupid enough to solve his problem of survival by destroying everything he stood for.
On Charles V
When he renounced his crown in 1555, retiring to a monastery he took nine of Titian’s paintings with him, including the monumental ‘Triumph of Faith”, La Gloria”, “and he is said to have looked at it in his dying days with such persistence and intensity of feeling that his doctors took fright.”
