Thursday, November 27, 2008

I do not want those people behind the wheel

In an earlier post I scolded Slavoj Žižek for his position on the economic crisis. His idea was that the bailout is unfair, but in the current system the rich have to be helped for the poor to be saved, so he concluded with: "obey, but think". What irritated me then - and what has irritated me for as long as I have known Žižek's writing - is the reactionary character of someone who has the audacity to present himself as a progressive thinker. Now it would seem that - what a surprise - US banks are using the no-strings-attached 700 billion to buy other banks and not much of the money will trickle down to the people it was intended to help:

Base and superstructure

The metaphor of base and superstructure that Karl Marx used in the preface to his Contribution to a critique of political economy is one of the most often misunderstood metaphors, which is no wonder since a vast number of people don't bother to read anything besides this preface and perhaps Engel's letter to Borgius. Engels was - like Althusser - interpreting this metaphor as a determination in the last instance, a indirect and mediated determination, but a one-way determination none the less. The obvious problem with such a conceptualization is that it negates entirelly the radical political moment of marxism - philosophers would be doomed to merely interpret the world. We should not be taking this metaphor too seriously, since with it Marx was summing up his thinking from the time he was writing his Contribution to a critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. The obvious path would be then to look at this text to make sense of the metaphor. The preface already shows that a one-way determinism is not what Marx meant with base and superstructure. He claims that only by having philosophy reveal the laws of historical development will the proletariat be able to become a revolutionary force - hence the upheaval of the base is dependant upon action from the superstructure. A further point can be made if we look at Marx' critique of religion. He claims that religion is in a functional connection to social praxis:

Religious misery is in a sense an expression of real misery and in another a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the tormented creature, the conscience of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of bleak circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

A second important point is made in the Feuerbach part of the German ideology. Here Marx and Engels claim that social consciousness was originally merely directly registering praxis. As material and intellectual production split, consciousness itself gained autonomy. The important point is that the relationship of base and superstructure is not a constant but historically variable. We could therefore speak of a one-way determinism only in societies that did not yet develop speech and where intellectual production is fully integrated into material production. Since we have instances of technically accomplished cave paintings - that is to say paintings done by someone with artistic training, hence someone who specialized in intellectual work - from as early as the late paleolithic, this pure determinism is a very distant historical state.

Tiepolo and Zuccarelli

As I reread my previous post I realized I had written something that might strike the reader as odd; I attributed to Tiepolo and Zuccarelli the playful rendition of everyday life. Surely this does not hold for Tiepolo who was thematically speaking very much in the baroque tradition: biblical scenes and depictions of the lives of saints are predominant with the occasional mythological motive from ancient Greece or Rome. Zuccarelli fits more closely to my description, but he liked to portray idyllic country scenes, sometimes adding mythical figures like fawns to spice up scenes of bacchantic folly. None of the two painters was interested in depicting the life of the rising bourgeoisie - since most of Tiepolos work was commissioned either by the church or by aristocracy, he was still rooted firmly in the old order of the world. Zuccarelli also had patrons among the aristocracy, but his paintings were obviously intended for a different function, not for public exhibition but for private enjoyment, for the aristocracy that was already under the sway of bourgeois values. Tiepolo's paintings were obviously meant for public use in the context of what Habermas had called representative publicity - the public showcasing of authority. This is revealed in the excessive pathso of his compositions, baroque drama taken to the extreme, but on the other hand the colour palette reveals an entirely different story. Baroque painters had discovered the dramatic effect of light and shadow and even master of colour like Rembrandt in his later years (Johannes Itten noted that Rembrandt's colours are like gems glittering in the darkness) subordinated colour to the effects of light and shadow. If baroque can be characterised as dramatic (deviating from the rationalism of the renaissance and the middle ages), the 18. century is somewhat schizophrenic: on the one hand compositions are nearly bursting with dynamism, everything that was still solid in baroque now melts away, every trace of rationalism and order that the baroque retained is abandoned in favour of drama. The colour palette on the other hand became by far less serious, the dramatic opposition of dark and light gave way to the play of bright colours, harsh contrasts are avoided, there are no uniform expressive planes of colour, everything is in motion, everything is in harmony and everything expresses a joie de vivre. It is this quality of colour that is chronicling the ongoing social transformation. It expresses the very ideal of bourgeois intimacy. Art of the 18. century is a prophesy, it is the trumpet that singalls the by now inevitable triumph of the bourgeoisie.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Bourgeois sentimentalism

The other day I was listening to a radio programme, in which a Roman publisher was talking about how Boris Pahor (among other things Knight of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur and repeated nominee for the Nobel prize in literature) was for a long time virtually unknown in Rome. What struck me was not so much the provincialism of Rome, but the words the publisher chose to praise the writer, taken right from the stock of romanticist criticism: he praised the "depth" of his writing and the "sincerity" of his testimony. It made me wonder whether Habermas was right in Theory of communicative action to ban art to the realm of intimate testimony, to be judged according to the criterion of sincerity. Was the historical avant-garde just a fleeting flash of light that made the subsequent darkness all the harder to bear?

To properly understand sentimentalism, we must go back in time a bit. It is inextricably intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie, which during the 18. century discovered a whole new phenomenon, completely foreign to feudal society - intimacy and the subjective experience housed by this sphere of life. As the bourgeoisie was also beginning to take the leading role in the realm of culture, this preoccupation with subjectivity also appeared in art: whether in introspective literature, the predominance of melody in music (one need only think of the emotion-laden melodies of Mozart) or of the playful rendition of everyday life in painting (Tiepolo or Zuccarelli come to mind). Biedermeier of course represents the grotesque peak of this movement - intimacy gone awry - expressing a radically entrenched privatism, fleeing from the gradual decay of progressive bourgeois ideals and their immanent shattering in the reactionary reflexes of 1848.

I do not want to argue that under the sway of sentimentalism critical art is unable to flourish, but there is a danger of intimacy becoming an alibi for the flaws of the world, or as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia 110 - Constanze:

As longing for that which dispenses with labour the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But by constructing the true as unmediated in the all-present untrue it perverts the former and transforms it into the latter. Not only does pure emotion, insofar as it is possible at all in the economically determined system, become a social alibi for the hegemony of interest and acclaims a humanity that does not exist. But the unwilfulness of love itself, even when not a priori practically oriented, contributes to this totality as soon as it is established as a principle.

It is in artists such as Euripides and Kafka that a rising dischord is felt between private destiny and the order of the world. While still staying in the confines of metaphysics - the notion of fate is strong with both writers - the order of the world is no longer seen as inherently just and rational, it is no longer pure form, but takes on an arbitrary and alltogehter alien character. Here we witness the sprouting of the same intellectual seed that Marx planted in German Ideology and Contribution to the critique of political economy, namely the realization that ideas are not the governing principle of the world, or as we could put it in Adorno's terms: recognition of the non-identical. It is from this rupture between form and heteronomy of the non-identical that critical thought emerges as Athena from Zeus' head. Similarly it is at the point where it transcends psychology that bourgeois sentimentalism is critical. No one understood this better than Ivan Cankar, when he described the reaction of children to the letter announcing their father's death in world war one:

That evening something unknown from lands far away disturbed the heavenly light with a violent hand, it struck the hollidays, stories and fairytales mercilessly. A letter had anounced that father "fell" in Italy. "He fell". Something unknown, new, foreign, completely incomprehensible was standing before them, high and mighty, but it had no face, nor had it eyes, neither had it a mouth. It belonged to nowhere; not to this vibrant life in front of church and on the street, not to this warm dusk on the oven, not even to fairytales. It was not happy, but not particularly sad either; it was dead, since it had no eyes to reveal why and from where it came, and no mouth to tell it. Thought stood miserable and shy before this enormous apparition like before a mighty black wall and could go nowhere. It came close to the wall, stood there and was speechless.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Juxtaposition

Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectics of enlightenment:

The subject of the new ideology is the world as such. By elevating wicked existence to the realm of facts it makes use of the cult value of fact. By virtue of such transmission mere existence becomes the surrogate of meaning and justice. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful.

Kafka in Der Prozess:

"No", said the priest, "we must not believe everything is true, merely that it is necessary. "Gloomy opinion", said K. "lie becomes the world order."

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Lapsus lingue

I am currently at the Arts, Culture and Public Sphere conference in Venice, organized by the IUAV and the ESA. Yesterday Mark Jacobs gave a very inspiring lecture, where he pointed out three different perspectives from which art can be approached: art as market (the instrumental aspects of expressive practices), market as art (the expressive aspects of instrumental practices) and art as existential (existential and moral issues negotiated and expressed through art). I was captivated enough not to be able to take notes, so I will disappoint you by not recounting his lecture in detail. Yet there is one seemingly insignificant and minute detail that caught my attention, and I will report on it: the omission of Horkheimer from the authorship of Dialectics of enlightenment. One might think of it as nothing more than an accidental slip of the tongue, after all, as Freud noted: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Let us not engage into speculation about the possible latent psychological motivation of the author though - after all I would not like to reproach somebody I hold in the highest esteem with following ulterior motives - what is of interest is the act itself. I noticed the same phenomenon a few weeks ago when a friend sent me an MMS greeting from Berlin with a picture of the statues of Marx and Engels, or to be precise, with the statue of Marx; Engels had been cropped in Stalinist manner. This tradition of strategic concealment of the base has a long history. Plato wrote about dialectics as the highest form of human endeavour, yet never once mentioned that this freedom - the freedom to think, if not necessarily of thought - had been won only at the price of unfree labour of others. In German idealism the spirit hovered above the world, and it took the combined effort of Feuerbach and Marx to ground it in praxis. Similarly it was Horkheimer's enterprising spirit as head of the Institute that enabled Adorno to produce such a vast corpus of work. The bliss of philosophy – which for Adorno lay in the elevation above praxis – can be achieved only on account of others being subject to praxis the more ruthlessly. When thought is trying to escape the "wicked society" as Horkheimer and Adorno had called it in Dialectics of enlightenment, it is actually making this hell a little less bearable for those not as fortunate to be above it. The freedom one is given caries with itself an inextricable responsibility.