As part of HU’s ongoing series of critics talking about art and criticism, I’m reprinting an email conversation between myself and artist and critic Bert Stabler. We start off by talking about Marxism and Christianity, but if you stick with it, we make our way over to art (garfunkel) partway through.
If you don’t blink, you’ll see comics get sneered at a couple of times too.
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Bert: Random conundrum… I know Eugene V. Debs is one of your favorite punchlines. Did you know about Jane Addams passionately condemning the Pullman strike? Do you have any thoughts on that, now that you’re feeling sympathetic toward teachers’ unions?
Noah: I didn’t know that about Jane Addams. I don’t know much about her. Checking Wikipedia quick, I see that her father was a banker, though, which makes her anti-union sentiments not all that suprising….
Bert: I ‘m deciding to suck on the idea of non-revolutionary radicality as a coherent thing, if it is. Nonviolence is clearly a great solution (especially when you have a strong central government and TV), but Eugene V. Debs was certainly not opting for that, which Jane Addams was deploring him for, as an ultra-pacifist.
In one sense, Jane Addams is Obama and Debs is a Tea Party protester. In another sense, Debs is an isolationist and Addams is a free-trade advocate. It’s definitely a great example of the materialist-pragmatist split I’ve decided to harp on as the key divide of liberal democracy.
Noah: That’s interesting that Jane Addams was sticking to pacifism. Debs actually went to jail as an opponent of WWI — though he wasn’t a pacifist in all situations, obviously.
You can also see it as part of the ongoing battle between marxism and feminism….
Bert: Well, a pragmatic Marxist is a democratic socialist, and a materialist feminist is (often) a psychoanalysis-ist, but it’s obvious that neither precludes pacifism. Bertrand Russell was a pacifist too, and he was as materialist as humanists come (bowing before the altar of math is absolutely the variety of gnosis materialists favor)– his association with Whitehead and Wittgenstein must have frustrated him terribly.
Materialists and pragmatists can disagree about desirable outcomes, but means and meaning are likely to be strikingly different. That’s why Marxism really is never capitalism by other means– it’s freedom through law rather than outside of it.
Noah: I think Marxism and capitalism are maybe closer than you’re allowing for here. I think there are materialist capitalists — which I take to mean ideological capitalists, at least to some extent. The invisible hand isn’t that much different than the impersonal forces of history. I think C.S. Lewis would see both as giving up your will to the demonic, essentially. Putting your faith in material processes is putting your faith in material processes. Whether or not those processes are supposed to work through freedom or dialectic doesn’t necessarily make that much difference.
And on the other side…it seems you could fairly easily be a pragmatic Marxist — someone like Gorbachev, basically, working within a Marxist system but who didn’t want to be all ideological about it and hoped to basically make things better by getting them to function better. Or there’s China — lots of pragrmatic marxists there, yes?
I wonder if the pragmatic/materialist vibe you’re seeing is more pragmatic than materialist in origin. That is, capitalism throws up a lot of folks who are pragmatic because, well, they’re in power, and folks in power tend to be more interested in manipulating power than in ideology.
Bert: Capitalism is pure ultra-organized de-ideologized biopower. Chinese capitalists and Russian capitalists just aren’t real Marxists. Hardcore American conservatives– Sarah Palin, Francis Fukayama, that fairly smart pastor who ran for President– don’t believe in modernity. They believe in a halcyon era without all these competing cultural narratives. Their urge to dismantle the central government is a negative response to biopower. It’s neo-agrarian retrenchment, just like Mao.
C.S. Lewis is a Christian materialist, and, like all materialists, he’s a pessimist. In a sense all materialists are conservatives, but calling Marxists conservative kind of stretches the definition of the word. He deplores modernity for its ruthless worship of power, which is certaily how Marxism can seem from the outside.
But Marxism is not nihilistic, capitalist, or pragmatic. Marx loves capitalism, make no mistake. But there is no reason the workers should take over, except– they just should, damn it! They do all the real work, they shovel shit, they are the last that are to be first according to, well, the Christian tradition.
Dialectics are, other than being a description of the magical astrophysics of history, a pale imitation of the invisible hand, despite being more elegant. Hegel is much closer to Kant’s moral law, which Lewis loves.. a real solid thing– the spirit as a bone. The invisible hand isn’t really a concept at all, it’s just a throwaway line. Capitalism knows that all language is a transparent game, a marketing ploy– you can write rambling psychotic poetry about it if you want, or you can just get a job and claim what’s coming to you.
Eschatology is the materialist core of Christianity– the present is in flux, but the future is solid. And this element is in capitalism– it can market the hybridity, the expansion of decentered homogeneity. it promotes, but it can also market the exact opposite. Capitalism doesn’t care. In a way, Christianity is proposing tangibility as existing exclusively outside of lived immaterial reality. Immanence isn’t tangible- only the infinte really exists. The Kingdom of God. But this is Caesar’s world here and now, which deserves our patronage but not our respect.
Noah: I think that’s right about Christianity; the world is worthwhile because there’s a real outside it that exists. I guess if you go far enough that way you get gnosticism.
There is a way in which Marxism is more like that than like capitalism; there’s a belief in something that’s real (the revolution.)
At the same time…there are people who really believe in capitalism. I wonder if Milton Friedman can get into heaven just like the people who sincerely worshipped the vulture headed god in Narnia? Or are you saying that you can’t actually belief in capitalism in that way?
Bert: You’re going to get gnosticism either way, of a sort. Capitalism offers a final referent– all outlooks and experiences are valid insofar as they are “cashable”– a term William James used as philosophical terminology. Or perhaps, as long as they promote “buy-in” to the larger project of individual striving. Absolute knowledge is outside any one experience, but is manifest in a thousand professional specialites. Milton Friedman just slapped a label on this, “neoclassical economics,” and his professional specialty threw Nobel Prizes at him. As opposed to Adam Smith, who probably had to have someone else brand his genius for him after the fact. Tautologies are the only arguments pragmatists can make, like a bunch of sparks that can’t make a circuit. Beliefs are anathema.
Whereas in materialism, tautologies are anathema. As you suggest, there is a hidden authority, a genuine thingness, lurking beneath and beyond the everyday, in the more perfect past from which these mere shadows were spawned. But the true scholar can hermeneutically divine essential being.
People combine these all the time, perhaps everyone always. But it’s a major source of hypocrisy, slippage, differance, however you like it. Being pragmatic and being material seem equally transparent. They are both branches of humanism. And they both only (but continuously) allow the supernatural in bracketed forms.
Noah: There’s something profound about the fact that there is no actual Nobel Prize in economics; only a simulacrum created by bankers. The soul doesn’t exist, but the body is created by money, and that ends up being the same thing to everyone but dyspeptic cranks. I mean, Milton Friedman I’m sure felt more validated by getting a banker’s money than he would have by receiving the philanthropy of some guilty do-gooder.
Bert: Milton Friedman creates theories about how it is inevitable that a corporate-academic state infrastructure will pursue its self-interest by not interfering with its own free desire to congratulate Milton Friedman for theories such as this.
Noah: What about a caveat “unless evil uinons interfere”? Isn’t there something like that?
Bert: Closer to your sphere of interest, I just read this Matthew Collings thing in Modern Painters about how the Turner Prize (the big British art award) is going to second-rate hack entertainers instead of real artists who have been dead for half a millenium like Fra Angelico.
The classical-standards-of-beauty argument is like the forces-of-history or the nature-of-drives or the power-of-math arguments. It’s materialist, it’s pessimist, it’s always backward-looking. It’s somewhat impossible to be a critic (or a philosopher) and not be caught up in materialism, even if the critic is mouthing all sorts of statements about “effective” and “successful” art (or truth, or therapy, or politics). In fact, I admire Matthew Collings for straightforwardly doing what a critic does– offering a standard in plain, fluent, and even amusing terms. And, in the end, that’s what he’s banking on, to give him his edge in the marketplace of ideas, which does undermine his materialism to some degree, Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.
At the same time, it’s naked hypocrisy dressed up as plainspoken wisdom (a handy definition of ideology, perhaps)– if Collings’ only positive example is a Renaissance painter (with some grumbling token acknowledgement of Chris Ofili), it seems quite possible that his standards are not actually objective. As with this guy Bret Schneider on the dismal Chicago Art Criticism blog, who writes at staggering length about the aesthetic bankrupcy of relational art practice (and, while we’re at it, contemporary sculpture), with no structural insight whatsoever, there is just no firm foundation for big general complaints about the relentlessly capitalist cultural milieu without some kind of appreciation of what it is that art is supposed to be doing now. All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.
Noah: Ideology doesn’t have to be plainspoken, though. Marx writes ideology, but it’s not necessarily framed as plainspoken wisdom…. Same with any economic thoery, really. Or much theology.
“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. ”
I think this is true of visual art, maybe. Other things (comics, books, even film) much less so. I mean, there aren’t any laws about what art can or cannot be, but there are historical expectations about materials, context, even subject matter. And those expectations tend to have ideological components which you can contest or not. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at photography and say, in general this medium does this and that and the other and I don’t like that for this reason or that reason.
I mean, you’re not saying photography isn’t art. You’re saying it’s bad art. I guess you could argue that since there’s not really any agreed upon actual value in the arts, then distinctions like good and bad don’t make sense — but then that leaves you merely talking about utility or other pragmatic concerns…or not talking about anything at all, I guess.
Bert: My whole argument about Fine Art Photography (not all photos– quite the contrary) is that it’s tethered to classical painting ideals, technology fetishism, and exploitive sociological tropes in order to validate itself in the anarchic ocean of photography in the unwashed techno-universe. Art has to represent its context, and representing by repressing is generally quite unattractive– as is the case with literary comics, which are all about not being comics while being comics.
I’m not talking about utility, I’m talking about pleasure– which has surprisingly little to do with attempts at metaphysical content.
And Marx is absolutely writing ideology, insofar as he is saying this and that are scientifically valid claims about society, which is a load of hooey, versus this and that are worthwhile principles on which to organize society, which has more than a little merit. This can basically be extended to other forms of modern writing– it’s just crystal clear in Marx and Freud, both of whom I admire.
As you suggest, a real utility argument isn’t really even an argument. It’s a true/false hypothesis and thus pointless to speculate on.
Your “like this for that reason, like that for this reason” approach is absolutely pragmatist. Nothing has to cohere– as long as the argument is elegant, functions on its own terms. My approach is always somewhat mired in materialism, on the other hand, because I want to suggest some larger picture– that’s a limitation I’m trying to deal with somehow.
Noah: Okay, two things.
First I got a little confused earlier. You said:
“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.”
I thought you were saying that your complaints themselves were conservative, and therefore unattractive (it seemed odd for you to be dissing yourself in that manner, but not impossible or anything.)
Anyway, I think it’s kind of an interesting confusion. To the extent that you’re right and art can be anything, then any negative response ends up being conservative; an effort to proscribe the jouissance or to sit in judgment on the gay utopia. I see what you’re saying in general — if anything is possible, then you should take advantage of that, not hanker after a past when fewer things were possible. But…that starts to look like a fairly pragmatic argument, doesn’t it?
I guess the question is, if art can be anything, what’s the point of criticism? From your material standpoint, it seems like art is too amorphous and empty and, ultimately, predicated on and redolent of capitalism to really even bother with. Whereas, from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s use is in its existence, and arguing about whether it’s good or not is pointless (except for the phatic pleasure of argument itself, of course.)
I think that ties in with your point here:
“Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.”
You could substitute “art” for “language” there, right? Christians or Marxists shouldn’t need art, ultimately (except as a mistrusted venue for propaganda or apologetic), whereas pragmatists don’t need art except as another exchangeable commodity. For materialists, only the meaning matters, in which case you should say what you mean and not dump it in this odd container; for pragmatists, only the form matters, so you’re reduced to figuring out whether it “works”, i.e. “sells”. There doesn’t seem to be a place from which the melding of form and content, which is what matters in art, can be said to matter to anybody else.
Bert: Ooo, nice move on the “art” for “language” swap. Yeah, the form/content problem is really tough for critics, especially since they keep trying to interpret form *as* content so that they have something to write about, here in the endless suburbs of customized big-box mass hallucination.
But materialism ruins art, as in the case of Fine Art Photography. I don’t necessarily think materialist criticism has to ruin art, since art can mine that as well as anything else, but beauty requires motion, the self-overcoming that pragmatism is always failing to express in its transparency-fetishizing penchant for klunky descriptiveness.
The trick is to find material in practice that is actually material, not just a flat deism of the ephemeral. Setting out to whittle a Christian twig will just yield a shitty twig. But what if you point out the twig and call it Christian? Criticism might actually work best if it is pragmatic– but treats its content as a meaningful part of its form.
Noah: Form is content in art, though. I mean, that’s what separates art from religion or political statement or anything that actually matters, is that the form bleeds into the content, so what’s important isn’t “love God!” but that you’re saying “love God!”
Does materialism always have to ruin art? I mean, the point of materialism is that the content matters more than the form, so you’d think that Marxist materialism would have a different formal effect than a materialism that was about how great old paintings used to be. I mean, Brecht is cool.
It seems like pragmatic art is going to be soulless art, which is the quandary of capitalist art in the first place. That is, art’s pragmatic function is to deliver soul — or to convert soul into value. But you can’t get soul through a pragmatic operation (in part because soul is pragmatically defined as “that which you cannot get through a pragmatic operation”.) So for pragmatism to function in art, you need to pragmatically commit to, or search out, materialism (or authenticity.) I think the point is that, rather than art being pragmatic (capitalist/jouissance/moving) or materialist (static/proscribed/unitary), in capitalism art is the intersection of those two modes. Art is kind of capitalism’s safety valve; the place where pragmatism acknowledges and integrates its repressed other. (Which ends up making art look like an opiate from a materialist standpoint.)
In a similar vein…I think criticism has to “work” best if its pragmatic, just because “working” is a pragmatic yardstick. If you want to tell somebody whether they’ll enjoy a movie and/or whether they should shell out 10 bucks to see it, I think it’s clear that you want a pragmatic criticism that isn’t wandering off to talk about whether the twig is Christian and how many Marxists can dance on the head of Art Garfunkel. On the other hand, if you’re a materialist, you could judge criticism on the basis of truth…which tends to make criticism as a discipline or a coherent form vanish, since everything is judged on the basis of truth.
Bert: Sure, form is content. And I’m more than happy to let Marxists dance on Art Garfunkel without interference– I would even offer mild encouragement. But you haven’t described or related or conveyed or reproduced anything by saying either “infectious pop hooks,” or “buy these two tracks on iTunes but by all that’s holy ignore the rest of the album.” The ideologically naturalized role of the cultural product is reasserted, but the ineffable jouissance, the nature of the power of the cultural product isn’t amplified or expanded in any way.
Chesterton said that people who reject belief end up believing in anything– while that may sometimes be the case, I would say that people who reject belief are the ones who are the most fixed in their ideas. Nobody knows what God thinks (to the extent that statement makes sense), even institutional religious authorities. But the Institutional authorities of instrumentalized culture can prescribe proper therapeutic remedies for the entirety of reality– or they can refer you to a specialist, or they can reassure you that your concerns are meaningless.
Still, the role of criticism is pragmatic. Art doesn’t need criticism to create content, but it needs something like criticism to cultivate a receptive community. It’s like a friendly parasite that helps exfoliate dead skin cells. It’s okay as long as art doesn’t pay too much attention to its parasites. That’s how you end up with moribund pretentious crap like high-end photography and alternative comics.
And, in much this same way, the freedom required for functional capitalism is fenced in by guns and cameras and touchingly ironic signs saying “Please ignore and love the nonexistent and revered guns and cameras Have a poignant day.” Perhaps making the signs more enjoyable to viewers is a worthwhile task, since we certainly aren’t going to get rid of the guns and cameras with our own signs, let alone our own guns and cameras. I just would like there to be something else for signs to say, as well as a reason for people to read the signs.
I’m meandering into the imagery of “They Live,” so I’ll just leave it there.
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It occurred to me that the primary target of most modern philosophy is religion (even if God is okay), and that the way you can tell whether a thinker is pragmatist or materialist is whether she makes religion a purveyor of illusion (materialism) or of reification (pragmatism).
Another critical moment I thought worth mentioning was the discussion in Artforum about this Seth Kim-Cohen review of a Doug Aitken piece (originally proposed by Bruce Nauman) where he dug a hole a thousand feet or so into the earth and then hung a microphone down into the hole, to the very bottom, and set up speakers in a small room at the top of the hole to transmit whatever sounds were audible at the bottom of the hole. Because he was all, “this is cool, but it’s so reified.” And this other art historian wrote in to argue and called Kim-Cohen an idealist and was like “our physical being has meaning.”
And Artforum had another battling critics thing where they published a piece of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book all about the forging of dynamic future communities of niche utopian resistance via the magic of love and Spinoza, and this Marxist responded that he didn’t know about all that, but perhaps it’s that kind of fluffy thinking that caused the financial derivatives mess.
One lesson is that materialists always win if they get to be negative. Another lesson is that Deleuze can be interpreted as a materialist (as he was in the first discussion about Doug Aitken) and a pragmatist (as he was in the Negri book). But even though I kind of like that Heideggerish guy who stuck up for Doug Aitken (mostly because I like that piece and I like the earth not being meaningless), Deleuze is totally a pragmatist. Desiring machines? Come on, Madison Avenue, dig him up and have him lead a creativity seminar!
Noah: I think my ability to respond to all of that is limited by my not knowing much about any of the artists in question. But I’m curious about reifying religion. Who do you think does that? I’m also curious as to why the digging hole thing is supposed to be reified.
Does Deleuze call individuals “desiring machines”? That is totally something you’d think an economist would say. I’ve often thought it’s kind of funny how Freud and Adam Smith are more or less obsessed with the same thing; for both of them and their heirs man is defined by desire.
Bert: Desire– Of course Freud and Adam Smith are not the only people who ever wrote about desire. But they are both uniquely influential secular modern theorizers of the politics of the individual in society. Bataille seems like the obvious go-to guy for analysis of the “libidinal economy,” in which he does a good job of talking about how aspiration manifests itself in history, and the tension between power and law. Adam Smith is much more interested in aspiration and power, and Freud much more interested in history and law, but Bataille and Lacan use the idea of libido not as a fragile emotional category, or even just an empirical fact of existence, but as an unstoppable force, the power that changes everything, the sun and everything it stands for, the positive matter existing in the void of time.
Soul– Meister Eckhart talks about soul on one hand as totally passive utterly detached completely naked zero ground of existence, and also as completely embodied and expressed in the will. Art has to deal with being a representation of the soul in language (not that the art has to use language, but it is never without symbolic context), which is the ego, and the soul in imagination, fantasy, aspiration, which is the superego, and the soul in lizard-brain id, material physical existence and, importantly, mortality and self-negation. Art wouldn’t be recognizable as art if there wasn’t a component of mirroring the soul in material, symbol, and fantasy, but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures. Does capitalism change that in some way? Yes– it makes the mirror look at itself, since the only pragmatist knowledge is self-evidence. There is no materialist capitalist art that “succeeds” as art in a capitalist context (critically or commercially or whatever) and remains materialism. Criticism can mirror that mirror-mirroring, or it can critique it.
Which beings us to Brecht. Who was certainly a materialist in his philosophy, but in his art could only trumpet the values of experimental progress by self-consciously mirroring the tropes of literary forms. Was he not a postmodern auteur ahead of his time? Him and any number of modern auteurs– Tarkovsky, Bunuel, and everyone Deleuze writes about in his Cinema books. Did he break through boundaries and smash sacred antiques? Indeed he did. Did he thereby impede the cause of capitalism? I should think not.
Noah: I don’t disagree about desire or Brecht.
I wonder about soul. I don’t know that defining soul or breaking it into different Freudian manifestations really makes a ton of sense to me. Freud doesn’t believe in the soul; people that do believe in the soul aren’t so sure about Freud.
Perhaps relatedly…I’m not so sure that the point of art is to represent soul. And I’m really not sure about this: “but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures.”
I think lots and lots of people see/use art for soul. Art is really central to the identities of lots of folks. Terry Eagleton talks about how art has become a substitute for religion. In societies that aren’t capitalist, art often doesn’t just represent or point out soul, but actually is involved in soul more or less directly — the ideological/material implications just are a lot clearer (whether it’s the Odyssey talking about Greek gods or Brecht shilling, however ineffectively, for communism.) It seems to me that the dilemma of capitalist art is in fact that art does not represent soul, but actually is taken for/is supposed to/must be soul. It’s function is to embody the ineffable so that the ineffable can be safely ignored. That’s why it can be the site of so much angst/energy/conflict while simultaneously being completely beside the point.
Bert: I don’t need Freud to believe in soul or Christians to believe in Freud. I live in a capitalist anarchosphere of ideas. You seem perfectly happy to engage both of those idioms in your own arguments, sir.
And, as long as you’ve reduced me to second-person attack, you, YOU, (or should I refer to you by your last name to a projected reader of your blog?), Berlatsky states that the point of art is not to represent soul. Or at least to him (you). But then he/you say/says it IS to represent soul, — at least to pre-industrial societies– or it is to embody soul– at least to the false-consciousness modern herd described by Terry Eagleton.
I think you really hit it at the end, though, when you talk about it being meaningless and controversial at the same time. Its appeal has a lot to do with its safety. Like that thing Zizek says, as a true materialist, about how culture is everything that we revere without believing in it– which he contrasts with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan.
But I don’t know if I really go all the way with the Frankfurt commodity-fetish argument about our collective stupidity. Appearances and representations are different from mirrors of reality, but they can approximate reality in a very appealing way, Mirrors of soul are sort of the same. But neither materialists nor pragmatists believe in souls, because for there to be a soul there has to be something intangible that both “is” and “does,” and I’m contending that that is an either-or distinction in our current milieu. If people overinvest in culture, either in an aesthete or a fundamentalist vein, it’s because they’ve been deprived of the option of believing in more than two options.
One more thing– Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the dead cannot be raised, then Christians “are of all people most to be pitied.” There’s something in there about holding an impossible beautiful thing directly before your eyes without blinking, as a liberating act of will, that could definitely be reflected in rational reverence for culture.
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If you felt that this was not enough Bert/Noah conversational action, you can find more such over at Bert’s blog.
Hi Noah – fun interview. Thanks for posting it!
I like the phrasing that art is about “soul” but I think it might mean something slightly different to me. Earlier in the interview you talk about “materialist art” or “capitalist art” and I don’t think “souls” are materialist or capitalist so the map of that relationship has to be complicated.
To me, the reason we feel art is so “soulful” is that it resists enclosure in those ideologies. That’s not to say that resistance always succeeds or is total in any way; just that there’s always a kernel of it, so people have a sense that there is some bit of art that is less culturally determined and more “expressive.” I think that’s the way in which art is about “soul” — although I acknowledge at the same time that the way an individual represents soul to him or herself is culturally constructed (although not culturally determined.) Art-as-soul is “about” the way that our humanity is something more than the sum total of our philosophy. This is also what’s going on in the Hegelian notion of subjective truth.
That’s not to say that art is a priori to any particular philosophy but rather that art qua art (as opposed to some particular concrete art object) is supplemental, in the strict Derridean sense, to all philosophy and therefore not containable within the logos of any single philosophy. This of course presumes that Art’s relationship to imagination is not one of reification, but I think that presumption is just another way of saying that art is about “soul.”
I’m curious, though, Noah, why the mechanism by which any specific materialism works (freedom, the dialectic) doesn’t matter as much to you as the fact that it’s materialist. Dialectical materialism, as a synthesis of materialism and idealism, is so encompassing that it seems to me the only sense in which it is meaningful for understanding anything is through its mechanisms.
I’m not sure that materialism is more important to me than its mechanisms; maybe you’re just keying into my relative lack of knowing what I’m talking about?
“To me, the reason we feel art is so “soulful” is that it resists enclosure in those ideologies. ”
I have trouble believing this, it’s true. I don’t think art is beyond or outside of ideology, really. I’m not sure if Bert does or not….
Enh, you know what you’re talking about. This stuff is too big and too complex for any single person to get everything into every argument every time.
…
Not “beyond or outside.” Supplemental! (There’s one of your Derrida-as-poetry bits.)
I see you struggle — and you have perfectly good justification for this — with the different philosophical placement (demanded by structuralism) between Art as an abstract universal concept and concrete specific instances of art. It’s almost like a Schroedinger’s box (to risk another lame-ass physics analogy): in the abstract there are potentials that specific instances may never actually achieve.
You seem to be saying if philosophy doesn’t represent what actually is, then what value is it? That’s a very empiricist way of thinking about it, but empiricism is a kind of materialism, so when you start from that assumption it becomes very hard to think your way out of everything being always already materialist, completely circumscribed by materialist frameworks. That’s why structuralism focuses on the logical rather than the empirical.
Of course art in a capitalist society is not going to offer a way out of capitalism or anything else from an empirical perspective, because in order for the way out to exist both the reader AND THE ARTIST have to have been paying attention to that potential throughout, and most artists and readers in capitalist cultures aren’t going to do that.
For me that’s the answer to your question about what criticism is for: it’s to remind us of those potentials and ensure that there is a fully public dialogue not just about what art is but what art is not and what it could be — and in this context, to keep us challenging the ways our “souls” get circumscribed and alienated by power structures like capitalism, and to encourage us to do whatever we can to resist, even if the only resistance is vigilant awareness.
That’s why it’s so important to me that criticism not be commodified into something that’s just for promoting or demoting art objects, a buyer’s guide. (Or the slightly less commodified alternative of helping less sophisticated readers become more sophisticated, a reader’s guide.)
I think that conversation about potentials matters because otherwise we’re at the End of Art, where all things have been accomplished and there’s nothing to do except watch reality TV.
It’s a shame that you mentioned this is an email conversation.
I like to imagine that you and Bert had this conversation while waiting in line to buy tickets for Transformers 2.
Bert and I used to have conversations like this while waiting to watch lousy movies. Now I’m old and boring and have a kid, though, so email it is.
Caro, this is definitely a variation of a conversation we’ve had. One point of difference is this, I think:
“both the reader AND THE ARTIST have to have been paying attention to that potential throughout, and most artists and readers in capitalist cultures aren’t going to do that.”
I don’t actually have enough faith in rationality and/or in self-awareness to think that paying attention is likely to be the solution to anything in particular — at least not in general. The way art is involved in capitalism and modernity isn’t something you can think your way out of…which is why I’m skeptical of claims that “better” art is somehow evading problems that genre work, or just bad art, isn’t. (And why I’m also skeptical that criticism has a role in saving art or artists or art audiences.)
I do see art as material, in the sense that it doesn’t really offer a way out of society, or point to something else — though its function is in some ways pragmatically to serve as the material content that points to something else. In that sense I am, as Bert says, just calling it false consciousness in some ways — thought, at the same time, I don’t necessarily think that capitalism or modernity is all evil all the time, so I don’t think either that it’s impossible to do anything worthwhile or good from within that milieu. Maybe imitating, or even parodying, the existence of soul is worthwhile just as a reminder that there are such things as souls, or because pretending, even cynically, to participate in transcendence might partake of the transcendent in some way. Which almost sounds like a PKD novel….
Thank you for commenting! Sorry to be so tardy in replying. Spring break is all about sleeping late and exercise and noon breakfast and procrastinating computer contact.
To back up a little, my vocabulary is a little improvisational. Materialism, to me, includes idealism from the get-go. Kant says the moral law is a rock-solid a priori fact, just as immovable as the base-superstructure model in Marxism. Poetry is regarded as the highest use of language by Schlegel, Novalis, Hegel, Heidegger, because it includes that supplement, the non-signifying musicality that Kristeva refers to as the semiotic, and associates with chora, a negative energy flow connected to the primal scene. Marx includes this magical quality in the moral power of labor-value amd the collective consciousness of revolution. For Zizek this is the Real, the gap that keeps the belief of the community from being entirely redundant. The role of art is bound to be programmatic and overdetermined.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, is essentially an affirmation of process, self-evidence, and strategy over history, principle, and logic. Merely pointing out that this goes along smoothly with capitalism is an understatement– in denying metaphysics, it allows capitalism in its endless becoming to assume totality as the only trustworthy human system. Art’s absolute ubiquity and freedom is synonymous with its profound irrelevance.
As I said earlier, these are both ripe for solipsism, which finds no more clear expression than in art. I think criticism should work against art, shoring up boundaries that the art pushes against and pushing at boundaries the art shores up, mirroring the strange imaginary mode of communicating *as if* it actually were language. The performance value of criticism is that it can allow individuals to be supported by art without being in thrall to it. Of course– this often fails to transpire.
“The performance value of criticism is that it can allow individuals to be supported by art without being in thrall to it.”
Do you mean supported monetarily? Or metaphysically? or something else?
I just don’t really see criticism as significantly different from art, necessarily. They seem to be doing, or trying to do much the same thing. I feel more like criticism is a genre of writing (like poetry or memoir or whatever) rather than a whole different ballgame….to mash my metaphors….
And this seems to mean, Bert, that you really are seeing art and capitalism as opposed — or at least, a viewpoint that sees art as important as the place from which capitalism is opposed. Is that right?
Oh, and I didn’t really talk about soul. But I guess I think that the best thing criticism of art can do is much the same thing philosophy or theology can do, which is to clear brush and make room for sunshine. Criticism has the advantage of having the connotation of negation implicit in its name, which is really an important part of getting at transcendence.
The world is terrible and unbelievable, but humility is probably the most important lesson any kind of critique can offer.
Sorry, I’m behind on my dialectic here.
I think art can, and does, decorate the throne rooms of aristocrats, totalitarians, theocrats, and technocrats. I have very little liberatory hope for artwork, either in a capitalist universe or any (inconceivable) other… except, to answer Noah’s question, to *support* individuals in a way that could be referred to as emotionally, or spiritually, in doing what they’re inclined to do.
Culture is an industry with lots of niche markets, which often feed themselves from despising as well as mimicking other niche markets– often despising and mimicking the same niche, and often as a stand-in for some other kind of relationship with the community represented by that niche (popular music and race relations in the U.S. comes to mind).
So I don’t know that either art or criticism, as faces of the culture apparatus, save people from their civilization singlehandedly. But what does? Individuals going into and out of their own specifically situated free-agency into discourse is a complex operation.
Gack, lotsa commentsa.
Bert says “Materialism, to me, includes idealism from the get-go.”
Well, if you mean “get-go” historically then definitely not — the distinction between idealism and materialism was a big deal to Enlightenment thinkers. It’s probably the most important binary in Enlightenment thought.
But I don’t think that’s what you meant.
I think you meant that contemporary philosophy has recast the meanings of these terms and our understanding of their logic to the point that even when looking back on thinkers from the Enlightenment, we see the materialism in their idealism and the idealism in their materialism and the chocolate in their peanut butter.
But, strictly speaking, that is not a materialist way to think about the meaning of materialism. That’s an idealist move (idealist here in the sense of Hegel, not in the sense of “I’m gonna join the Peace Corps!). It’s allowing terms to become so saturated with meaning that the new meaning ceases to be fully historicized. And materialism demands full historicization.
Dialectical materialism includes idealism, definitely, in the abstract philosophical sense, in its moment of origin, and in it’s history over all. But does empiricism have any room at all for the generative force of ideas, perception, mindfulness — all the things that fall under philosophical Idealism? I don’t think it does, not at its inception and at no point in its history, not even today. So I think “materialism” is too loose a term, because empiricism is a very extreme form of materialism, probably the purest form.
You can certainly choose to emphasize what materialism there is in idealism and vice versa — Zizek’s work on Christianity does that — but there has to be some of that perspective Delany was getting at when he differentiated between definitions and functional descriptions: I’m not sure where it gets you to blur the distinction between Marx’s materialism and Locke’s.
One place it gets you is Noah’s belief that “art doesn’t offer a way out of society.” That argument expunging Idealism even from Marxism. Noah appears to be insisting on a pretty totalitarian form of social constructivism where “history” is this completely a-human force. But that’s not dialectical materialism; that’s strict social constructivism: entirely linear in its causality.
The way we think, the things we think about, and the way we represent our thoughts to ourselves — those things are Idealist because their existence, their material reality, is based on things in our mind, things that exist only as ideas. Yes, on ideas that are themselves influenced by and even constructed by history in this ever-cyclical dialectic, but ideas that have some autonomy from that historical force too (“soul,” again). The radical materialist position lands too far on the side of complete determinism.
All those ideas and way of representing ideas feed back into the dialectic and affect the material form taken by the next cycle of history, which encounters and is affected by the next batch of ideas and way of representing ideas, over and over again in the endless dialectical loop of history.
I don’t think that recognizing the significance of those ideas necessarily means “saving” art or artists or whatever. The dialectic is pretty value neutral on what constitutes a “saved” society or a good society. And it’s certainly not a position of binary in/binary out, or a position of entrapment. But if you get a critical mass of people thinking a certain way, caring about a certain thing, you can push the dialectic — and with it History — in the direction of those ideas. Empiricism — nor any materialism that doesn’t have that germ of idealism within — doesn’t allow for that to happen.
The problem, of course, is that it’s generally very hard to get a critical mass of people thinking about anything except March Madness and Beyonce.
I don’t really care about March Madness, but Beyonce’s great.
You keep wanting me to be an absolute materialist, which isn’t exactly where I’m coming from. You can argue that there is an outside to the universe, without thinking that that outside is well-described by “art” or “human mind,” necessarily.
Bigger question is not whether art or human mind is “outside the system,” but whether art CAN trigger the mind (or soul, if you like) to get outside of it…Is there, in fact, any “outside the text” that we can “touch” or “reach” in some kind of transcendent “moment.” Probably not…but it’s a different question than whether art (or anything else) habitually provides such a space. With no “outside,” I would argue, there’s nowhere one can gain “leverage” enough to “move” the system (in a very materialist/empiricist metaphor). We thus “need” a notion of “outside”–even if the need for such a notion doesn’t necessarily mean that such a thing exists.
Nothing wrong with March Madness either
Right…but if you see art as being the place where that “outside” can happen, or which can trigger that outside, then you end up really down on those kinds of art (Beyonce, March Madness) which don’t do that. That is, some forms of art are hidebound, this world, capitalist tools, and some forms of art lead us to the angels (or the equivalent.) (To simplify perhaps overly snarkily.)
I just have trouble buying that. I think art does tie into ideology and politics, and I think talking about that is worthwhile, but I think Caro risks turning “good art/bad art” into a somewhat moral distinction that I don’t find convincing.
Hopefully that Beyonce comment will set Noah off (and he will point out that we can’t talk about setting anything off without getting Queen Latifah in on the dsicussion).
I kind of don’t really think people were realy arguing that much in the Enlightenment. It was more about rearranging deck chairs on the Gnostic Titanic. If you will.
“Where there is no property there is no injustice.” You probably know– that’s Locke, not Marx. Of course Locke’s identification was with the professional class, which lends some pragmatist tendencies to his ideas– utilitarianism can certainly be provisional (or hooded), but for him and Marx, it’s more behaviorist. Autonomy is more of an effect, an ultimately predictable calculation of interests.
Economics, incidentally, has gotten so strange because externalities (information, experience) have colonized the definitions of “rational free choice” that once were seen as beonging to mathematical logic. But then this is resystematized as game theory or something. But really economists are weathermen with tenure.
Sorry for that tangent. Anyway, one obviously can mean many things by saying “experience is real,” whether that experience is believed to be of the internal or external world primarily (subjective solipsism or vulgar materialism), whether that reality is qualified in any other way (like the World-Historical Soul, etc.), but it’s a lot different than saying “reality is experienced,” which is the entirely provisional message of pragmatism. Which is where Emerson, Nietzsche, Peirce, et al. split off, cancelling the idea of the fixed subject in the name of self-seeking individualism.
There’s always contradiction and crossover, but the rejection of a truly transcendental element is a shared element that causes this aporetic duality to continue perpetuating itself. I think that art, engaging the Imaginary rather than the Symbolic, the semiotic rather than the semantic, is not likely to rupture our boundaries of experience, but rather to set those boundaries, delineating what can be communicated as experience.
The self is annihilated both in behaviorism and in consumerism– art suggests its reaffirmation, but either you let the projection define you, or you know it’s just a projection.
Sorry– I keep taking so long to comment that I miss comments. Anyone who’s ever heard me speak (stammer) is not surprised.
I am not enough of a materialist to believe in “good art/bad art.” Nor am I enough of a pragmatist to not be sickened by, say, advertising. But the postmodern legitimation of an “outside” as a provisional supplemental prop for the illusion that everything else has some solid core sure sounds like Wall Street fanagling to me.
Living in some kind of discordant limbo is the ultimate pragmatist approach, and one that makes Zizek, as much as I appreciate and admire his small and medium-scale insights, kind of a big fat hypocrite in the big-picture analysis.
I haven’t read all the comments yet (and won’t have time to do so until later tonight) but just to clarify in response to Noah: I don’t think it’s a requirement that the kind of thought that might successfully stand in opposition to capitalism necessarily matches up tidily with the conventional standards for “good art.”
And not inside/outside! Never inside/outside! Always — always already, even — supplementary!!!
“Never inside/outside! Always — always already, even — supplementary!!”
But supplementary to what? Spatial metaphors are problematic, but I don’t see how you’re getting outside them with your supplement.
You misunderstand me if you see me saying that certain kinds of art lead “outside” (or whatever). I’m just talking philosophically…It’s useful to have the notion of “outside” and art can (maybe) be a tool for getting there. I didn’t say even that such a thing is possible…Just that it’s a useful question to ask. I also think the Derridean idea of “never inside/outside” has probably reached the limit of its utility. Even if Derrida is “right” (and how would we know?), this kind of argument only works to undo other ideas, not to construct its own. Derrida’s notion that one is never “outside the text” (or the system, if you will) MAY be true, but I think it’s still important/useful/necessary to try to imagine otherwise–to something “outside”– even if we acknowledge that we may not know it if we get there.
Maybe I should give Zizek credit for at least believing solidly in no outside, I just don’t know that he really believes that.
You guys are awesome; there’s so much good stuff in here.
Eric: on the question of limited utility: I think the supplement is just the structuralist version of “conditions of possibility,” which is always a useful philosophical question to ask. Derrida is specifically concerned with philosophical logic and I don’t know whether he intended for “the supplement” to become a generalized philosophical concept. But he’s given a name to something that isn’t limited to his formulation of it in Grammatology. It’s the same logic that underlies the Lacanian concept of the “aporia” as well as the relationship between the Imaginary and Symbolic Orders; it’s the concept behind Althusserian structural causality (his formulation of the base/superstructure relation, in which economics is part of the superstructure and only the “supplemental logic of the system as structure” is determinative). Derrida’s version is also the most purely logical formulation of the intersection between Saussure and Hegel. I think that the repetitive use of Derrida’s “method” in poetics/lit crit for what is basically rote deconstruction (a practice that Derrida himself pooh-poohed) has really overshadowed its full philosophical context and utility to the detriment of both lit crit and Derrida.
Bert, you made this comment: “the postmodern legitimation of an “outside” as a provisional supplemental prop for the illusion that everything else has some solid core sure sounds like Wall Street fanagling to me.”
I’m not sure I can tease out from what you’ve said so far what it is about Derrida’s point that seems like snake oil. Maybe it’s something Derrida does or says that I’m not giving enough importance to? Greatly reduced, Derrida’s point, as I understand it, is that the things that we usually think are the “center” of some philosophical thing, at the very heart of the “inside” of that thing, are actually not at the center at all, but “outside” — except outside doesn’t mean “not part of.” It means being simultaneously fully other to the philosophical thing while also being a necessary conceptual prop for it — so he calls it a “supplement,” neither outside nor inside, neither fully part of nor Other to. (Maybe that answers Noah’s question of supplementary to what?)
So I don’t think the supplement is a prop for the illusion; I think failure to be aware of supplementarity is what enables the illusion. Once you’re aware of the supplement, you know there is no solid core.
What’s actually at the center — for this entire philosophical tradition, including Heidegger and Arendt and Neitzsche and all of the post-structuralists including Lacan and Althusser — is pure Hegelian negativity. The aporia. The desert of the Real. False consciousness or alienation. Etc. Etc. Whatever “un-thing” occupies the same logical place as the negative in whatever cluster of concepts you define as your “system.” (Hence “Tarrying with the Negative,” for you folks interested in Zizek.)
I think Zizek is so much more a Lacanian than a Derridean that his version of the “inside” is just the Symbolic Order, which is pretty inescapable (far more so than capitalism). But Lacan’s fascination with Otherness and with the emergence of identity makes him less absolute in this than Derrida or the structural Marxists, I think. I would guess that Zizek believes (as least as faith sufficient for theory) in both a structuralist outside that follows the logic of the supplement, and the more absolute outside — absolutely outside the Symbolic Order at least — of the Real. I think the statement “reality is experienced” is completely consistent with Lacan, but he isn’t the least bit pragmatic…
I think I’m having trouble pinning this all back to the discussion of art because I’m not having any luck wrapping my brain around what it means to you guys to be “outside of society” or outside of capitalism or whatever (that’s Noah’s quote but it’s directed to anybody who wants to answer). Is this just a philosophical question — is this possible? — or is there a specific goal we’re aiming for here? It’s worth saying that I don’t think my goal is to get “outside” of anything so much as to drive the dialectic of history in a direction that I think is good for human beings and good for human creativity: it’s not so much a revolutionary aim as a slowly subversive one, but it’s only subversive because I think we have too much capitalism right now, not because it’s inherently subversive.
To drive something in a certain direction implies “change.” In a “system” with no outside, nothing can be gained or lost and therefore change seems impossible…The idea of change is why “outside” is an important idea…one which I would say Zizek/Lacan hold onto, but Derrida really doesn’t.
Well, not to out Bert, here, but he’s a Christian. When he accuses Zizek of bad faith, he’s pretty much (I think) arguing that the logic of Zizek’s arguments (especially recently) seem to demand a Big Other that Zizek is basically unwilling to acknowledge. Zizek should believe in God, but doesn’t (presumably because his Marxism tells him he shouldn’t, or some such.)
I’m sort of in Zizek’s position, in that I think that for most philosophical purposes things make more sense if there’s a God, but I’m still an atheist.
The “supplement” thing was very patiently and lucidly explained, and I apologize for ignoring Derrida, except that he sort of irks me. The supplement, as Caro implies, is one of many repeated motifs in Continental philosophy. The gap of the Real for Zizek, a priori for Kant, the accursed share for Bataille, the semiotic chora for Kristeva, the Soul for Hegel. The overflow of logic that I’ve been referring to it as “magic.” Perhaps “magic pill” is a good concretion of that idea for me.
Now, once you have your magic pill, the “magic” can serve various purposes. It can represent a libidinous death charge, it can represent endless deconstructive deferring of meaning, it can represent labor value, it can represent economic rent. What matters is whether the magic pill expresses some primal fact about the nature of history, the psyche, etc. (materialism) oe whether it is evidence of an “invisible hand” of some kind, an affirmation of power, energy, force. The magic pill is likely to have some connotations either way (the proletariat is the source of power, maximized utiity is morally good, etc.) but the debates that matter in modern philosophy generally, I think, boil down to whether the universe works according to principles or process.
I attended an atheist seder last night in which the whole point was apparently to crap on Jesus, and Noah outed me, so I’ll go ahead and be brazenly theistical. On a very pedestrian level, Christianity (and Judaism, doubtless other faiths) refer to things like the bread and wine of Communion (the Christian example), or the bread and wine of Passover (which my atheist friends found far more tolerable) as “pointers,” signs that seal a symbolic rupture by combining an abstract idea with a direct experience, as what Kristeva calls a “contract”– “one that either follows hostilities or presupposes them,” kind of replaying but healing the castration trauma of entering the Symbolic.
That could be seen as the purpose of art, but if the thing the pointer is pointing at is ultimately some knowable form of closure (as in materialism) or ultimately irrelevant, the endless grid of referentiality (as in pragmatism), then art’s specialness seems sort of hollow. And if you’re a pragmatist nihilist like Derrida, the magic center-margin teleportation pill of the supplement is the chaos underlying all being, it’s just another way of saying the pointer is being confused with something worth pointing to. You point, and the dog looks at your finger.
I think Derrida actually has his religious moments–or “spiritual” non-nihilist moments in his later writing…Can’t remember exactly how these arguments go…”The Gift of Death” I think is maybe one of these.
Foucault too turns this direction, in some ways, late in his life…the “limit experiences” of sado-masochism serve this role for him…
Aren’t all seders atheist?
Mentioning religion in a philosophy discussion goes over, I’ve found, sort of like a fart in church. As it were. Why I didn’t mention it earlier.
I don’t know that I appreciate the late sentimental post-Habermas Derrida more than the young-Turk grammatology Derrida. But that’s certainly an appropriate reference.
Foucault and limit experiences, I will look that up. Foucault is also someone I hadn’t brought in yet– I love that guy. He really manages to talk about history and power at the same time. He had “ethical concerns” in his later period too, which I know next to nothing about. I just hope he doesn’t take the same Levinasian turn as Derrida. Apologizing for sympathizing with the Iranian revolutionaries, stuff like that.
I think you folks know a lot more about Derrida than I do. Although I know this is less so in his later work, I always just think of him as having “philosophical logic” as his primary concern.
Zizek I know more about, although I think I have read the recent work on Christianity less thoroughly than Bert and Noah. I read into it that indeed Zizek rejects any historical, actually existing diety, he is perfectly comfortable accepting the Hegelian notion of Absolute Spirit, which is basically a philosophical God Term, so it amounts to the same thing, to an athiest at least. I’m not sure what benefit he’d gain philosophically from faith?
I’m probably just conditioned to allow philosophers to get away with never bringing all these things back down to the pragmatic level from the purely logical and abstract.
Bert: I will heretofore use the phrase “once you have a magic pill, everything looks like a stomachache” instead of my old standby “once you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.”
Eric – do you really need an “outside” for dialectical change? It seems very evolutionary (in character, not in mechanism) and there’s no “outside” to biology, at least not from the standpoint of physical perpetuation of the species.
Evolution is entirely predicated on an outside pretty much; it’s environment which pushes evolutionary change. I guess you can say, “there’s no reason for the biological to want to perpetuate itself”…but then you’re kind of back debating the meaning of life, so I don’t know that it’s necessarily a contrary example.
Zizek is pretty obsessed with the nature of God and with Christianity. He comes down by saying that Christianity is the truth in that it says that God is man — that is, there is no God save humanity. The problem is that the conclusions he draws often don’t really justify his obsession; that is, he does lots of clever philosophical writing based off of Christianity, and then at some point he sort of jettisons it all and says, “hey, I’m still a materialist,” and all the begged questions sort of roll over and die.
Here’s how I put it in another back and forth with Bert:
“Aha! Just got to Zizek on the resurrection; it’s apparently a metaphor for the way an inspirational example lives on in a community of radical believers. “I may die, but what I stood for will inspire you…and so I live on!”
Which seems like really weak tea. Zizek goes to a lot of effort to read the death of God literally…and then we’re supposed to take the resurrection as not just a metaphor, but a cliched metaphor? Joan Baez on Joe Hill is the meaning of the resurrection? I mean, I like Joan Baez, and labor organizing is cool, but…why are we talking about Christ at all then if this is the point, exactly? And if this is indeed the point, why aren’t you out there organizing rather than having a debate about God?”
But natural selection works on attributes of the individual or population that are already present biologically. The environment doesn’t “cause” them to be there. It causes some of them to disappear, but it’s a posteriori. Traits are “selected” in response to environment, and that’s a very dialectical pressure.
Yes, if you didn’t have the environment, you wouldn’t have any change. But that doesn’t mean the environment is “outside” the biological system. Wouldn’t the “outside” be the different environment on the other isolated island that causes divergent evolution of the same starting population?
I think that’s basically the same point the structuralists are getting at: any outside that has the possibility of influencing the inside isn’t really outside at all.
I don’t doubt that it’s mostly semantics, but these are just really binary terms for something that makes more sense to me as systemic and complex and non-binary.
That’s kind of you, Caro– Heidegger’s hammer-metaphor loss is my pill-metaphor gain.
Hegel was a Lutheran his whole life, which has been retroactively written off as some kind of heteronomy in his philosophy, capitulation to the dogmatic social injunction. Perhaps Andy Warhol’s Catholicism can be dismissed similarly. But this seems like such a great example of nihilism being hoisted by its own petard. The space Hegel opens up as the potential for Creation is seized upon as the fundamental emptiness of graph paper, a Nothing against which someone’s faith has no meaning for their allegedly rational description of reality, which is either evaluated as true/false or functional/nonfunctional.
Why philosophy itself should be evaluated in those ways, regardless of whether it evaluates phenomena in those ways, is beyond me. I find the idea of “true” or “functional” philosophy somewhat absurd.
And yet this presumed Nothing precisely mirrors the presumed Something, the Big Other, that believers supposedly require as a precondition to arrive at the conclusion that Something exists, according to the Hegelian phenomenology. Allegedly, subjective Spirit is transformed into objective Spirit by this self-deluding act of will.
Spirit, as in communal zeitgeist, is a magic pill. It’s just another fig leaf to suggest there’s something under the fig leaf– the phallus itself? Which signifies the lack of the phallus in castration?
That’s what I meant by Wall Street fanagling. The pyramid scheme (pun intended) of Hermeticist striving for logico-mathematical purity, while moving away from any kind of individual responsibility for this delicate and highly contingent multiplicity we inhabit, denying that there is an actual standard of purity that exists beyond thought. That’s what seems like heteronomous heteronormativity to me.
At the same time, faith means that there is something superceding the fragile terms of exchange we employ. The knot can be cut rather than picked at.
Doesn’t it? How did life start? Most scientific accounts argue it’s a natural environmental process; in other words, the environment is the cause of biology.
Noah: Sure, but can’t you say that about any dialectic? I mean, history started somewhere too.
And it seems to point to a complete eradication of the notion of outside, since the histories all collapse into one.
Starting from that presupposition, that there’s only one system, nothing outside of it, you need the dialectic for any change at all. Unless you posit Bert’s invisible hand.
(Haven’t read Bert’s post yet. Noah’s was shorter.)
Oh, and evolution is a load of hooey. Ha ha, emoticon emoticon.
I think I’m with Caro on that one– evolution is a purely functional phenomenon, which I think has far far far too often been used as a metaphor when it shouldn’t be.
You say “evolution,” I say “fractals,” let’s call the whole thing off.
But if I wasn’t going to blow off a philosophical evolution, I would look at the way the whole operation changes, environment and parts of the environment (like life forms), over time, as the result of the expanding of space and the expending of life force (libido).
That’s what I’m daring people to call Nothing. It doesn’t seem like nothing to me.
It’s interesting that Zizek has gone in this direction — I’ve said somewhere in the comments to something in the last month or so that I thought his purpose in this project was to tie this aspect of Hegelianism into his theory so far. Now that you point out the extent to which Absolute Spirit is a positive for Hegel, it reminds me that the most common critique of Zizek has been that everything he says is critique and there’s nothing to build positive action on. I do still strongly believe that his interest is in Hegel’s God rather than in God on his own terms, though, but I wonder if this a shift in emphasis toward the Hegelian positive (for want of a better term) might be connected to an effort to answer those critics?
We’re kind of dancing around and not actually talking about the extent to which Continental philosophy after structuralism is not a philosophy of being but a philosophy of knowing: I don’t feel that Lacan, at least, posits an absolute Nothing. The gap in Lacan is very much the space between matter/body (things like evolution) and language, culture, and understanding. That’s why it’s the “Symbolic” order.
Bert, it sounds a little bit like you’re equating the Real with the Negative, and I think the negative instead is the space between those physical-world things and our perception of them. I understand the trauma of the “encounter with the Real” not as some recognition that the Real is Negative space but the recognition of how fictional your Symbolic beliefs about it are.
This feels very Augustinian to me, in both its Lacanian version and in Derrida’s early work, especially Des Tours des Babel. The Christian antecedent to me is in imagery like “through a glass darkly” (is that why Paul is so important to Zizek?), the unknowability of God, and the anguish that causes. Augustine describes that anguish as the “absence” of God, and that absence/distance is what I would label the Negative.
Not to imply that Continental philosophy is less nihilist that it is. It is overwhelmingly an athiest philosophy. But I don’t believe the nihilism is inherent to the structure or the logic — they’re borrowing that from Hegel, who as you point out, was Lutheran. I think the nihilism gets layered on top when they try to transform the theory of knowing into a theory of being.
But for Art or art criticism, do we really need ontology?
“But for Art or art criticism, do we really need ontology?”
Right on. Good question. I didn’t really bring God up too much in the original conversation with Noah for that reason as well.
But truth– which I guess is what language philosophy after metaphysics is about– may be an iffy standard as well. Thus my whole materialist art is moribund, pragmatist art is empty conundrum.
Maybe we should have been talking about aesthetics. But the fact that artists and art critics have very little insight to offer on this subject gives one pause. Rhetoric, however, is quite central– perhaps more central to poststructuralism than either knowing or being. Rhetoric is used to talk about ontology by people like Deleuze (and psychoanalysts, I would argue- the Subject is really an existential– not existentialist– variable), it’s used to talk about truth by Derrida and Richard Rorty, etc., it’s used to talk about power by Foucault and by the Zizek brigade. Zizek, by the way, never struck me as being all that negative in general– he has lots of hobbyhorses to flog, but many other hobbyhorses with which to flog the first hobbyhorses. But others could read him differently.
The Augustine anguish, which is the Luther anguish, the Kirkegaard anguish, is certainly not irrelevant to truth, but it’s also not irrelevant to ontology– being born into a fallen state. I love talking about Paul. Lacan really can be read as an extended commentary on Paul as well as Freud. “Through a glass darkly” is used in the commentary on agape as a statement on being separate from God, which Lacan would speak about in terms of trauma and anxiety.
This fallen state is evil. The Real does introduce trauma, but it’s our own stupid fault for eating the apple and seeing our nakedness as shameful. Art can induce humility in various ways, but it is definitely about coping with that Real gap.
Psychoanalysis is about this kind of willful act of autonomous self-delusion I’ve been talking about. There’s something fundamentally vertiginous there. You are to be comforted with tautology (materialism) rather than fleeing from it (pragmatism), without any third term possible.
I think the way that philosophy gets at being (ontology) through discussions of rhetoric is maybe the point. Rhetoric is either simply instrumental, in which case aesthetics is simply about what works, or it’s connected to truth/beauty/whatever, in which case you’re talking about ontology and no one cares except philosophers.
Well, okay, I guess I’m reconsidering. Jouissance is about a (temporary) extinction of the ego, a little death– that is absolutely about being and not being, which is what ontology is about.
Barthes and Kristeva definitely want criticism that talks about the “genotext,” “the grain of the voice,” as the entirely non-communicative, non-Symbolic part of art. Barthes suggests that a fun parlor game is to try to discuss music without using any adjectives.
So, I’m back at my metaphor of clearing brush– if critics can work against the art, and definite what and where it isn’t, that probably helps it do its job.