First Set of Readings

Here is the first set of readings for the semester, two from major historical figures and one from a contemporary scholar. We'll attempt to discuss all three on our second meeting of the semester. I'm not sure if we'll get through all three in one session or not, but we will try. I'll add a greater or less number of readings to these once I determine who quickly we are able to move through these materials.

These readings should be moderately challenging. Do not expect to skim through them, glean the necessary information, and call it a job well done. They correct understanding should require careful scrutiny and continuous reflection. The read them in any sense that could properly be called reading should feel like the mental equivalent of a light to moderate workout at the gym. Our readings will get much tougher than these, but this batch should still be an appropriate challenge. As you read, recall that you are responsible for speaking about these writings in class. A good way to prepare for that responsibility is by taking notes as you go and jotting down observations and questions to be brought up in class, or even something as sample as a word whose definition you want to discuss. The more you prepare for class, the better you'll read, the more you'll enjoy class, the more you'll learn, and the higher your grade will be. It's that simple, but there are no shortcuts.

FYI, always remember to run the cursor over images I post here. More often than not they are links to helpful supplemental materials.

§ § §

Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767 – 1835)
"Theory of Bildung"



F.W.J. Schelling
(1775–1854)
"The Scientific and Moral Functions of Universities"

Elinor S. Schaffer
(living - Cambridge University)
"Elinor S. Shaffer—Romantic Philosophy and The Organization of The Disciplines: The Founding of The Humboldt University of Berlin"

Philosophical Friendship

Most of us, sadly, will never know.

But if life itself is good and pleasant (which it seems to be, from the very fact that all men desire it, and particularly those who are good and supremely happy; for to such men life is most desirable, and their existence is the most supremely happy) and if he who sees perceives that he sees, and he who hears, that he hears, and he who walks, that he walks, and in the case of all other activities similarly there is something which perceives that we are active, so that if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, that we think; and if to perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we exist (for existence was defined as perceiving or thinking); and if perceiving that one lives is in itself one of the things that are pleasant (for life is by nature good, and to perceive what is good present in oneself is pleasant); and if life is desirable, and particularly so for good men, because to them existence is good and pleasant for they are pleased at the consciousness of the presence in them of what is in itself good); and if as the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also (for his friend is another self):-if all this be true, as his own being is desirable for each man, so, or almost so, is that of his friend. Now his being was seen to be desirable because he perceived his own goodness, and such perception is pleasant in itself. He needs, therefore, to be conscious of the existence of his friend as well, and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of man, and not, as in the case of cattle, feeding in the same place.

Aristotle, On The Soul

This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as “post-structuralist.”

Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and “political correctness”; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the “subject” over and against “scientism”; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida’s own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter “in praise of psychoanalysis.”

These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility—for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future.

This are Coptic times!

This is a post from my current IT2 journal. You may recall me mentioning the Rothko Chapel in class today and want to know more. If you don't, oh well. It's not my job to force anyone to become interested in life and ideas, only to help those who are even marginally interested at little more interested.

Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria

Click the photo below to see images
of the famous churches of Lalibel, Ethiopia,
which are seamlessly hewn out of solid bedrock.
Yeah, cool and all.  But what's up with them?





In keeping with the topic above, and also
with reference back to Leo Steinberg's
discussion of the austerity of contemporary art,
have a listen to this piece by the important
20th-century composer Morton Feldman, a member
of the famous New York School.




Morton Feldman
(1926-1987)
"Coptic Light" (1986)

For those who care, here is another
piece by Feldman, this one commissioned
for the opening of the Rothko Chapel,
in Dallas, Texas.





"Rothko Chapel (4)" (1971)



Bad Brains
"Coptic Times"

Alexandrianism - Beauty and Cruelty

STUDENT:

If you cage beauty you’re caging mankind and its imagination.

TEACHER:

I'm glad you took the time to read and think about this post. There is a lot in it to digest, and most of it in far from easy to digest. In very large measure this is because so much of the post deals with Oscar Wilde, a late-Victorian figure who, in his own inimitable way, was one of that society's most incisive critics.

Whereas most social critics will attack a society for its hypocrisy, it inability or refusal to do what it means and mean what it says, Wilde instead attacks society in terms which are precisely the opposite. It is not society's hypocrisy which offends Wilde but rather it's wretched excess of sincerity. Everything, for the Victorians, was so achingly, stiflingly earnest. It is the unrelenting morality of the Victorians - their belief in good honest work, and art which is sturdy and meaningful - that Wilde finds so absurd. All aspects of art, according to the Victorians, must be subordinated to good ends, must reflect purposeful labor.




Ford Maddox Brown
Work, 1865

In place of this imperative profundity, Wilde substitutes a view of art which calls for complete superficiality, perfect irresponsibility - both of which vices are transformed into the new "virtues". Wilde's is indeed a world were it is more important to be beautiful than good, more important to be glamorous than substantial, more important to be idle than active. The name for this perspective on life is aestheticism, a sensibility and total lifestyle often referred to as "decadent". Aestheticism is based in the belief that life should be lived as art, and that the only things worth doing are things done purely for their own sake, and purely because they are beautiful. If it takes the suffering of others to allow me to live gorgeously, so be it; or, all the better! This view of things in no respect seeks to cage beauty. Or, if it does cage, bind or shackle beauty, it is only to make it all the more intensely beautiful. Aestheticism fully accepts the fact that the radical liberation beauty - the very highest ideal - may well require the generous application of cruelty. According to this view, precisely because the Beautiful has, for so many generations, been held captive by the Good and, later, by quasi-religious political-economy of the Useful; art must be pruned and polished until it is free of every last unnecessary accretion and imperfection. And though it may strike you as odd, one of the very last, and most persistent of these blemishes is Thought.

One may not choose, in the end, to be an aesthete. The price may seem to high, or the very thing may seem repugnant. Indeed, modern art and modern art criticism arose as a strong reaction to Wilde and his cult of the gorgeous and the futile. Modern painting and sculpture, for instances, established themselves as no longer interested in beautiful results but rather in productions which offer direct evidence of the plastic activity of the Mind. Still, even if we reject Wilde's cultivation of pure Futility as perverse and built upon sadism and the enslavement of others, it nevertheless offers us a valuable view into the culture of Utility, which after Wilde can only appear to us as in large measure built upon masochism and the enslavement of the self.




Michelangelo
Dying Slave, 1516

"Objectivity": Science as a Form of Art and Social Practice

Modern thought begins with Kant.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

STUDENT:

Scientific thought changes every day, but new ideas will only be valid if they build upon and unite current findings, evidence, and theory. Einstein's relativity is the perfect example. Einstein turned Newtonian physics upside down, but the entry level physics class taught here and at every university in the world differs only in the slightest from what Newton wrote in his Principae four hundred years ago. Why? Because what Newton found is based on empirical evidence and cannot be erased, only seen from a more enlightened angle. Tomorrow physicists may find that the universal gravitational constant isn't universal or constant (which is quite likely), but that will not change the fact that objects fall at 9.8 m/s^2 on the surface of the Earth. The idea that we shoot beams out of eyes, bounce them off objects, and collect them again in our eyes to see will never be true, regardless of how you look at it. Science without empirical evidence is nothing.

TEACHER:

Though I took issue with you in class, which is after all my job, we actually agree on quite a bit. I would certainly agree that science without empirical evidence is nothing. Though I might phrase it as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant did: Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Others have translated it this way: Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.




This famous phrase is just one declaration in Kant's very extensive and indisputably brilliant argument, presented in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he shows and dramatically exposes the radical limitations and previously hidden assumptions underlying both empiricist and rationlist science, the prior focusing on direct observation and the latter on theoretical speculation. The brilliance of Kant's argument derives from his radical rejection of any simple combination or blending of the two methods. Any middle course between the two, Kant argues, must take the a construction, one which necessarily and openly acknowledges the we have no immediate access, either rational or experience, to entities as the really are in themselves.

For Kant, all substances, both external and internal to consciousness, and indeed consciousness itself, are nothing but representation whose existence and comprehension depends in an absolutely fundamental and a priori manner (before all conscious thought) on certain concepts of the understanding and reason which cannot discovered neither through research or logic but must be "transcendentally deducted". In fact, it's only because these categories of mind are operating within us at all times that we are able to do research and logic at all. According to Kant, not only are all objects in the world mere representations, but in fact the entire world itself, experienced as a meaningful totality, is nothing but a grand construct assembled, or to use Kant's term "synthesized" out of the representations from which human experience is composed.






Composition is the key term here. It brings to mind not just the act of writing, which was fundamental to Kant's critical method of arriving at truth, but also because it brings to mind musical composition. Because for Kant all human endeavor, including scientific research, is, like musical composition, conditioned by and expressive of the human will. We do not simply discover the laws of Nature, but as far as Kant is concerned - and the extent of his influence on both the Sciences and the Humanities is quite literally incalculable - we veritably write the laws of nature ourselves, always in accordance to human needs and desires. Nature is neither God's creation nor is it simply a collection of dead parts, but Nature is a symphony which the great scientists of history have written and revised, over and over again, over the course of many centuries.




Though much neglected in our day, one of Kant's greatest disciples was Arthur Schopenhauer, who went on to influence a wide number of thinkers such of Nietzsche and Freud, who we still to consider giants for all time and whose work continues to fuel critical debates such as those taken up by Jean-Pierre Vernant. Famously, Schopenhauer pronounced Music, an art form which previously had been considered merely acoustic ornamentation (i.e., Muzak) to be the supreme form of art, precisely because music most directly reflects the states and movements of the human Mind. But what Schopenhauer says of music is equally true of the sciences. Science, even in its most objective forms, never tells us simply how things really are in actual reality, but rather it expresses the variety of human interests and needs of the culture and society which sustains it.




So much extensive writing on these topics on these topics over the last two hundred years it almost boggles my mind when I consider where I might begin to direct someone who wanted to know more. I'll mention just a very few books below. Trust me, there are thousands more. Do understand this at least, Kant's contribution to the theory of knowledge and the practice of science is, as I said above, quite literally incalculable - by which I mean not only that his influence was immense but also that his ideas through forever into doubt the belief that Cartesian numeracy and calculation can reveal the nature of things-in-themselves.Kant knew this full well, and for that reason he named his abbreviated version of the Critique of Pure Reason the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics - whose title means, that preparatory study which must be undertaking before any meaningful investigation of nature can begin. And what is the fundamental commonsense assumption of which Kant labors in the book to disabuse his reader - the belief that Nature exists at all.

So, what have I been reading on my own lately?

This first book, by the celebrated philosopher Jurgen Habermas, picks up on certain key terms I invoke in my writings above.




This next book is a contemporary classic in the critique of the rational scientific method, written by Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher and historian of science who first trained to be a musician.




This next book was recently issued to great acclaim by MIT Press, one of the finest academic publishers in the world.




This last book, which I'm reading right now on my own, was very recently issued by the University of Chicago Press. It is a passionate but deeply informed and meditated defense of the attack on objectivity, written - perhaps to the surprise of some - by own of today most thoughtful scholars of literature, George Levine.




But, again, to mention these four titles is to scratch just the outermost surface of the surface. I could go on and on and on. Certainly other have: (CLICK!)

Between Woolf and de Beauvoir II - "Cinemantics"

"I had searched for a soul akin to my own." --Lautreamont

"Instincts/(Insects) and Their Vicissitudes"

In other words, that Caillois' male praying mantis first displaces its own desire onto the female,
identifies itself with her, and then retroactively devours its own head, bites off and severs ties with its own memory, history, past. - BK

Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). Editor's note (1957).

In Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Freud describes an instinct as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind. In a number of passages, Freud expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of psychological knowledge about the instincts. The instincts make their appearance at a comparatively late point in the sequence of his writings. But the instincts were there under other names. Their place was taken, to a great extent, by such things as excitations, affective ideas, wishful impulses, endogenous stimuli, and so on.

By the pressure of an instinct, we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The aim of an instinct is in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct. The object of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. By the source of an instinct is meant the somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct. The essential feature in the vicissitudes undergone by instincts lies in the subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influence of the 3 great polarities that dominate mental life. Of these 3 polarities, we might describe that of activity-passivity as the biological; that of ego-external world as real; and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity.

But why don't we cut straight to the heart of the issue and say what should be obvious by now, that cinema, as far as he is concerned, is an inherently corrosive, inherently destructive artistic medium, one which has more to do with slicing, fragmentation and decomposition than the construction of any unified experience. The cinematic frame, as pure differential; or the movement-image, as parastaltic advance ; are here to be understood in terms of mobile devices, or dissevering dispositifs which produce schism (σχισμή) and trauma (τραύμα). They are cutting machines, buzzsaws which literally lacerate and grind their way through the corporeal continuum of the life-world. Thus, as we saw with Hitchcock's elevation of the souveneir postcard to the status of background and frame, here Deleuze gives us an alternative version of how content, or in this case a sub-genre, rises to constitute the set of which it is itself a member. All film making is a form of cutting; all films are slasher films.

And by extension, cinema simply offers a particularly bold example of what is the case with all artistic media. Each in its own way is cursed from the beginning what certain materials theorists such as James Elkins refer to as an "innate vice," a fundamental tendency toward disintegration which is inherent in all substances, an unfixable instability intrinsic to all substrates. Cinema exists not as the result of any continuity of identity but rather it results from constant shifts and leaps and transformations. It is a relentlessly heuristic ('ευρίσκω, βρίσκω) art form which comes into being only insofar as its unmakes itself, cuts itself free from any sense of integrity or continuity with tradition. Cinema chews its way into the future. This is what Johnston means by "machinic visions," an ongoing appetitive processes in which the eye is recognized finally as an insatiable probing and predatory organ.



Francis Bacon
Pope Surrounded by Sides of Beef, (1954)
Art Institute of Chicago

With this in mind, we might then turn to the paintings of Francis Bacon. If we actually take the time to examine his work, which Christian Metz would insist (right along with Johnston and Deleuze) is not at all photographic, which is to say not at all fetishistic; how many indications can we find that Bacon's paintings are in fact highly involved with "cinematics"?

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971)

Offering what is probably the longest uncomfortable silence in the history of cinema, Stan Brakhage’s documentary short The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is a harrowing, unshakable, but fundamentally fascinating, viewing experience. Set entirely in a Pittsburgh morgue, the film records three actual autopsies with an unflinching eye. In its willingness to stare death and our inescapably corporeal state in the face it practically begs the viewer to have an extreme reaction. Different viewers, with different levels of squeamishness, will respond differently to the material. For many, I imagine it is nigh-unwatchable. Personally, I’ve seen several autopsy videos before (both in exploitation films like the Faces of Death series and in tapes produced for educational purposes), but I still found viewing this movie a difficult experience and one that forced me to call into question whether the illumination that I got from examining Brakhage’s approach was worth the trauma of watching the movie. Because Act of Seeing is entirely silent and because Brakhage’s roving camera does more than passively observe the flaying of peoples’ bodies, it feels more immediate than any such film I’ve seen before. He zooms his lens in to get uncomfortably close to his subjects, turning flesh into an abstraction. In doing so prompts the audience both to see the beauty there that we might otherwise neglect and confront the fears that we’re able to avoid due to lack of proximity to awareness of internal selves.

Between Woolf and de Beauvoir I - "Insignificant Other"

Alberto Giacometti
Woman with Her Throat Cut
1932
bronze
8 x 34 1/2 x 25 in.
at MoMA

I know it is possible that some you are hungry for more up-to-date readings. But let's be honest; I don't think we're going to be able to find anything which is more contemporary or daring than what I am teaching you now. Plenty of people are trying to produce "new" art out there; but our culture's insatiable capitalist demand for novelty (a sublimated form of animal hunger) is the source of some of the world's biggest problems. For what it's worth, of far greater critical concern today, and I am reminded of this by things I heard while at AWP in Denver, is not the issue of originality but rather of repetition. But this aside, the critics need time not only to create a new set of concepts, but simply to find these new artists, in addition to continuing their work on more familiar older artists whose work still demands to studied, whose legacies are still very much tied up in the scholarly equivalent of protracted inheritance litigation. Not that there's absolutely no one writing on stuff being produced this very minute. But most of that writing will not appear in journals so much as in 'zines. The more current the art gets, the more the writings on it will take the form of mere reviews and celebrations rather than deeply considered studies. Leo Steinberg, as you will recall, discussed a seven-to-ten-year lag between the moment of production and popular acceptance. I would suggest that the scholar, whose job it is not simply to accept something but also to explain it, lags even farther behind. We shouldn't expect the most preeminent critics of our day to write on hip-hop/cyber/metal/punk/graffiti art. These people, many of them older than your parents, are struggling with their own ideological fathers, their own anxiety of influence. The people we've been reading will simply not get around to fighting your culture wars. If anyone is going to write the articles on "today's" scene which you now want to read, that person will have to be you.

To open up a huge debate in the history of modern art, Hal Foster's critique of Peter Burger's Theory of The Avant-Garde; is that Burger's presentation of art history is far too linear, and far too sure that art movements were what they were in their very moment of their emergence, and further that they were consciously aware of what they were. Burger believes, if you will, that we can take the Avant-Garde at its word. His views cultural expression and critical thought as progressively liberating themselves from tradition by means of decisive encounters with otherness, and as a result coming to a consciousness of their own essence and freedom in practice; is all very much the product of Burger's Hegelian Marxism. Burger's take on the Avant-Garde, which for him represented a historical movement which deliberately set about to emancipate itself from the Art Institution, is entirely informed by his belief (of Frankfurt School, which is to say Institute for Social Reasearch provenance) that History is linear and progressive, and that to continue to abide in a set of practices once they have been successfully critiqued and historicized is to wallow in fantasy, denial, servitude, decadence. For this reason Burger's considers Neo-Avant-Gardist such as Rauschenberg, Johns, Judd and Nauman, to be infantile and perverse. The historical avant-garde, for Burger, was indeed bizarre and shocking to the uninitiated, no doubt; but it was simultaneously nothing if not canny about its own intentions and methods; and it was, above all else, truly original.

Now, it is this (comparatively conservative) view of history and critical thought as "decisive" and ultimately meaningful which is precisely what Hal Foster rejects. Instead, he asserts that the so-called 'historical' Avant-Garde was never a moment of newly won freedom, clarity and self-awareness; or originality, simplicity and integrity; within a general dialectical trajectory of cultural Enlightenment. Nor should we percieve the Avant-Garde as a shrewd form of cynical withdrawal from what Adorno called the "culture industry". Rather, the Avant-Garde, for Foster, marks a point of radical "indecision"--of trauma, loss of consciousness, and convulsive identity. The Avant-Garde stands not as a culmination or breakthrough so much as a point of unresolved and irreducible conflict. The avant-garde emerges in a place of total difference, and as such stands as the first of multiple iterations (click), of which the Neo-Avant-Garde of the 60s was one such repetition. For Foster, the art object is never finished, at least certainly not at the moment the artist applies the so-called touche finale. Rather, art objects, and most apparently those associated with the avant-garde, powerfully refute this idea. Instead, they are the very stuff of interminable analysis; their final completion is always deferred through an infinite series of interpretations which take the form not only of critical writings on them but also their presentation within museums and the university, as well as their reproduction in mass-media.

Whereas Burger claims that the Avant-Garde was authentically what it was in its unique historical moment, and that all subsequent returns to it are parasitic and servile; Foster insists that the Avant-Garde is that mode of expression which radically challenges our understanding of History in general, which by its intrinsic problematicity has always assumed the possibility of reiteration to be its most constitutive feature. Though Burger may see the Avant-Garde as a rational and lisible (i.e., readable) lexeme (i.e., statement) which finds its full meaning within the general grammar of a grand developmental narrative, Foster demands on the contrary that we see the Avant-Garde rather as a Return of the Real (click), an irruption of the speaking body within the space of the subject of speech. For Foster, the Avant-Garde is not a significant utterance so much as a hiccup, an stutter, a recurring blockage of the channels of communication. And if this is so, the very success of the historical Avant-Garde for which Burger argues, would in fact constitute it's veritable failure.

At this point it would make perfect sense for us to inaugurate some discussion, any discussion at all, of Adorno and Horkheimer's (as well as Walter Benjamin's) interest in the Avant-Garde and Surrealism, as possible strategies of escape from the all-encompassing system of Capitalist Utilitarianism which they called the Dialectic of Enlightenment (click). As Michael Weingrad demonstrates at great length in his essay "The College of Sociology and The Institute of Social Research" (click), the relationship between Bataille's circle and that of Adorno was anything but a harmonious matrimony. Still, if you read Weingrad's piece, it is quite easy to see how much his historicizing method depends upon the very same clear expository style which characterized Peter Burger, who ultimately is entirely intolerant of artist and critical inscrutibility, and the free play of signification in general. (Be sure to click on the image off to the right after reading Burger's unmistakably defensive, and perhaps quaintly pugilistic, opening posture below.)

In the begining was a smile, an irritating smile [or what last night I called a smirk] , in no way comparable to the masculine activity of the smiling in one's beard with which the scientists in Musil's A Man Without Qualities follow the talk in Diotima's salon. Theirs is the expression of deference and incompetence. In vain, I seek a similarly apropos phrase to define the smile in question here that always appears on the lips of the advocates of poststructuralism when one intends to propose an argument. So arrives the thought that to understand poststructuralism means nothing other than to understand this smile.

But would it not be possible for us read the encounter, and eventual judgment of Frankfurt upon Paris in far more traumatic terms? to read this critical scrutiny and dismissal rather in terms of a far more vexed moment of meconnaisance (click), in which the Self and Other exchange places, and discover or cathect (which is to say contract, or catch) the Truth of their identities and beliefs in so far as they lose their former selves in an encounter with radical Otherness? How would highly-sophisticated intellectual German Marxist Jews react upon encountering the most cutting-edge French intellectuals, who claimed to be experimenting critically with radical alternatives to Capitalism, and who claimed to welcome them as friends and protegees into their most intimate (i.e., secret) enclaves; how would Adorno and Benjamin react upon finding Bataille and Caillois toying with Nietzsche and Fascist ideology? Could we expect such a reaction, no matter by whom, ever to be objective? What would it mean to read the various essays, letters and memoirs, and take Adorno and Horkheimer, or Benjamin, at their word?

In reading Michael Weingrad's very circumspectly researched piece of scholarship, can we help but feel that we are reading recollections of recollections, reconstructions of reconstructions, as well as disavowals of disavowals, all of them peppered with countless textual as well as cognitive lacunae, blind spots? Is there not a quasi-libidinal ritualism to this sort of international curiosity and intrigue? Read by the mediating albeit lugubrious candle flame of Kojeve's (in)famous lectures on Hegel (which indeed helped lure the Frankfurt School to Paris), is it really possible to view all cont(r)acts between Bataille and Adorno (the latter being the world's most sophisticated critic of capitalist calculation) as mere rational laissez-faire negotiations, unmotivated by any residual idealist speculations or the equivocations of Desire? Weingrad has done a superb job of organizing and summarizing the source materials currently availible to us. But still it strikes me that far more remains to be done in terms of analyzing this particular station on Critical Theory's itinerary from Germany to America. In other words, we do not simply find a need to review the lessons of the past; but in a much more radical sense, we find ourselves compelled to return to them. We find ourselves unable but to repeat, unable but to begin, once more, again.

Thus, when 'Nazi' brushed against 'surrealist' that night, I wanted to deny such associations, and I doubt I was alone. . . . Clearly the [encounter] violated a critical taboo, and a nervous silence ensued; it was the silence of an interpretive breakdown. I did not think about that silence for several years (such was the strength of my denial) . . .. The [solution to this] question [Foster continues] was how to make [the appropriate] connections and, even more obscure at least to me, why I wanted to do so. The text that follows is thus provisional at best, and I present it only because I can now bear its fractured argument better than I can the restive silence that proceeded it.

Well now, what do you think of the essay below for next time? Is it recent enough, pertinent enough, different enough? Or just another iteration of the same old same old?

"Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity:
Gerhard Richter's Work of Mourning"
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
October, Vol. 75 (Winter, 1996), pp. 60-82

Androgyny: Woolf against Gender

Just as a perspective need not be actually perceived by anyone,
so a 'life' need not be actually lived by anyone.

-- Bertrand Russell

So, what exactly is Virginia Woolf saying about the need to get over gender? Clearly, she has read the feminist writings of the generations which immediately preceded her own. We know this because she refers directly to the work of Florence Nightingale and John Stuart Mill. And, more generally, she refers to the various instances of progressive political activism of late-19th and early-20th centuries. No doubt Woolf herself benefited greatly, both as a citizen and as a potential writer, from key advances made by women and men laboring for social justice. Nor should we imagine that Woolf believed the work of progressive politics had been achieved in her own day and an equitable society achieved. Because Woolf, though she mingled from her youth with her nation's greatest minds (the famous Bloomsbury Group), never had the benefit of a formal higher education. Women in 1900 did not get to attend university. Why then, does Woolf seem so opposed not only to the macho political writings of her day, which she saw as intrinsically fascist, but also to women's political writing? Why does she seem to argue that women need to get over their gender? Why does she insist great writers must become androgynous?




The answer to these questions is very involved. Let me attempt here at least a partial answer, and let me begin by referring to Woolf's avowed admiration for the ideas of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who figures so prominently in A Room of One's Own. Coleridge, to this day, is broadly considered the father of English-language literary criticism. His ideas in many respects are uniquely English, nevertheless in numerous crucial respects they derive from the ideas of Immanuel Kant, whom we discussed not only earlier in the semester but also in class just the other day. Working off of Kant's notion of the autonomy of pure Reason, Coleridge famously developed a theory of "poetics" which argued that the mind is an organic form which veritably brings all external reality into being, actively shaping that reality through a force which he called the "esemplastic power of the primary Imagination." This power can demonstrate itself in a mediated form as it concerns itself with Utilitarian worldly affairs such as politics and economics. The mind is able to reveal itself, its active and autonomous efficacy, in it purest and most immediate form, only in the creation of art. In genuinely great art - which exists not for any mercenary, practical or even moral purpose - but strictly for its own sake, we see the mind functioning at its highest level.




All of us live the vast majority of our lives in quotidian reality, caught up in the cares of the world. However, a small number of us are at times able to rise about the fray and sweat and anxiety of the world and occupy and exalted purely mental realm of artist creativity, one in which the think and to act become identical. It is only in these instance that the mind reveals it truly is living force whose environmental niche is not a physical world of solid objects such as table and chairs, but rather a purely mental world populated by "phantom" tables and chairs which exist in the modality of pure "percepts". The world itself, Woolf believed as a result of her interaction with the logical-positivist philosophers best represented by Bertrand Russell, was nothing but the totality of these possible points of view, along with the mental sensations which they occasion. To dwell unperturbed in this realm of unencumbered consciousness as fully and frequently as possible, this was, for Woolf, in the most literal sense, to live the "life of the mind."




Woolf, though she recognized that her access to the intellectual realm depended enormously on the work of her activist sisters, nevertheless refused to see their Utilitarian goals as ultimate ends. The Women's Movement did not bring women true freedom but was only a necessary precondition to the possible of women experiencing the highest form of freedom, which could be experienced only in the realm of the intellect. To experience true freedom, and to create aesthetic objects which would offers a lasting record of the experience of true freedom, each women needed "a room of her own." Yes, this did indeed entail a some sort of personal physical retreat from the duties of the world, but more properly it meant an intellectual retreat from anything that did not concern the free activity of the mind itself.

I have argued that Woolf inherited these notions of hers from key philosophers, in particular Kant and Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, it is also important to acknowledge another tremendously important source of Woolf's ideas regarding aesthetics and the life of the mind - modern painting. Modern painting, as I mentioned in class, was first brought to England by Woolf's close associate Roger Fry, who organized several important exhibitions of French painting in England, the very first to be held in that country. The body of works Frye brought home from France to exhibit in London was compromised of artists and styles extending back to Manet's Modernism, and Pissaro and Monet's Impressionism; and forward to Gauguin and Cezanne's Post-Impressionism.




Paul Gauguin
Self-Portrait with The Yellow Christ, 1889
[Christ as wallpaper? B.K.]




Woolf considered Frye's discover and exhibition of these paintings, and the purified "non-objective" aesthetic which they represented (they were not "of" objects in the world, but simply used these objects as "occasions" or materials upon which the mind could direct is plastic powers) that she wrote a book entitled Roger Frye: Biography. Many readers today find this book highly austere, singularly lacking in the kind of minute detail which is the very stuff of serious biography. But Woolf's book must be understood not as a somatic biography so much as an intellectual biography. The book must be highly abstract, because according to Woolf's understanding, there is no other way to produce a portrait of the life of an unique are highly sensitive mind.




Though Woolf's prose never becomes entirely abstract and also retains some slight reference to the external world, it is nevertheless important to situate her historically not only alongside Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, but also the rising generation of purely abstraction painters such as Kasimir Malevich, Wasily Kandisky and Piet Mondrian - each of whom writes an influential manifesto of the nature of non-objective painting. Woolf's own writings, whether fictional, biographic or essayistic, should be read with this famous manifestos of modern painting clearly in mind.

Anti-Chang

In response to the post in which I suggested that (the Sarah Chang video of) "The Four Seasons" is Kitsch, let me post a response to that piece of music by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, a tribute I believe he wrote in order to bring out the true essence and finest qualities of Vivaldi's timeless masterpiece. Please, have a listen.




Now, I don't want us to get too far out of the Middle Ages. But what do you suppose Schnittke is trying to say about Vivaldi. Is this truly a tribute? If so, why? And if not, why not? Does Schittke believe Vivaldi is Kitsch? If so, why? And if not, why not? Is Schnittke's own piece Kitsch? If so, why? And if not, why not? Is there perhaps some other term we could use to denominate either of these pieces?




If nothing else, upon this much at least I hope we can all agree, that the lower-budget video is far less wretched than the high-tech studio production in which the almost annoyingly pretty Sarah Chang blabs her head off. With her reputation for wearing only gorgeous designer gowns, and the fact that regularly blogging and making celebrity appearances has been a major component of her total process of public relations, Chang really has attempted to style herself not so much as a violin virtuoso so much as a violin diva. Call it "promotion and development" or "advocacy" all you want. It's abundantly apparent to me that the Chang/Orpheus Chamber Orchestra "Four Seasons" project was conceived to do one thing and one thing only: sell an immediately recognizable and easily consumed commodity, and thus make lots of money. I mean, honestly, when you listen to "Winter", what do you really picture blowing in the wind, leaves or $100 bills?

"Something for everyone!" - Sarah Chang / "Dreadful!" - BK

Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e., what is only an
adjunct and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete
representation of the object, in augmenting the delight of taste
does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of
pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces.
But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of
the beautiful form-if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win
approval for the picture by means of its charm-it is then called
finery and takes away from the genuine beauty.

- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1789)


Below is a little promo for Sarah Chang's performance of Antonio Vivaldi's beloved "The Four Seasons". Have a look and a listen.

I won't even bother to ask whether this is genuine Art or dreadful Kitsch. Of course it's junk.

What I will ask you to consider though is exactly why, from a Kantian perspective, it is so bad. Is this Kitsch through and through, or is there actually something genuinely decent here which just happens to be mixed with horrendous accretions of incidental ornament? In the video below Chang keep refer to "the poems": "The sonnets are integrated into the music and one can't go without the other, giving a vision of a certain animals or emotion to go along with the music." What are these poems to which she refers, James Thomson's "Seasons," a set of four baroque poems, no doubt based on four different aspects of nature capture in for painterly images. They are, by all currently standards and accounts, utterly dreadful.

Anyhow, watch the following and see what I consider BAD to look like. I welcome and encourage all comments.







The sonnets or poems to which Chang refers are the same poems to which famed art critic Clement Greenberg refers in his landmark essay, "Toward a Newer Laocoon".

Lessing in his Laokoon written in the 1760s, recognized the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion of the arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of literature, and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the typical misconceptions of his age. He attacks the descriptive verses of poets like James Thomson as an invasion of the domain of landscape painting, but all he could find to say about painting's invasion of poetry was to object to allegorical pictures which required an explanation, and to paintings like Titian's "Prodigal Son," which incorporate "two necessarily separate points of time in and and the same picture".

The Seasons
by James Thomson
(1700 - 1748)
"Winter"

SEE! Winter comes, to rule the varied Year,
Sullen, and sad; with all his rising Train,
Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms: Be these my Theme,
These, that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought,
And heavenly musing. Welcome kindred Glooms!
Wish'd, wint'ry, Horrors, hail! -- With frequent Foot,
Pleas'd, have I, in my cheerful Morn of Life,
When, nurs'd by careless Solitude, I liv'd,
And sung of Nature with unceasing Joy,
Pleas'd, have I wander'd thro' your rough Domains;
Trod the pure, virgin, Snows, my self as pure:
Heard the Winds roar, and the big Torrent burst:
Or seen the deep, fermenting, Tempest brew'd,
In the red, evening, Sky. -- Thus pass'd the Time,
Till, thro' the opening Chambers of the South,
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smil'd.
THEE too, Inspirer of the toiling Swain!
Fair AUTUMN, yellow rob'd! I'll sing of thee,
Of thy last, temper'd, Days, and sunny Calms;
When all the golden Hours are on the Wing,
Attending thy Retreat, and round thy Wain,
Slow-rolling, onward to the Southern Sky.

BEHOLD! the well-pois'd Hornet, hovering, hangs,
With quivering Pinions, in the genial Blaze;
Flys off, in airy Circles: then returns,
And hums, and dances to the beating Ray.

. . . (read more)

With respect to the painting of the same cultural moment, monumental modernist art critic Clement Greenberg passed a similarly harsh verdict: "The worst manifestations of literary and sentimental painting had already begun to appear in the painting of the late 18th century - especially in England, where a revival which produced some of the best English painting was equally efficacious in speeding up the process of degeneration." To whom or what could Greenberg be referring here? I will wager most anything that by the best English painting he was referring to this (please, click the image).



William Hogarth
(1697 - 1764)
The Marriage Contract,
from the "Marriage a la Mode" series (1745)
Tate Gallery, London

To what abysses of vulgarity did Greenberg believed such painting inevitably lead? How about the Pre-Raphaelites? At least as far as Greenberg is concerned, this is about as bad as it gets.



Holman Hunt
"The Hireling Shepherd" (1852)
Oil on canvas -30" x 48"
Manchester City Art Galleries