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

Pere-Versions of Love and Hate

They key to understanding the issues we are currently discussing, or at least to understanding these matters as Krauss does, is to read what I've written on Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser as carefully as possible, in order to gain an insight into just how completely our consciousness, for these philosophers and critics, is imbricated within the structure of ideology.



"Without Visible Rival"
There is, for these thinkers, absolutely no way to think outside of ideology, and so we have no way to understand what artifacts - even from the relatively recent past - might have meant within the context of their own culture which is not deeply perverted by the fact that our reconstruction of the past is being conceived and written from within history. Invariable we project the values of our own culture onto the past. And one of the most common ways of doing this, at least or especially within the academy, is to "historicize" the past in development terms. Is there then no alternative to getting the past wrong? Well, there may be, but it will not be easy. How is this to be done? That too is a very complicated issue. But the shorthand answer is this, to replace the history of the past with the genealogy or "archeology" (not understood casually but rather in a very specific technical sense) of the past, the groundwork for which will be the genealogy or archeology of the present.

Althusser, in various of his writings, attempts to theorize the possibility of such a project. The result of his thought, which is long and complicated and greviously difficult, is to argue for the possibility of a wholly material and wholly immanent critique, one which attempts not so much to dismantle as to "transcode" the entire system from within. Such a project, to put things as succinctly as possible, will take the form of a radical inversion of the dominant order, one which will entail as radical reversing of those terms and values which have enjoyed cultural privilege. An alternative history must emerge, one written in the terms provided by the devalued axis. The history of Humanity must be re-written from the perspective of the Monstrous.


This is precisely what Krauss, along with a small group of very close colleagues, has attempted to do in the two-volume survey shown below. Her reward for her efforts has been to win herself the hatred of at least half the art historical world. You may well find yourself, after long consideration, to be numbered among the haters. At a very fundamental level, we don't, from a structuralist perspective, really get to choose. At a certain moment, we find, if we are one of the rare few who to a life in Art or Text at all, that we have either "always already" loved Rosalind Krauss or "always already" wanted to see her hung, drawn and quartered.

Roger Kimball,
"Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss"
New Criterion 1993
(I'll post this when I can get access to it.)






Ideological Claptrap

As a professional art historian who teaches twentieth century art at public university, I find this book to be virtually worthless. Not only do the authors leave out artists from their book because they don't adhere to their own rigid ideological orthodoxies, but the book is very badly written; they undermine their own arguments by constantly lapsing into semi-meaningless jargon. A good postmodernist/ Marxist perspective in a general introduction to twentieth century would be useful, but these authors are too inept and arrogant to bring it off.

One of the worst books I've ever read.

As a visual studies major, I've read my fair share of theory and art history books, and this is by far the worst. It is filled with statements that ramble on for full paragraphs leave you looking for both the period and the point. The reader gets the impression that an intoxicated art historian is rambling on at a party, completely unaware of how uninteresting he or she is, or how little sense is being made. The legitimate information in this book could be presented in a pamphlet. I was forced to read this, and sift through 704 pages of hay to find the needle. I literally read this book while walking on a treadmill in order to maintain consciousness.

Like chewing through tough propaganda

"....an indispensible resource for understanding how our current cultural moment is inflected by changing conceptions of the past" as another reviewer puts it. It sure is that. It certainly demonstrates quiet clearly how some academics choose to reappropriate historical fact in order to fall in line with the narrow, convaluted views and theoretical constructs of a few, who wish to establish themselves as the, self appointed, "new and improved" cannon. Far too many omissions for my liking. It's a huge and relevant Art world out there !! Be warned . . . If you are not prepared for the language (at least Batchelor of Arts Degree level)you may feel like an illiterate Medieval peasant traveling out of your village for the first time in order to enter the doors of Cologne cathedral to hear a man in a pointy hat speaking Latin !!

One star is one star too many

This book appears to have no relevance. The word 'critical' is used frequently but never truly defined in context to art. If the work is taken as valued, it is an illuminating theory with merit. When not valuable it is deemed as privileging, or illegitimately an assertion of the preferences of the artist and a social privilege, i.e. men, capitalists, etc.

Nietzsche: "God is dead." ~ Althusser: "Man Is Dead."

All of what you say about Althusser is essentially correct, though it does seem to me that you're concentrating on the opening section of his essay. That part, as I said in a previous post, is interesting and important, but in many ways, as Althusser himself avers, is not terrifically different from Gramsci's writings on hegemony. The opening, in retrospect, will appear quite different, far more thematically nuanced and critically insightful, after you've read through the end of the essay, which is simply staggering.

It's in the later half that Althusser puts forth his whole theory of interpelation, wherein he presents not just an argument about the oppressiveness for workers of the relations of production, but, far more fundamental, an account of the process whereby the working $ubject is produced. Yes, churches, schools and offices are sites where this takes place. But the key for Althusser, something I tried to point out in class with my presentation of the semiotic square, is that one is not a subject who after the fact enters into "the relationships of the relations of production".


Just to bring you up to speed, not only should the duplication of the stem "relat-" catch your eye, but in particular Althusser's use of the word "relation-ships". This is not a Marxist economic terms of the sort Gramsci would have used but rather an anthropological term, one taken directly from Claude Levi-Strauss. It refers to the superstar anthropologist's presentation, in Structural Anthropology, of the "elementary structure of kinship", an atomic set of basic familial relationship which inform all identities, activities and even attitudes within primitive cultures. The point Levi-Strauss wants to make in this essay is that within such structures the individual means nothing. Each individual body enters into the structure, which is to say into culture, only insofar as loses its individuality and takes up a functional role within the larger whole. Not only does the discrete biological body no longer exist in the raw form after this moment of "interpelation" (as if it ever did in the first place), but indeed the individual unit of consciousness does not exists before this moment of entry into larger structure. Even before its birth, as Althusser insists, the individual was "always already" a $ubject.


This is the crucial difference between Marx and Althusser; or, between the early Marx and Althusser. Because one of Althusser's greatest projects, a life-long project, was to demonstrate something I discussed in class yesterday - that at a certain moment in Marx's life, around 1848, a fundamental epistemological shift ("decalage") occurs. In the same way that pre-history of modern sculpture, at a point around 1900, can be seen to meet an agonized end in the failed commisions of August Rodin; or just as the historical "moment" that was modernist sculpture in turn meets its demise around 1964, when a welter of previously unimagined but nevertheless mappable forms begins to arise; so, at a certain moment in the mid-19th century it becomes possible to think the end of another historical "moment", that of Man. The end of Humanism, a tradition apparently going back a number of centuries, according to this argument which is made in structuralist terms akin to those used by Krauss, in fact only dates back to the late 18th century, with the rise of a particular set of ideas, question and disciplines known as the Sciences of Man - all of which focused on the human body as a scientifically knowable entity, and all of which maintained a face that the scientific investigation of Human nature would eventually lead to a just, equitable and peaceble brotherhood of Humanity.


Althusser's argument, quite simply, is that sometime just around 1948 - when he wrote the "Theses on Feurbach" (the last and greatest exponent of Humanism) and The Communist Manifesto, Marx was able to think the end of Man, to realize man is neither the apex of creation nor the perfection of nature, nor is Man even an entity which has a continuous and unified history which will eventually culminate in self-knowledge and self-actualization. Rather, Man is an ideological construct of relatively recent advent. I say 'advent', instead of 'invent', specifically because Marx, as Althusser constructs him, does not believe anyone in particular invented the myth of Human History. Rather, Human History arises as an "event", and takes the form a total "moment", a comprehensive structure outside of which it is not possible to think at all. Or, to say it contrariwise, it is only by fully mapping out the extended field within with the Human is but one term or position (and for that reason it can no longer be seen as a priviledged), that one is able to project the end of Man. One can only think the end of Man from within, and at a particular moment during, the History of Man. In other words, the critique of Man must be a radically immanent critique, because thought itself, consciousness itself, only exists within a structure.


To put it in psychoanalytic terms, which Althusser also admits to adopting, it is only possible to map the Unconscious from the position of consciousness. This is the fundamental difference between the early Marx and the later Marx, the early Marx and Althusser. The former believe in the original dignity and eventual sovereignty of Man. Ideology, according to this view, is a state of false consciousness into which humanity fell. In the middle of his essay, Althusser points out the two prevailing beliefs about this fall: 1) That of the 18th-century French philosophes was that false ideas has been foisted on the majority by the priest and despots in order to exploit them. God, here, is a weapon to crush. 2) That of the 19th-century German philosophers and historians (a veritable new science) was that false consciousness was a phase that humanity needed to pass through over the course of it natural development. God, here, is a fantasy construct through which humanity darkly contemplates its own image. Of course, for Althusser, both of these are wrong. Because each supposes that it is possible to overcome ideology, to start, "in the final instant", outside of ideology and come to consciousness per se. Hence, the obvious contrast is between false consciousness and free consciousness. What Althusser claims Marx saw, though still dimly because he lacked the methods and insights later furnished by structural anthropology, what the free consciousness was itself a form of false consciousness.


In fact, free consciousness, the belief that we are in control of our own minds and actions and destinies, is false consciousness par excellance. The very feeling, to put it as plainly as can be, that we have finally stepped free of all ideology and at last stand in the clear, this is the surest indication that in that very moment we have entered into Ideology completely. This, again, is the famous moment of recognition, the moment of the production of the $ubject, of his entry not into the relations of production but into the relationships of the relations of production; which Althusser calls "interpelation", or "hailing". It is both a total event which happens at various key moments in our individual lives, but even more importantly for Althusser, it is a ongoing process we repeat, moment by moment, every instant of our waking lives. Each time we say to ourselves not just, That's where I work; or, Now it's time to pay my bills and do my taxes; but indeed each time we say to ourselves, These are my pants and thank God the key are in the pocket; or, Man, I really feel like myself today; we are in that same instant hailed into $ubjectivity, as term which must be heard in its pure ambivalence.



Robert Gober
"Untitled" (1992)
Site-Specific Installation (2007)
At Schaulager, Basel
There is no outside to Ideology. In the same way the outside of the total social practice we call Text can only be thought as a logically necessary aspect of Text, one which must properly be understood as Not-Text; so the outside of the total social practice we call Enlightenment, or Freedom, can only be thought as a logically necessary aspect of the same structure which must be properly be understood as Ideology, or Necessity. As Lacan, so famously put it, "There is no other to the Other."

Coming up: Alternative Sciences and Immanent Critique

/Cloud/

Helene Cixous' declaration that "Everything will change when woman gives woman to the other woman" is an example of a grammatical form called the "middle voice" (El coche se vende.). Cixous uses it as a way of getting beyond traditional views of active and passive, or Subject and Object. Two examples of the kind dichotomous thinking she want to overcome are Aristotle's first and final causes, and Descartes' notion of rational engineering.

Consider the house above. Try to imagine not as a building which was designed by an architect for a client (in linguistic terms, not a purposeful message traveling between a "sender" and a "receiver"), but rather a structure, an utterance, which emerges gratuitously (as a "Gift") on its own, and develops in its own terms. No prior expectations about form, function or finish are in place, and so the house is free to develop interminably, as it will. That's exactly what most confused me about Gehry's corrugated-aluminum and chain-link buildings when i first saw them. Walking by the construction site, I couldn't imagine why it took the builders so damn long to complete a simple structure, until an architect friend of mine pointed out that the building was "done". What I took to be scaffolding, barriers and a foreman's mobile office was in fact the "finished" building. To have renovated this construction would have been no different from building it in the first place. The initial building was already an alteration. This is a very different way of viewing "living space": no longer as simply neutral Cartesian isometric space which you simply live it, space now is itself dynamic, alive.

Something I wrote to one of my freshman comp students:

I like very much your idea of comparing the clearly outmoded Architecture and Planning building here at the U to those of other programs on campus. I was a bit surprised you wouldn't have mentioned the Marriott dance building, because that is such a wonderful example of a building designed for a specific purpose, and which has aged wonderfully well. Also, I'm a bit concerned about your idealization of classic style, which reads a bit too much like von Humboldt.

...Rather than returning to romantic notions about the perfection of Greco-Roman culture, you might (as a truly 'catholic' planner) want to turn your attention to the medieval notion of design, building and use. If you consider the great cathedrals of Europe, you'll notice that these are structures which, for all that hey are unmistakably grand building projects, nevertheless everywhere violate classical notions of finish. They were built over large stretches of time, and used by the public all the while they were under construction. And quite evidently their plans were revised over the course of their construction. Many began as fortress-like romanesque buildings (quite like the A+P building at present) but over time became increasingly ornate, glassy and gothic.

If you were to adopt this post-modern view of things, you would be able to suggest that our our Architecture and Planning Building at the U, horribly outdated, not be completely overhauled, but rather put into a state of permanent revision, quite a bit like the Robert Morris title (which I've borrowed for the name of one of my class livejournals) suggests: Continuous Project Altered Daily. This is a concept you could address in terms of Aristotle's distinctions between contraries and contradictions: Some would assert that an architectural structure is either complete or incomplete, but rather than thinking in terms of such contraries, I would suggest that the same problem can be understood in terms of a contradiction. A building, then, might be considered as neither constructed or under construction but rather in a permanent phase of de-construction, or perpetually "under revision". Suddenly, cranes and scaffolding are no longer mere ugly nuissances, but rather occasions for us to perceive alternative forms of beauty and functionality, and to re-think building in terms of time in addition to eternity.

This is precisely what's going on right now with the Marriott Library, which is being modified even while it is in use. It strikes me that the A+P building might be the best place to educate the entire campus community with regard to the anti-modernist idea that finish is not the norm but rather the occasional exception, and that perpetual construction and demolition is in fact a more honest assessment of how cultures and their architecture actually live.

But to return to your own remarks, I think what you're saying about the impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside in the Gehry house is entirely correct. This is a house while is all surface, but without any real inside or outside. This mode of construction is certainly what you see in the earlier Gehry works. By constrast, what you see in the later ones, those which made Gehry an architectural rockstar, is a different sort of confusion, or inversion: the reversal of background and foreground. Whereas /architecture/, or /space/, in the perspectival tradition, had been understood an established rational form outside of which loomed its irrational other, /cloud/; now, in Gehry's more recent works, /cloud/ is brought to the fore, while /architecture/ and /space/ are made radically to retreat and function merely as a ground against, or within, which /cloud/ can suddenly appear and hover. And, if you think about it, if not neo-mannerism, quite possibly such as reversal could be understood as a kind of neo-baroque "theatricality" (think Fried), the kind of thing you might associate with Racine. We'll talk about this more when we get to Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew".

Finally, some images to prompt reflection:





Torelli, with some help from me.



Fontebasso, Francesco (Venice, Italy, 1707–1769)
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, c. 1749
Oil on canvas, 46 x 59 cm



Fontebasso, Francesco (Venice, Italy, 1707–1769)
Abraham and the Three Angels, c. 1750
Pen and brown ink over black chalk, red wash heightened with white



Lucilla Catania
"Ganci, Virgole e Doppie Punte," 1996
Galleria ARTRA,
Milano, Italy

Finally, have a look at these outrageous designs by Giuseppi Bibiena, in which /space/ and /cloud/ seem to merge together into one.

This is perfect day for reading Sei Shonagon.

Utagawa Hiroshige - 歌川広重
Oshashi Bridge & Atake In a Sudden Shower




James McNeil Whistler
Nocturne Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge




John Cage
"In A Landscape"
"Daughter of The Lonesome Isle"
"Suit for Toy Piano - pt. One"

The Mouth before The Voice: Food, Fantasies, the Mother

"Those who go below the surface do so at their own peril." - Oscar Wilde:

* * *

It is wearisome to hear once more that Roland Barthes' "Empire of Signs" is an example of hypocritical cultural imperialism. It's been said too many times; and, further, it's an inaccurate assessment of the actual text to begin with. I don't see the need to apologize for this book before recommending it - simply a need to introduce it in terms of what it actually pretends to accomplish as well as what it never imagined it could do. In a word, it's hardly as though Barthes was a Heidegger.


As a previous reviewer mentions, Barthes' shows his hand from the very beginning and does not attempt in the least to produce an objective or scholarly account of Japan. Who could be foolish enough to imagine that Barthes, who though he wrote none of his own was certainly no stranger to genuine historical and anthropological analysis; who could be foolish enough to imagine that Barthes would ever have considered himself here to have produced, spontaneously, a passable work of scholarship in a slim volume containing no documentation or critical notes whatsoever?

Barthes' writings, for all their diversity, began with a concentration on the sign as a unit of discourse, and the way signs become bundled into larger meaningful wholes. This a model, which though directed toward the analysis of the novel, nevertheless had it's basis in the concept of speech - which he saw in very abstract diagrammatical terms. Over time however Barthes began to pay increasingly greater attention to the materiality, the maternality, of the sign, in particular the written sign. Barthes' reading of Japan offers a vision of culture which is compelling insofar as it appears wholly different from that of the West, one which entails viewing all cultural activities as various forms of inscription as opposed to speaking. Barthes oppose Western logo-centricism (Word- and Voice-centered reality), then, to Japanese grapho-, or grammo-centrism (Writing-centered reality). Such a fundamentally inscriptive culture, highly ec-centric from the West's perspective, locates thought and action on the outside rather than the inside of the subject. It never assumes that action and communication (if those words apply here at all) take place in an natural and unmediated fashion, or in terms of a living and present Voice. Rather writing, speech and action are always intimately bound up with some technological or instrumental variant (sword, stick or banner) of the Pen.


If Barthes is working within any genre at all here, it's not that of scholarship but rather of the essay as first established by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's writings on indigenous Brazilians were in no way expected to provide an objective picture, much less construction, of the "rawness" of life amongst cannibals. Montaigne rather finds in the accounts he has heard of the Caribbeans an occasion to reflect on the concerns of his own culture, in particular epistemology, history and the value of the values of his own "over-cooked" civilization. Montaigne was well aware of what he was about, as was Barthes.

There is clearly no need to question the merit of thorough anthropological and historical research. However, those disciplines do not exhaust the possibilities of writing on other cultures. That we possess the methods necessary for the production of objective accounts of cultures, does not mean we no longer have a need for more subjective (or perhaps more non- or pre-objective) forms of investigation. Reason and the understanding, as Kant might have said, cannot take from the imagination what is its proper due.


It strikes me that the kind of phenomenological reverie evinced in Barthes' encounter with Japan (his "love affair" with chopsticks, which is openly fetishistic and evokes a dual, maternal phallus, an anti-Platonic phallus which is "not-One", which does not slice but rather unswaddles or snuggles a dumpling) is highly indebted not only to Montaigne's writings but also to Bachelard's later critiques of objective science. This sort of literary entry into a "paradis artificiel" does not come without a price. And certainly the cost of entry to, or residence in, this world of maternal jouissance was one which not only Baudelaire himself, but also numerous other writers, as antique as Augustine or as recent as Barthes himself, were perfectly willing to admit, and indeed to make the problematical focus of entire books and careers.

Barthes' "The Empire of Signs" is not only a welcome complement to more conventional scholarly writing, but is in fact conditioned and called for by it - as Barthes says elsewhere, the only proper response to writing is more writing. If Barthes had not written this book, someone else would have had to write it instead.

More Kant Troubles

Student:

I want to post a passage from Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), one dealing with the character of non-European races.

"If we examine the relation of the sexes in these parts of the world, we find that the European alone has found the secret of decorating with so many flowers the sensual charm of a mighty inclination and of interlacing it with so much morality that he has not only extremely elevated its agreeableness but also made it very decorous. The inhabitant of the Orient is of a very false taste in this respect. Since he has no concept of the morally beautiful which can be united with this impulse, he loses even the worth of the sensuous enjoyment, and his harem is a constant source of unrest. He thrives on all sorts of amorous grotesqueries, among which the imaginary jewel is only the foremost, which he seeks to safeguard above all else, whose whole worth consists only in smashing it, and of which one in our part of the world generally entertains much malicious doubt -- and yet to whose preservation he makes use of very unjust and often loathsome means. Hence there a woman is always in a prison, whether she may be a maid, or have a barbaric, good-for-nothing and always suspicious husband. In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery? A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker, just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face. Of course, Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whome he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: "You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad." And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid."

- Immanuel Kant, "Of National Characteristics, so far as they Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"

The gentleman in class who threw out the notion that Kant might have had a hint of racism probably experienced some shock while reading the last line of this passage. I certainly did. It's tough to twist that line and come out with something positive.

Teacher:

I know what you're saying about that last line. My response, though I don't know it to be correct, is this:

Was the shock deliberate? Is that line meant to be taken entirely literally or was it written for rhetorical effect? Was the shock not in fact something which was calculated in advance, intended to provide us with an initial jolt and then a subsequent opportunity to overcome the disturbance through rereading the passage ironically? In other words, is this sentence perhaps a miniature restaging of the Kantian dynamical sublime?

Honestly, it's hard to say. Not that Kant, when it came to race, held nothing but opinions which would be considered perfectly acceptable by today's political standards. But doesn't that final statement seem to come too unexpectedly out of left field? And doesn't it seem especially odd coming from a man who, above almost all things, prided himself on his lack of prejudice. The surprise appearance of the sentence, the effect of "parenthyrsis" (a term the 18th-century German art critic J. J. Winkelmann appropriates from Longinus' On The Sublime) might oblige us to suspend our judgment. Again, we must wonder whether Kant wasn't in fact asking if the reader, after considering all the manifold conditions which go into determining racial and regional character, would nevertheless be hasty enough to dismiss a man's opinion exclusively because of the color of his skin. Everything about the sentence would seem to suggest it is meant by the writer to stand out to us as a schoolbook example of faulty deduction.

Let me repeat, I don't know what the answer to this conundrum is. But the passage of Kant's which you raise for consideration comes from a man who was astoundingly well read, especially when it came to geography and ethnography of his day. The passage in question at once brings to my mind Montaigne's very famous essay about the newly discovered natives of Brazil, called "On The Cannibals." In it Montaigne ventures to argue that when the European and Brazilian cultures are freely compared without bias, it is in fact the Europeans who emerge as the more barbaric. Note how Montaigne clinches his point by ending his essay on a ironic note:

I had a very long talk with one of them; but I had an interpreter who followed my meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas, that I could get hardly any satisfaction from the man. When I asked him what profit he gained from his superior position among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to march foremost in war. How many men followed him? He pointed to a piece of ground, to signify as many as such a space could hold; it might have been four or five thousand men. Did all his authority expire with the war? He said that this much remained, that when he visited the villages dependent on him, they made paths for him through the underbrush by which he might pass quite comfortably. All this appears to make good enough sense. But what's the use in? These people don't wear breeches.

Which is to say, "This supposed savage seems to speak reasonably enough. Still, who would be foolish enough to lend credence to a man who doesn't wear pants?

How much depends on the kind and degree of inflection we lend to the last line. I will freely admit that here we run into even further trouble, because in fact there is a scholarly debate over the proper translation of these last few sentences. (You can google various translations to see what I mean.) So, if Kant did indeed read Montaigne (and I would be very surprised if didn't) we still don't know how Kant's edition of the Cannibal essay read, (here's where you apply for grant money to fly to Königsberg to search Kant's library), much less how Kant himself read it.

In any case, this vexatious passage only confirms my point: before we hasten to pass judgment on such important issues, and especially when we're dealing with a declared free-thinker and a master stylist of astonishing intellect, we need to examine the evidence very closely. As it stands, the issue is not yet decidable for us.

And for what it's worth, it's just such a highly problematic and deeply disturbing detail which would make an ideal starting place for an essay in the style of Derrida.

From The Library Journal: "Following the death of Paul DeMan and the controversies surrounding the ensuing revelations of his personal life and wartime politics, Derrida delivered a lengthy seminar on the ethics and emotions of friendship. Each session began with the same plaintive refrain from Montaigne's essay on friendship: 'O my friends, there is no friend.'"

Hybridity, Monstrosity and Outrage in Late-Modernist Art

Click the image below and have a look at all the reverential and pandering nonsense PBS has to offer with regard the life and work of Robert Rauschenberg, a true American "master". Then conduct a Google search and have a look at Rauschenberg's actual art. This brief exercise will give you a wonderful lesson in what textual scholars call "redaction": retrospectively revising a text, or framing it, in order disguise its internal inconsistencies, as well as its inconsistencies with regard to its own historical context or our own contemporary values and expectations. Another way to refer to this smoothing and softening process might be "intellectual cowardice," a phrase which comes from the critic Susan Sontag.


Please, don't get me wrong; it's not at all that I think Rauschenberg was an insignificant figure in the least. It's rather that everything I have seen (in books and in person) and read (from genuinely critical sources) leads me to believe that Rauschenberg's actual project was not to contribute to but rather to destroy high culture, and in particular the institution of the Museum. His aim was always to replace reverence with loud laughter. Rauschenberg, like his associate the maverick musician John Cage, is almost always pictured smiling broadly and laughing heartily. But are these expression indicative of good-natured joy and human warmth? Or do they rather evince hostility and mockery, or perhaps simply an unashamed and unapologetic acknowledgment of the absurdity of most all we've been taught to respect?

Famed art historian Peter Berger summed up the issue in these terms:

In the begining was a smile, an irritating smile. . . . 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.

Religious piety aside, are these artist laughing with, or are they laughing at Humanity? I propose this to you, as I have to all my classes in the past, as a serious question.


In any case, well-meaning idiots, like PBS, apparently never stop to ask themselves this question. Most likely because more often than not there's no immediate reward for being critical. And because they are two deeply mired in the self-congratulatory "Intellectual Traditions" ideology of which I have tried to remain skeptical throughout the semester - and in all my classes, not just this one.

This process of recension is one I want you to consider as we watch how the Christian Fathers gradually assembled a set of canonical books and orthodox teachings which, over time, functioned effectively to turn Jesus from a radical trouble-maker (of one sort or another) into a full-fledged conservative, something which by any responsible scholarly account he simply wasn't. And this, of course, is what the Museum mentality does to all lives and works of art and literature. Because these texts made an impact in their day, and because we feel a need to explain how our own current thoughts and practices derive from these pure sources, or simply because we like to congratulate ourselves for being cultured; we "interpolate" significant (and therefore potentially dangerous and unsettling) events from the past, until they become "Great Men", "Great Ideas" and "Great Books". Quite bluntly, I don't buy it. This mentality, no matter what you're been told and no matter how obvious and natural may seem, is the effect of an ideological system of which I am a renegade product. I will freely admit that I gained familiarity with intriguing texts through this sort of intellectual baby-sitting (precisely what Kant attacks as 'infantile' in "What is Enlightenment?"). But at a certain moment in my life I found it imperative to break away from what other people (some of them my institutional superiors) told me think. It became necessary to stand back from my education and ask myself, not how it ultimately made me "a better person" (zzzzzzzzz!), but rather what had it turned me into in the first place?


Some of you will wonder why I ask you to read not just great books but also minor ones. Some of you will wonder why we move so slowly. Some of you will wonder why I ask such pointless questions, or don't seem to present clear and definitive answers. Some of you will question what the whole point of the whole class is. Some of you, at the end of the semester, will write poor evaluations of the course; for a host of reasons, a quite frequently because it didn't look organized and professional along the lines of what you get in your science classes. But I would ask you to consider this: What does scientific research really look like? Does scientific research begin by assuming everything you feel to conform to common sense is actually the case? Or does not science actually begin by interrogating common-sense assumptions. Any scientific research proceeds according to method. The scientist works like an archaeologist; or a crime-scene investigator, who must not jump to conclusions or take anything from granted. Critical and methodical researchers must uncover not just what looks immediately interesting, but rather they must map out an entire site. Showing how two objects which look like they belong together were actually deposited thousands of years apart. Such researchers must get behind all the assumptions that have been handed us, until we see that reality (or at least the rational explanation of it) in fact works far differently from what common sense first tells us.

If you can begin to adopt this attitude with regard to our readings, you will have a enlightening and enjoyable experience in this course. If you simply want me to tell you what the "great writers" had to say so that you can say that you have studied "Intellectual Traditions" and therefore deserve to be awarded special "Honors" which distinguish you from the average student, then this class, though not necessarily intentionally so, is pretty much designed to make you utterly miserable. Oops! Whereas, if you want to begin to explore not just what we have been told to believe, but also how and why we have been told to believe at all, as well as what other alternatives to orthodox belief and behavior have arisen and are currently out there; then this class should be a fun and exciting adventure for you. At least that's my intention.



Robert Rauschenberg
Monogram. 1955-1959.
Moderna Museet
Stockholm, Sweeden

Abductions and Adductions of D&G with respect to the Academy

Abduction (kinesiology)



Abductive reasoning

In response to Erik's question about the ultimate success or failure of Deleuze and Guatarri's project within the university as well as society at large, I made reference to the the work of fate of René Thom, in particular his catastrophe theory. Here's the entire quotation of Thom's for which I was searching last night.

"Sociologically speaking, it can be said that this theory is a shipwreck. But in some sense, it is a subtle wreck, because the ideas that I have introduced gained ground. In fact, they are now incorporated in everyday language. . . . The notions of [catastrophe theory] have become part of the ordinary baggage of modelers. Therefore, it is true that, in a sense, the ambitions of the theory failed, but in practice, the theory has succeeded."

I believe the same can be said of the work of Deleuze and Guatarri. Nomadology never achieved its authors' ambition of a general cultural revolution, before being reterritorialized back into the institutional body from which they sought emancipation. Nevertheless, the variety of terms and concepts introduced by D&G, along with an at least provisional reorientation of critical outlook, have found their way into general scholarly practice, and perhaps as a result have made the institution a more highly articulated and agile body.



The Swallow's Tail — Series on Catastrophes
Salvador Dalí, 1983
Oil on canvas
73 × 92.2 cm, 28.74 × 36.30 in
Dalí Theatre and Museum, Figuere

This was the final painting created by Dalí, the last piece in a series based on René Thom's catastrophe theory (click for more info). Below is another painting in the same series.



Topological Abduction Of Europe - Homage To René Thom, 1983