The thematic link between Specters of Marx and The End of Art was ‘endism’ – the view that political, cultural, religious institutions can come to an end. Derrida’s opponent was Fukuyama whose book The End of History and the Last Man takes its premise from an Hegelian view of history. Likewise in Geulen’s book the ‘rumour’ that is the end of art begins with Hegel’s famous thesis.
But it soon became clear that in discussing versions of the end of art we were simultaneously discussing tragedy. With hindsight this is no surprise when we learn that Hegel developed his dialectic whilst formulating an idea of tragedy. ‘For Hegel tragedy is the conflict of two substantive positions, each of which is justified, yet each of which is wrong to the extent that it fails either to recognize the validity of the other position or to grant it its moment of truth; the conflict can be resolved only with the fall of the hero...Hegelian tragedy is the inevitable consequence of the absolute realizing itself in history.’ (Mark Roche) Where Antigone was the much cited example in Geulen’s account, Derrida uses Hamlet to read Marx and critique Fukuyama. In both cases and for both scenarios ‘the time is out of joint’.
Why does tragedy serve as a paradigm of temporality in endism? And, outside of getting students to read these two books, can it be taught: is there a tragedy of the teaching studio?
Michael Belshaw
Tragedy and Trauerspiel – Synopsis for Roundtable discussion Draft
The distinction in the use of language between tragedy and Trauerspiel emphasizes a closure to historicity and in so doing opens up the dialogue over thought as ‘Idea’. He stages allegory in the process of asking whether we can be outside of our history and without subjectivity.
Guelan aligns him with Nietzsche due to language and development of idea and next to Heidegger due to circulatory thinking.
The circles of thinking are to do with allegory. In fact he uses theatre as staging of this thinking. A series of intercalated circles that reveal the overlap of allegories out of time but over a period of time hence Baroque, German Romanticism to modernism. These were also an end of the idea i.e. perfection, therefore Benjamin sets a stage for a more unstable future (Vidler on Baroque and Interpreting the Void). He distinctly makes possibility of fragmentation by his use of language and allegory. Indeed he introduces an anesthetisation of everyday life. By framing he creates distinction and closed ends within art and ultimately makes possible endisms resulting into beginnings. He places uncertainty centre stage.
These allegories are tragic in term of the Derridean nature of hauntology. They echo the same demise and act as memory. They are allegorised at the point of their demise clarifying them at the point of closure. Artaud is relevant here in focussing on this aspect of cruelty the repetitious nature endings and endings of theatre.
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel was to close the event and create a stage for endism at the point of beginning. In so doing he sets a stage for ‘Idea’ outside of historicity and brings the thought/idea to our attention. i.e. reproduction of the reproduction is the circular endings simultaneous with beginnings – thought = ‘idea’.
Joanna Geldard
The Perpetual Present: The End of Art as an Uncoupling of Discourse from History?
Hölderlin’s understanding of the river is key. When Geulen writes that Heidegger’s interest in the river in Hölderlin’s poem stems from its double-directedness, she does not mean to imply that it flows both ways. Hölderlin’s description of the river does not emphasise direction as such (or at least directedness that points to the meaning of the river being determined by its final resting place). Instead, the meaning/being of the river in/as the present draws from both its source (“far away”) and its destination (“seaward”), which in turn establishes it as river.
In drawing from both source and destination, Hölderlin maintains the river as, in essence, a static thing in perpetual flux—the river (as river) can never reach its end, nor can we ever witness its beginning. More importantly, in Geulen’s analysis, the river can be seen to parallel history in the sense that, to Hölderlin, events seem held between (and defined by) origin and destination. This alignment or double projection appears close to Heidegger’s clearing (the space in which being shows up as being).
However, the situation is made more complex by language (after all, the end of art is a written thesis). Here, Geulen alludes to a problem that arises out of the distance that exists between ‘event’ and ‘language of event’. The assumption that language ‘refers to’ or ‘arises out of’ allows language to follow or trail, and to trace a lineage of, what will become through language, sequential, ordered events—language plots history. Or, to put it another way, history is, here, seen to underpin, author and legitimate the language which follows it and establishes it as history.
If Hegel is (or his interpreters are) mistaken, it is in naturalising this linkage. The end of art, therefore, appears as language of an event which has not existed, nor ever can exist if the end of art is to have meaning. This paradox relieves language of historicism, and points to Hölderlin’s reliance on rumour and legend. Rumour thus serves as an acknowledgment of an irresolvable dislocation between event and language of event, and as an explanation of what it is that fills the gap.
If event (river) is requiring of origin and destination to establish itself as river, then the end of art thesis, too, requires an origin and destination which it must maintain in order to perpetuate its existence as end of art thesis. Within German metaphysics, the end of art draws from Hegel as its source and the fabled end of art as its destination. With both ends buffered by rumour, the thesis is uncoupled from the events it is taken to chart. In so doing, the end of art attains both freedom and endlessness, and in the process becomes a rumour of itself.
Tom Palin (June, 2011)
Commodification as the end of art
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, as Guelen recognises, proposes two ends of art. The first of these is the false demise of art that comes with the rise of capitalism and the logic of the market. For Adorno, ‘all songs have sickened’ since the emergence of bourgeois culture and art withers when governed by principles of economic rationalism. Under Capitalism art will always reflect the economic interests and mandates of the handlers that it serves. In contrast, there is the promise of a utopian end of art, under a reconciled communist society, where the pure use value of art is freed from the shackles of exchange.
Both of these ends can be seen as directly informed by the two famous, but fragmentary and passing, comments made by Marx, the only two that specifically comment on art, which subsequently came form the basis of an orthodox Marxist aesthetics developed by various writers throughout the Stalinist and Zhdanovite era. The first, in the Grundrisse, is an idealistic-utopian statement that labels Greek art as epochal and free, and all subsequent art as ‘Art Production’, that is, art co-opted to the market and corrupted by exchange. The second notion, the famous passage on Raphael from the German Ideology, points to a future communist society, where ‘there are no painters, but at most, men who, among other things, also paint’. This historically determinist notion insists that the emancipation of culture from ideology is conditional to a revolutionary change in the economic base. Until then, the philosopher’s task is merely to highlight the ‘semblance of autonomy’ in art from its ideal or utopian form.
The mystical character of the commodity undoubtedly removes art from the sphere of production into alienated production, which is in itself an end of art. However, this end suggests a beginning of art, where pure use value existed, before and outside the possibility of exchange. The purity of such a use-value, as Derrida has argued, cannot be guaranteed. The fidelity to such an origin, or beginning, could already be thought of as haunted, fictive or ideal.
Richard Miles
