Michael Belshaw has put together all the edited transcripts and has come up with an idea for a cover. (Above)
Find below the information sent by Michael, all our thanks to him for his hard work. The next stage is going to be how to turn the whole thing into a publication.
PREFACE
The roundtable discussion, transcribed in the following pages, took place in Leeds College of Art in the summer of 2011 and was based on two reading groups undertaken earlier in the year – one on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and the other on Eva Geulen’s The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel. Common to both texts is the topic of ‘endism’ and the broad aim was to explore this as an issue for art and to consider its consequences for pedagogy.
The transcript has been edited with a view to making it a useful resource for students and staff alike and in the hope that further research might be undertaken in this area. As well as editing the text we have included endnotes, an introduction, and suggested further reading on the topic. As will become clear endism is a perplexing concept once one has overcome the temptation to tie it to dates: we cannot speak of the end of history in the way we speak of the end of the Second World War. This is the underlying problem that shapes the discussion. Mindful of this problem, the participants approached endism according to a number of related themes.
If we made the claim that history has come to an end would that claim be made before or after the end? This begs the question of whether we think of an end in terms of death, for which ‘before’ and ‘after’ have no rational bearing. The concept of temporality or time out of joint recurs throughout the discussion – now as a question of historicity, now as the familiar metaphor of a river.
Another interesting problem that came up for discussion was the status of language. What are the consequences of thinking of language as a self-referring system, and if endism is determined by language, should we not be surprised when it appears to be circular, or at least unresolved? This suggests allegory, duality and repetition are at the heart of endist thinking.
If the end of art is such a rich and interesting topic can this usefully be taught to art students or does it remain an academic puzzle. We have become accustomed to the idea that art cannot be taught. Is this simply a manifestation of the end of art? Moreover is the end of art forever a theory or is it a kind of practice? To put it another way, what are we to make of the suggestion that studying art contributes to its demise?
These are some of the troublesome questiions addressed in the roundtable, any one of which might be taken up in further study – practical or theoretical. Initially they arose in the reading groups and were debated there among the following members of staff: Garry Barker, Annette Beaumont, James Beighton, Michael Belshaw, Andrew Broadey, Susan Carter, Joanna Geldard, Andrew Joskowski, Dorothy King, Madeleine Newman, Tom Palin, Debra Roberts, Marcel Swiboda, Lee Wainright.
... all of whom would like sincerely to thank Louise Thaxter for producing the draft of the roundtable discussion.
INTRODUCTION
In 1989 the American academic Francis Fukuyama published a paper, ‘The End of History?’, in which he argued that liberal democracy had finally overcome its principal opponent, communism, and that therefore major historical developments, driven by ideological conflict, had come to an end. In the same year the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington applauded Fukuyama for his analysis of the end of the Cold War. In his article Huntington also coined the name of the genre to which ‘The End of History’ belonged, arguing that ‘Endism is oriented to the future rather than the past and is unabashedly optimistic.’ With the approach of the millenium in the following decade ‘endism’ gained currency, spurred on by an astonishing number of publications debating the end of something – nature, religion,time, the world, and art. That said, endist arguments have been around for a very long time. Indeed it may well be said that religious endism in the form of eschatology, or ‘the end of days’, is firmly rooted in many cultures. Moreover, such religious arguments resonate with those in contemporary science and cosmology in such a way that the latter seem almost to be allegories of the former. Whether it is in the form of four horsemen, an asteriod or global warming, we seem endlessly fascinated by our own demise. For all that, the word ‘endism’ doesn’t yet appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The roundtable discussion addressed the topic of endism according to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and Eva Geulen’s The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel. Derrida’s book is in part a critique of Fukuyama’s thesis and hence a critique of the hegemony of liberal democracy. Derrida recognizes Fukuyama not only as a neo-conservative but also as a ‘neo-evangelist’ in his use of theologically loaded phrases such as ‘the Promised Land of liberal democracy’. By unifying the end of conflict under such a heading Fukuyama condemns all subsequent, post-historical injustices to the status of squabbles. The rhetoric of Fukuyama’s argument leads Derrida to conclude, ‘the end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology.’
In Christian discourse one would distinguish sharply between body and soul or spirit. In contrast Derrida considers the ghost or spectre, which, he says, is neither body nor spirit and both body and spirit. This is a familiar move in deconstruction and it signals the idea that the spectre is an ‘undecidable’. The spectre in question here is Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Shakespeare’s tragedy provides Derrida with a number of rhetorical figures with which to approach Marx’s writing, not least of which is Hamlet’s remark to his companions on hearing of his father’s murder from his ghost - ‘The time is out of joint’. For Derrida this phrase points up Marx’s concern with the drama of revolution and the analysis of exchange value because it figures the error of identity according to what one commentator has called a ‘constitutive anachronism’.
Marx lamented that the revolutionary act depended on precedents in the form of spirits of the past. ‘And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things,in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’. For Marx one must forget the past in order to act anew. Yet the spirits of the past have a habit of haunting the present just when revolution promised a new beginning. The inverse of this problem can be seen in the case of the commodity fetish.
The commodity fetish is illustrated in Marx’s figure of a wooden table which, understood in terms of exchange value, goes beyond its use value as a ‘sensuous thing’ and takes on a spectral appearance as an apparition. ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.’ On the one hand the revolutionary act is in error if it depends on precedents in the form of spirits of the past, on the other hand the ‘sensuous thing’ is in error when it is haunted by the commodity. For Marx then the revolutionary act needs to rid itself of the spectre of the past, just as the ‘sensuous thing’ needs to be rid of the spectre of the commodity. But for Derrida the specter is the ineluctable effect of ‘time out of joint’.
It is well understood that Fukuyama draws on Hegel for his analysis of the end of history – a point that Derrida seizes on: ‘The model of the liberal state to which [Fukuyama] explicitly lays claim is not only that of Hegel, the Hegel of the struggle for recognition, it is that of a Hegel who privileges the “Christian vision”.’ It is Hegel who serves to connect the two texts discussed in the reading groups, but, as implied in Derrida’s remark, there is more than one Hegel. This becomes clear in Geulen’s study The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel.
The key statement on the end of art appeared in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics: ‘...art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’ As Geulen shows, we cannot be certain that Hegel said this because the lecture was transcribed by a student. Hence we are dealing with a rumour, albeit one we must take seriously. The end of art is also a rumour because it has no beginning – just as endism is a characteristic of many cultures, so art has always been drawn to its own end. Moreover, a rumour is a kind of simulacrum – it has no recognisable origin, and its repetition is always a repetition of a repetition; which is to say it is always ‘out of joint’. This observation separates Geulen’s study from those that seek a final decision on the end of art because, as a rumour, the end of art is also a paradox – ‘With the end of art, it seems immediately obvious that the unity and identity of this object cannot be found in it itself, but only in claims about it.’
Geulen identifies two ways of reading the end of art – the anti-aesthetic and the aesthetic – each of which can claim an Hegelian pedigree. The former claims are recognised as ‘radically temporalising the end’ by declaring the end of the end and abiding in the paradox of a ‘consititutive anachronism’. The latter anticipates a rehabilitation of aesthetics when all talk of the end of art has come to an end. In this sense Hegel’s rumour, far from being true or false, turns out to be a kind of hermeneutic circle. Interpreting the end of art as a discourse brings it into being: ‘only ex post facto, now, is Hegel’s position as the founder of this discourse legible.’
Geulen’s book traces the development of the end of art in a loosely chronological way from Hegel to Heidegger by way of Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno. But it is to Hegel’s contemporary and friend, the poet Friedrich Holderlin, that she returns in the final chapter, bringing the discussion full circle. In his poem ‘Voice of the People’ Holderlin, like Marx, is concerned with historical precedents, in the form of legends, for human action – specifically the self-destruction of a town ‘under the spell of a repetition compulsion’. Geulen’s reading, like Derrida’s, teases out the necessary anachronism that Holderlin’s poem reveals. ‘That the “marvelous legend” is not merely the object of interpretation but is simultaneously the result of interpretation, is apparent from the inversion of the chronological sequence of the events the poem depicts. The later event precedes the earlier.’ The end of art submits to the same spectral logic: whether we call it a thesis, a rumour or a legend – art’s self-destructive impulse is the object and result of interpreting ‘the end of art’.
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1 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest, Summer,1989
2 Samuel P. Huntington, “No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” The National Interest, September, 1989
3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx,Routledge, London, 2006; Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2006
4 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.75
5 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.76. For a useful guide to Specters of Marx and related topics, see Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History, Icon Books, London, 1999
6 Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ Diacritics, vol. 25, no 2, Summer 1995, p.88
7 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.135
8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol.1, New York, Vintage, 1977, p.163
9 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.75
10 Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour After Hegel, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2006, p.11
11 Geulen, The End of Art, p.7
12 Geulen, The End of Art, p.5
13 Geulen, The End of Art, p.12
14 Geulen, The End of Art, p.145
15 Geulen, The End of Art, p.146
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Round Table Discussion Transcript
The End of Art
Present: Garry Barker, Michael Belshaw, Joanna Geldard, Richard Miles, Tom Palin
- MB We are meeting today to discuss the themes of two reading groups that we conducted in the second semester. The link between the two books - Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida and The End of Art by Eva Geulen - was ‘endism’, and we are going to discuss this idea as it relates to both art and politics. Specters of Marx was a challenge Francis Fukuyama’s views on the end of history, and of course the endism in Geulen’s book is the end of art, so we’re going to combine themes from both sources and see where that takes us.
- GB These sessions have often been about Hegel, and Derrida was quoting him extensively when we were reading through Specters of Marx; so it has been interesting for me to return to Hegel and read further - going back into his work and reading. ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ and trying to get the sense of what was underlying all of this and it seems to me that there’s a real friction in Hegel’s thinking. On the one hand he’s one of the first philosophers to deal with history and materiality and yet at the same time he’s concerned with other things that he believes that philosophy must deal with; the spirit and with the idea of something that transcends us and when we were reading Derrida we were constantly asked to focus on this duality.
You’ve also got Hegel’s master/slave dialectic which is again another duality; a duality that means as you think the master takes over, the voice of the slave opens that otherness – so the master can never take full control; there is always a situation that as the power of the master evolves, the slave is somewhere finding the strength to revolt and push back. That sort of conflict seemed to me to go right back to Hegel’s worry about the fact that really he was an atheist and yet at the same time was trying to deal with the Christian leftovers or Christian ideals that still come through and shape his thinking – that in itself has a deeper issue and the deeper issue is Hegel’s awareness of his own mortality; Hegel’s awareness of the ‘death’ business. When I went back to reading Hegel he has a lot to say about death and what it is as part of the human condition, so somewhere this awareness of death is something about an essential component of the human condition and for us to be aware of life, it is actually at its height and at its highest level of awareness when we know death faces us; when we know that death is the end of it. In revisiting Hegel I had this sense of going through a reading of an approach to death, and that the reason why we keep coming back to it is because it gives us the most heightened experience of what it is not to die – to be alive – so the death of art has to be faced in order for us to be aware of what art really means to us. If we lose it, through its extinction, in some way we become more aware of what it actually means to us.
- MB That’s an interesting point. Would it be right to say that in Hegel, the idea, even of the death of art, is just a prelude to something moving on – to something further down the line as it were? I wonder whether or not we could find a contrast in the writers that we’ve been looking at in those that see this in terms of continuity, this ‘rising to the absolute’ on the one hand, and writers on the other hand, like Nietzsche, who see death in terms of finitude.
- JG I think so – in the prologue of Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, he actually talks about an awakening and dealing with that tragic in that particular sense he deals with the death of style of art and culture – he is echoing Hegel there but he then takes that as a repetitious nature that continues from Baroque to German Romanticism and he uses that jump and how that’s mirrored as the allegory for modernism, but the key word that he uses in the prologue is ‘awakening’; that actually by finalising and tying that off within a timeframe it actually allows the suspension of the idea as an awakened idea and I suppose, it’s not even a rebirth, it is just an aliveness to a new beginning.
- GB But that tragedy, perhaps, is part of that other awareness that God, Christianity, the big ‘other’ doesn’t really exist – and that is the tragedy of the human condition; a tragedy that for Hegel, who is sort of mourning the fact that perhaps God doesn’t exist; is at the centre of his problem with atheism. But as you move further on, writers like Benjamin accept it and say ‘this is the state we have, it’s accepted now’.
- JG Well he actually ties off that idea of perfection, he calls that part of what Hegel had wanted and he calls for it as an end in that trauerspiel, in that German tragedy, his perfection is…
- MB Can I just ask a question? What is Benjamin’s idea of the idea?
- JG Yeah. It’s really hard actually. It’s one of those things that slips away from me and I occasionally get an idea of it. My interpretation is that he fixed down the connection between thought and thought becoming an idea; that as you thought, the structure of it became idea. The reason he’s labelled German romanticism as trauerspiel is because by labelling and fixing it, he pins down that as a thought idea; a political and cultural thought idea and in so doing, almost ends it – closes the curtains on his theatre, if you like, in order to allow for a free space stage for the idea of doing that to happen again. Does that make sense?
- GB It does when you include language.
- JG I pinned it down to the use of language, yes.
- GB These are people that started to come to terms with the linguistic turn; they are becoming more aware of the fact that we are conditioned by language. That we are limited in terms of what we can say within any particular language and what we can use. And I think that we’re going through that period historically where that becomes central to the debate about what can possibly be said, so that the drama, the theatre of text, is played out around language.
- JG I also think by calling it thought as idea he opens up a space with that language to allow for interpretations that are more allegorical, in the sense that they are less fixed by the cultural and political norms of that period. It’s like he uses the language to both fix and liberate; by fixing it he liberates that space for allegory and idea. In fact he is talked about alongside Vidler in terms of that creating of that space; that spatial anxiety for an uncertainty and an instability as a result of… as a result of what? Tying off, cutting loose – it’s almost like he cuts loose and says; that’s fixed in that German romanticism and it failed and the whole allegory of that failure and the tragedy of it he re-pictures in modernism, he re-pictures elsewhere but the playout of it isn’t exactly the same. But by tying it off and cutting it loose as style and how it failed, these are pockets – they overlap but they’re not the same. I think that’s how he starts talking about simultaneity in that chapter as well.
- MB So allegory there could almost be contrasted with Hegel’s idea in so far as allegory as a double story, as a twice told tale, is a story in an unending tension that is cannot be resolved. Would that be a legitimate contrast do you think, to make between Hegel’s idea of resolution which moves things on, and someone like Benjamin who talks about allegory as a sustained tension?
- GB I think there is a clear difference there but you have to remember that Hegel almost is aware of his own failure; he posits a viewpoint that we need to move on towards an idea of wholeness. We have this philosophy replacing art at a high level but then you get the sense that he doesn’t know where to go from there, because he’s heading towards some wholeness which is always brought back by his other concern, which is his groundedness in history and in materiality.
- JG Does he almost epitomise then, that very allegory that Benjamin then… his whole actual structure and thought process as himself is almost Benjamin is seeing that within Hegel and actually almost pitting the allegory as Hegel.
- GB You could almost say the hindsight of history; that what Benjamin is able to do is look back at Hegel with an awareness of his dilemma. Perhaps a lot of these people are doing that – they’re seeing Hegel’s dilemma and from that awareness open out different ways of answering that dilemma. That’s why I think duality occurs so much at the centre of so many of these responses to thinking about the end of art.
- MB We came across an interesting allegory in the Hölderlin poem. The idea that the poem The Voice of the People was sort of a repetition or a restaging of one tragedy or one drama in a later one, rather like the way that the New Testament is an allegory of the Old Testament. So allegory is sort of spread across time; not so much as continuity but as episodes that are repeated. I think the difference between continuity and repetition is one that features in a lot of issues we’ve been looking at.
- JG But is it the structure that is repeated? The style and form of it, the materiality clearly isn’t. Can we equate that to how Benjamin talks about the reproduction of the reproduction? That that whole allegorical thinking is reproduced, it is revisited, it is restaged, but in its form, its vision, its materiality; it does actually appear differently. Therefore it could be said that it’s the death of art in one sense because it’s repetitious but it’s not the death of art because its form is still unstable.
- GB In the middle of that there’s always that sense of the striving for the other, the striving for that wholeness, spirituality or whatever it is. In Benjamin perhaps that starts to come out as the aura; that he starts to see that as a necessary part of the human condition in that we want to place a type of spiritual value on something. At the centre of that whole thing of commodity exchange is a similar sort of problem to that we have already uncovered.
- RM Well aura is the fetish isn’t it, that’s what Benjamin is talking about and that gets in the way of direct human experience, it replaces it. I’m interested just going back to something that you said Jo, because obviously wanting to think about this from an Adornian perspective and seeing as though we’re talking about aura now; the reproduction of the reproduction – obviously under Benjamin the classic from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he would say that the aura with us. Adorno would view that, without wanting to use this word too lightly, tragic. Benjamin would view it as emancipatory – and is this what you mean by leading to a new beginning? The shrivelling of aura allows you to recontextualise the reproduction and bring it into different spheres.
- JG Absolutely, it lifts it out and suspends it above that historicity and its original connections and that’s what he releases as a new beginning and he liberates and almost the reproduction of the reproduction actually recreates a new space.
- RM Yes, and you see for Adorno it’s just one further alienated remove from direct human sensuous activity as such, and I think that’s why they had that famous disagreement. I’ve never quite decided which is the correct response actually.
- GB It’s interesting in relation to that, that George Steiner was quite interested in this. He talked about the fact that there was a wonderful moment where after going through that process of awareness, where all those supposedly spiritual developments towards something like the big other or whatever… you have to come back to the fact that there is a reality out there and you have to strip that spiritual stuff away. Steiner states that there is something grander about that acceptance of material reality than there is about that thing that we all want; in Lacan’s terms, the ‘big other’. We have to overcome the sense of the big other in order to live the life of now. If we don’t live the life of now, we’re avoiding reality.
- JG Benjamin says something similar, he calls that history the historical shadows and he talks about that place of reproduction; a mirror world, and that there’s an infinity with mirrors; when you bounce them off each other there’s an infinity that evolves out of them and he talks about that reproduction of the reproduction as that mirror world and the history and our understanding of style and form and that place in a particular time period as that shadow. Which I think is quite an interesting jump across to Derrida and hauntology, that history itself is a spectre and a shadow and it casts a certain shadow; a stylised shadow; a characterised shadow that is written by politics, bourgeois, cultural aspects… by pulling the curtain down and putting that on a stage, he then allows this mirror world for us to explore in a new dimension. I’m not sure that any of us really grasp that, I certainly don’t! Once you start thinking of it like that it becomes very exciting.
- MB Well commodity fetish is a good example of the spectre in that it is both alive and dead at the same time.
- GB There’s also that thing of whether the way that we interpret life is something that we can resolve through rational thinking, or whether it’s an emotional dilemma. I think this is a crux here because images like the spectre presuppose that we are attuned to an emotional understanding of a rational response, and again that becomes another duality.
- JG But then some of Benjamin’s work does actually rest on the cognitive processes that Freud did use to do with dreamscape and that use of the phantasm – he did allegorise all of that and he did ground himself in some of Freud’s cognitive processes. That rationalising of the conscious and unconscious he did use, and he goes on to use throughout his work. I was saying earlier; it’s like The Origin of the German Mourning Play and trauerspiel is the beginning of his vision of this stage and this theatre, whereas the arcades project at the end of his life latterly really visualises his struggle of processes and ideas as allegory and he brings in that spatial anxiety of architecture, that spatial anxiety of time, that idea of monument and ruin and all those aspects. When I think of it like that, it’s no wonder it took so long to write and that it was never finished! Because actually it encompasses many of the things that we’re talking about in all of that, including even, I don’t think Benjamin ever gets to where Holderlin is with poetry but there is a sense of a poetic language in the visual stimuli that Benjamin uses as allegory and it’s like he never quite got to what Holderlin arrived at, which is perhaps what you’re saying about this resolution of the emotional as well…
- GB What I would say to that is that Freud’s response is a rational response to an emotional dilemma, while Holderlin’s is actually an emotional response to the rational dilemma.
- JG But then doesn’t he resolve Hegel’s failure?
- GB I think what we do is we play out in tragedy, each time we approach the subject of Hegel’s failure.
- MB I think one of the interesting things about what’s coming out in the way that you’re discussing this, is that for Hegel of course, art is left behind in favour of philosophy, and philosophy has to be rational. But for Benjamin, as you’re describing his work, and for Nietzsche, it’s more of a philosophical continuation of art, rather than art into philosophy. I think that makes room for a discussion of tragedy as well. Of course, there is in a sense a philosophy of tragedy that begins with Schelling, and I think Holderlin is a deeply philosophical poet, and that’s certainly Hegel’s perspective on tragedy. I think it would be useful to reflect on an interesting remark from Geulen’s book where she says, “tragedy is afterall that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless and the same time”. That seems to be a very telling thing to say. It’s obviously paradoxical but it highlights the view of death as sheer finality. But at the same we can’t accept or comprehend that finality so we’re caught in a kind of double bind of believing something, and believing that it’s not so at the same time. That again comes across as like the allegorical in the sense that it is a thing in tension rather than a thing in resolution.
- RM That’s interesting; that’s quite relevant to Adorno’s notion of autonomy, just going back a bit obviously the standard, orthodox Marxist perspective is that with the rise of capitalism, the rise of the market, art is lost; art ends there and gets more and more degraded as capitalism gets more and more sophisticated. Adorno in his notion of autonomy knows this to be the case; knows almost that autonomy is, as a materialist, that autonomy is impossible. It’s impossible to step outside of the market, to step outside of the social system you’re born into, but you must strive for that anyway in order to have any truth content to what you produce but there is always that dialectical tension.
- MB Is it an endless tension rather than a resolution?
- RM It’s a continuing tension that’s central to all of the negative dialectics that that is never resolved. It’s exactly the opposite of Hegel actually that some synthesis is achieved. Actually you’re in an impasse with these two things constantly negating each other and held, in almost like a co-dependence, and co-dependence with its negative connotations, rather than a synthesis.
- MB Is that a kind of idea, or an understanding which then puts the receiver of that idea in a position of action? That one has to act, in the face of that?
- RM That’s interesting, because throughout all of Adorno’s work actually – he was criticised in ’68 for not actually having what those ‘soixante-huiters’ would call a praxis – he wasn’t on the barricades as it were. But he said that his praxis was remaining as uncorrupted by the social system as possible through thought; his writing was his kind of praxis. But it’s not a philosophy of action as is inscribed on Marx’s tomb; it’s not that the point is to change it. It’s almost a strange deadlock until you’re waiting for the revolution to come; emancipation only comes with a revolutionary change in the social base but it doesn’t give you a direct route to achieve it. Which again is this peculiar tension that exists.
- GB That’s a very old dialectic; the difference between acceptance or struggle goes right back. The interesting thing that I was looking at in terms of Hegel was that he was very interested in Luther. Through Luther you get this struggle obviously in the way that you position yourself in relation to the Catholic Church – you develop a struggle within, or mentally in relation to that. But there are two strands of Christian debate: one is to struggle to sort out, get rid of all the crap, to use rationality to get there, to define a purpose; but you’ve got another strand, that Meister Eckhart type of strand, which is one of acceptance, that acceptance of duality. You could say it’s more the Buddhist strand of the Christian tradition. So you’ve got these two strands; one which you could say ends up in dialectical materialism and the idea of action, and another one that says we can overcome all this stuff in the world as long as we just, in the acceptance of it, embrace it and understand it. And that understanding transcends the need for action.
- RM Yes, that’s interesting Garry. Definitely in Adorno, as I mentioned in the sort of preamble, for Adorno what the radical thinker is left with is; his task, is to merely cut through the veil of reification to expose fetishism where it exists and waiting for that to turn into action.
- GB But what’s interesting in relation to that is how many Buddhists lie at the centre of radical change. If we look at some of the changes in South-East Asia, it’s often been Buddhist priests that are at the centre of revolt; making very dramatic stances like burning themselves in public.
- RM It’s the classic contrast in terms of protest between non-participation and direct action that you still find today.
- TP I don’t think the Geulen text ever deals directly with the issues that you’re discussing. It exists within a layer of theory –as something that is a theoretical possibility. With regard to the dualities that you’re talking about; it’s the maintenance of two opposites that keeps a system in place, though a system with perhaps shifting parameters. The end of art as an idea needs to be maintained in order to understand both the end of art and, in fact, art as art. The later sections of the Geulen text address the perpetuation of the end of art as idea; they don’t deal with the coupling of the end of art as idea with an event in time and with identifiable coordinates. The end of art is separated from the possibility of it charting an event – that’s what gives it life and meaning.
- JG I think that links with Benjamin as well because he restages things as drama and he almost creates a staging for action to take place. In fact I think he’s almost pre-empting the need for encounter to engage with, not necessarily this acceptance or struggle but something in between to encounter what is; to encounter what is of the now in that space, in that stage, in that time free from both the historicity of what’s gone before and liberating from a context in order to create that beginning.
- MB If it’s a beginning it’s a very odd one isn’t it, because the word that we’ve not yet touched on is rumour. The full title of Geulen’s book is The End of Art: Readings in a Rumour after Hegel. A rumour, like a myth, is something that has no beginning. It’s somehow like a river in constant passage.
- JG But doesn’t that support what Tom was saying about that mainstream – about it having to be sustained within, well say, the river; the stream of cultural dialect.
- RM You see this is really interesting going back to Adorno because the one reading that Geulen introduces of Adorno’s text which I suppose as an orthodox Marxist I never picked up on; she introduces the idea that actually Adorno’s writing is in some way a parody of the end. Its apocalyptic tone is an invention, in some way performative. Which leads me to another point I wanted to raise here; going back to what I said before about Adorno maybe not suggesting any kind of praxis, any kind of concrete programme out of this – it’s just bleak, it is just the apocalypse. I think in assigning an apocalypse, in assigning the end of human culture, Adorno needs to assign an origin and this brings me back to Derrida and to make that origin seem more authentic and that origin is pure human use value, pure un-alienated, pre-capitalist society, maybe he has to make the apocalypse – the end – seem more dramatic to make that origin seem more authentic. That’s not in Geulen but that’s something that I’m starting to think about from Geulen.
- TP That’s close to what Garry was saying earlier—about death defining life, giving it meaning and purpose. In the last chapters of Geulen’s text, she considers the significance of the river to both in Holderlin and Heidegger , and invokes the end in attempting to establish the meaning of the present. In so doing she draws from the end, from death, the apocalypse or a similar finality, but also from the source of the river. So an understanding of the present has to draw from two directions. The present exists between something, not in relation to an end alone; it exists in relation to both end and beginning.
- RM This is close to Derrida’s notion of hauntology I think… it seems throughout every single bit of Marxist aesthetic theory; they all want to assign an end. It seems to be necessary to assign that end to imagine a fictitious utopian origin and this is something Derrida deconstructs immaculately in the end of Specters of Marx – that notion that there once was a pure society, a pure idea of human use value without exchange outside of the market is itself phantasmagorical – it is an invention, it is fictive.
- MB And also a kind of rumour. I think these questions keep coming back to the idea of perpetual repetition. We’re always talking about a simulacrum of an idea as the end of art. I can see now why Geulen used that word – ‘rumour’. When we began talking about this topic, we inevitably thought of the end of art as something that could be posited at a certain date because we habitually think in terms of dates going from one year to another to another – and if there is something called the end of art it must have happened some time. What we seem to be gravitating towards is the idea that the end of art, as a rumour or as a simulacrum, is something that cannot occur at any one time. I suppose if we think of it this way, one of the ideas that we come up against in Geulen’s writing is that the moment of the end of art, let’s say for the sake of argument that it was Hegel’s own moment in history where he sees art displayed in museums – therefore inauthentic in itself – that moment also coincides with the moment that art is studied. When it becomes studied it becomes created retrospectively. It comes into being after the fact, belatedly, and ‘out of joint’.
- RM What Adorno would call the administration as opposed… the direct opposition to culture…
- GB There’s also another side of rumour which also in normal layman’s parlance is called gossip; tickle-tackle as it would be in the Midlands. The thing about that is that is leads very quickly to a false consciousness; it leads very, very quickly to ‘we think this is going on’ – it’s spread by gossip and yet it’s not founded in anything. That type of false consciousness; therefore you could mirror with certain aspects of theory that are tickle-tackle, that are actually almost like theory as gossip. So many of these issues are developed by people conversing around a sort of hermeneutic point and you get further and further away from reality; you get further and further away from material practice.
- TP I saw the use of rumour as some kind of acknowledgement of a dislocation between an event and the language of an event that follows it. So, in a sense, the imprecision of language or the failure of language lies in its inability to replicate or document an event, and the further it sits from that event the greater the space between the language that describes it (the event) and the thing that happened. So rumour for me, in my reading of Geulen, was that acknowledgment of a space, and of the inaccuracy, inadequacy and imprecision of language.
- JG I think she was hinting at that through Nietzsche as well, because of the tragedy of the tragedy and she arrives at the end of that chapter calling that parody almost the attic comedy – the comic tragedy. So that the tragedy of the tragedy isn’t just the initial mourning of a tragedy, the tragedy becomes through rumour sort of comical and continues to be parodied and inaccurate and then suspended and out of joint?
- TP It attains a life of its own doesn’t it? Irrespective of any link with history. It attains a life within discourse which is unsatisfactory to some but I think that’s what the Geulen text is pointing towards, especially through Holderlin in the last chapter.
- JG I think Nietzsche being so tragic and final in that sense is the funniest out of this chapter because it arrives at the most comical; he does almost have the last laugh with it.
- GB It’s interesting as you move through that that we move towards poetry and that poetry then becomes a model for an ability to reconcile these different elements. It can accept allegory as part of its form, but its own form is also a duality. So it can be a way of understanding through a more flexible format, the dilemma of the limitations of language based philosophical discourse. Going back to Derrida, he often, in order to answer his points goes back to Shakespeare. It’s the poetry of Shakespeare that allows him to understand the nature of tragedy and through that particular poetic language, there is an allowance for duality. The problem with prose is it has a linear construction which is always looking for an end, while poetry is able to cope with the complexity of shifting relationships between emotion and logic.
- JG Does that also link back then to Tom’s description of the present in terms of it being a space that uses the past and links to the future; it can’t be just the present in isolation. Perhaps poetry allows to take in the language of the now but also to recapture and use the allegories of the past, the narrative of the past…
- GB I think that links very closely to Yates. Yates’s when asked about how he came up with a particular poem stated; “I made it out of a mouthful of air”. He made it out of its becoming, which is now/the present tense, but actually it’s also history because each moment of now is composed of memories of all the other poetry read and all that lies behind the articulating mouth as it opens.
- TP My feeling is that the end of art as a statement or an idea is a poetic one, one which, as I’ve said, isn’t intended or expected to chart a series of events. Perhaps there is a parallel here. As the river draws from its source and destination in order for it to be understood as river, so the end of art as thesis must draw from Hegel (as its source) and from the fabled end of art (as its destination)—in so doing it acquires its meaning. But that perpetual meaning doesn’t lead to an event, it doesn’t chart an event, it doesn’t document a thing.
- MB It’s very interesting isn’t it, because it’s almost as though we are participating in Hegel’s rumour by discussing this, that we are somehow allegorising what he’s already started off, or what he has not necessarily started off himself but somehow put his finger on, in a way. We’re not talking about Hegel or anyone else in the past, that we are actually sort of participating in re-describing that past in the act of discussing it.
- TP Maybe we could also separate Hegel from the people who followed him, because they’re interpreters of Hegel. Unlike Hegel, they have Hegel as a starting point.
- GB But then Hegel himself is an interpreter of other people. He talks about relationships between Goethe and Kant, both signifying for him two different Germanic traditions in terms of a way of understanding the world. You get the sense that what Hegel’s trying to do is to reconcile them. How do I understand Kant, but at the same time how do I understand Goethe? They both threaten him and yet they both at the same they support where he is. At the same time in the middle of that there is Luther. All of which are writing in the German language, all of which are contributing to the idea of how German thought is constructing a view of the world, and we’ve got to remember, going back to nationalist politics at the time, the way the German nation was forming itself into a shape and that that continuation politically, eventually would become Hitler and the Third Reich.
- JG I remember an artist describing to me how one of his rules for making art was to take the chance occurrence that it occurred in his previous piece of work on into his next piece and I think there is an element with all of these that there is a sense of a series of inter-collated circles. They’re overlapping and interlocking at various points and they’re not linear, they’re not necessarily linear time-based. They are linked and inter-collating at the point of idea, at the point of concept. I think that is very interesting about what Geulen does with this book because the order that she has put those authors in is not even to do with that linear sense of time. It is to do with a series of turning points, or seems to be to do with a series of turning points of understanding the materiality in history, the visual form, the visual culture. It’s a series of turning points in our understanding of endism.
- MB That’s really interesting. The Nietzsche chapter is called ‘Nietzsche’s retrograde motion’ and there is a sense that Nietzsche and Holderlin do make this point of turning back. Wherein Holderlin in the ‘Voice of the People’ poem he talks about the failure of the town by the Xanthos that saw itself as somehow repeating the past as an event. But then the remedy to that, for Holderlin, is the position of poet that interprets that event or interprets that allegory, so that interpretation is a way not of passing on to a moment of the future but a way of looking back. Roughly speaking that’s what Nietzsche does; the retrograde movement in Nietzsche is a way of understanding tragedy as a tragedy of a tragedy in the sense that it’s an interpretation of the death of tragedy rather than a repetition of it in terms of an event. It was Holderlin who cautioned against the German nation of the Volk seeing itself as Greek, seeing themselves as latter-day Greeks and he cautioned that in his ‘declining fatherland’ essay. For me that is an interesting way of summing up the end of art as a rumour; that it’s not going to happen, nor has it happened, but is always in a gap between those two things, a little bit like the river, which is a very rich image in Holderlin’s work.
- GB So it is always repeated isn’t it? For somebody the dawn tomorrow is going to be the first dawn they will ever experience, for other people they will have seen that dawn many times before and for some people it will be the last one they will see. That cyclic tradition is actually at the core of so many of our religions, so many of our ways of thinking. Our own awareness of a start and an end is reflected in agriculture, we plant seeds, they grow into plants, we harvest in autumn, winter comes and we plant the seeds again in spring. All of those cyclical moments are a part of some sort of phenomenologically understood, embodied experience as well as being an intellectual one.
- JG I think that word experience is crucial in what you’ve just said because I do relate that to how Benjamin uses theatre. Theatre as experience – it’s not theatre about just what’s on the stage – it is about whether those people in the audience are objective or subjective in order of their own cultural experience and he does question whether we can actually step outside of that subjectivity in our own time. I think your reference to experience there is quite interesting because if we label it as experience and we label it as a possible repetition of, there is a closing and understanding of it, closing and beginning, closing and beginning; and understanding that it is cyclical.
- GB Which is very interesting in relation to Benjamin’s final monument which is right on the coast. You have this experience of a tunnel that you go into, that then extends itself over the cliff top. You go through that and it really is quite spectacular. You come to the end and you look out to this moment of the cliff top over the sea, which is sheer phenomenal experience.
- MB I wonder if we shouldn’t be critiquing the idea of sheer experience? If, as you were saying before, someone has a first dawn. Well, they don’t have a first dawn until they’ve had a second one. Experience, that is the time of exerience, is out of joint. It’s not something that you grasp in the immediate present. I think that is why the end of art as a topic is so interesting because it is likewise out of joint.
- JG Unless you grasp it as an experience at the very end of something else, and where you’d be able to recognise it as a dawning of a new experience.
- RM That’s right – under the classic Marxist reading of alienated art supposing that there was once art; that relies on retrospective labelling of what they were doing as pure art. Which is not actually quite what Marx says in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts but for man under primitive communism everything was aesthetic; every single aspect of life – walking through the woods, picking up a stick… the idea to try and find art seems to be to apply retrospectively the principles of classification to something that was never there. This pure origin that Derrida is attacking in the Specters of Marx.
- GB But that’s the mourning isn’t it – you’re actually mourning the loss of that ability to experience in some way. Because of the linguistic turn, we believe that we never really have any unmediated experience outside of language and its structures, and there is a sense of mourning directly related to that.
- RM But that’s not necessarily art is it?
- GB No…
- TP Mike’s tragedy of tragedy is interesting because it is a way of dislocating language from event – it is language of language of an event. There’s a stage or place removed from an initial event that can be understood as what it is that is tragic, or even as a platform for an understanding of tragedy. Such a space or platform allows for the possibility of freeing the end of art thesis from itself, and having it attain endlessness—perhaps as a rumour of itself.
- JG I agree and I think it’s why Geulen also put Benjamin between Nietzsche and Heidegger there because she does align Benjamin with Nietzsche on that aspect that it’s a use of language that defines that endism, but it’s the encounter that Benjamin touches upon in the staging that links so nicely in to Heidegger that she then goes on to in the next chapter and that circulatory thinking that we were talking about that before appears so frequently in Heidegger.
- TP Isn’t it an attempt to free language of its historicism in some way?
- JG Yes – so it becomes just idea, but Benjamin sees idea as a structure; as a map; a constellation, if you like, that is suspended above that historicity. It can link into it but it is not its literal counterpart.
- TP Language isn’t a tracing of events; it doesn’t document cleanly in the way that is commonly presumed. It sits above events and is free flowing – it moves above events.
- GB But if art is going to renew itself, it sometimes has to free itself of its trap within language because all it will to do is repeat itself endlessly through the structures of the language that it uses to articulate itself.
- JG Which maybe makes a case for that reproduction of the reproduction and out of context that we often criticise that lack of context so much but sometimes if you have established that context, to then remove it from context there is a sense of liberation that is occurring there rather than the entrapment of that language.
- GB And as people that deal with art and design pedagogy…
- JG This is really interesting!
- RM I was wondering if we could bring this back to pedagogy maybe now to almost summarise…
- GB We need, as pedagogic practitioners, to recognise that our job perhaps is therefore to question languages of discourse and the acceptance of the way that practice is understood, so that when students are developing their own practices they have levers for change, they have support when trying to articulate their own experiences of the world, support in developing experiences that are not always shaped by an acceptance of the dominant thought patterns of the time.
- RM Well you’re talking about ideology there Garry aren’t you… the task for us as educators is to smash ideology; not just unpick and interpret it but to find ways in which students can change that.
- TP But it also problematises the whole linkage of theory and practice… in the assumption that theory arises out of practice, or impinges upon practice, or that practice is a justification of theory. If we think of practice as event, and think of theory as language of an event then the relationship that I described earlier could be seen to exist between the two…
- RM Of course for a Marxist, praxis is what we’re aiming for which is the unity of thought and action.
- GB And between the two the one big issue is just awareness and that is what you are trying to grow within, I would have thought, our student body. A sense of awareness of possibility. Without that awareness of possibility what you get is poor art, fake and repetition which I think is what Benjamin somewhere was talking about.
- RM Of course we are in a situation now where there is no government funding for art education. Students will be paying £9000 – art education has been commodified and the relationship between student and teacher has fundamentally shifted, possibly forever. I don’t know if that means the end of art education, in tandem with the end of art?
- MB That’s an interesting problem isn’t it? For a number of decades now we’ve lived in the period of institutional critique and I think it’s long been understood since Bill Reading’s famous book that universities are kind of like transnational companies so we’ve all been in…
- RM Education factories!
- MB We’ve all experienced education as commodity ...
- RM Again that brings us back to Derrida doesn’t it? It’s doubtful whether any pure, utopian, art academy ever existed! We like to think of maybe the ‘60s as these kind of free spaces but of course they weren’t.
- MB I wonder whether the implications of some of the things we’ve been saying can be brought to bear on what we might call the teaching studio, at least in terms of art, not necessarily in terms of design but in terms of art. There’s a sense in which what goes on in the art studio today, or always has, is a kind of double-bind, in that art, as we’ve sometimes been told by people like James Elkins, is unteachable – cannot be taught – but at the same time must be taught. It almost makes an allegory of the quote that I mentioned before “tragedy is after all that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless at the same time”, It could be said that the teaching studio is the scene of tragedy if art teaching is meaningful and meaningless at the same time.
- TP We could move it right back to Jo’s point at the beginning of the discussion, with idea – that we could have a notion of art as idea and we could have art as thing. In an ontological respect this is an oppositional situation, with the divide unbridgeable.
- GB Which is interesting in terms of that way that some institutions put performative practice at the centre of their understanding of what goes on. So in some ways one could say that an understanding of one’s role within a tragedy and of how you actually play it out, is more essential than a logical understanding of where you are, or even a philosophical understanding of where you are – it is all in fact just something we play out.
- JG I think it is being prepared to take the encounter and be the actor on a stage and actually going through a series of endings. No practitioner actually goes through a process without coming to endings within their own practice. It’s almost their awareness of those endings – we’re saying there’s a problem with theory and practice – but actually they can only become aware of those endings within their practice if they have the language with which to begin to define that as repetitious, that as parody… So it’s almost maybe there’s a sense where that counter play in the practitioners studio is there; that actually as much as they are trying to become, or make, or create something new that they are in at the same time ending, and that they have to go through that process of ending in order to open up the possibility and there is no chance of finding that possibility unless they place themselves in the performative, risk taking, unstable, uncertain, exposure of that practice.
- TP I was just thinking about Heidegger’s notion of Lichtung or Clearing– as a space in which being is allowed to show up in its being, or as being. This perhaps informs my conception of the studio as the place in which things are allowed to exist as the things that they exist as, or in the form that they exist, or as what they are. Being careful to avoid the term art…
- GB Except the studio itself is just so occluded by myths of what the studio…
- JG It is, yes, it comes back to an institutional…
- RM It’s a space of ideology…
- MB There wouldn’t be a notion of studio as studio in Heidegger’s thought.
- JG They release that uncoupling of language again, yes
- MB I think you said earlier on, or in your notes, that the clearing for Heidegger was like the river; the source and the destination and the moment and the flux. Could you enlarge on that?
- TP I’ll try to…
- MB It would be really interesting to understand the teaching studio in terms of Holderlin’s river.
- TP Yes, this goes back to Holderlin’s river, and to Geulen’s analysis of the river. I said that it could be seen to parallel history in that to Holderlin, events seem held between and defined by origin and destination. I used Heidegger’s Clearing; I considered that double projection as something that was close to Heidegger’s Clearing, which allowed for a space. It was an infinitesimally thin space but it was a space or a butting of source and destination that in Heideggerian terms could be called a Clearing. It actually wasn’t a space at all, not in terms of a location. It was a meeting of two other things.
- MB Sort of an overlap, an imbrication of two things.
- RM In a peculiar way for me the art institution, the art academy, the studio is almost like for Hegel when the museum signifies the death of art in the same way. This institutionalisation of art within the academy becomes the death of art in its own way. Paradoxically though I’m an art educator, and I go on being that.
- MB A double-bind.
- GB Going back to the master/slave dialectic, which I think this is very much about. We switch roles, and what we do is become aware that as one form of ideology takes over it leaves a space underneath it for its attack, for its reversal. In some ways what we remind the students of is that although we are partly the master, in terms of that dialectic we also as our own masters have our frailties, we carry our own oppositions. Though we are seen in one way as teachers we are also very aware that we stand for something that is the opposite of what we are.
- RM That’s very interesting Garry.
- MB We’ve talked about the teaching studio but we haven’t talked about the idea of teaching the history of art or the history of design, certainly the history of art.
- JG I was just going to come to that.
- RM The stuff of rust and filing cabinets…
- JG You alluded to it when you responded to my synopsis about… we’ve got Benjamin’s trauerspiel here at the beginning when he was first attempting to be a professor; that was his professorship work; that was him entering into the academy. By the time he gets into the arcades project he’s already firmly established this idea of the phantasm and of this shadow play and he uses all that materiality of 19th to 20th century to illuminate that but he uses what is within our own time to illuminate the structure of what is really going on. I think there’s an element where we as art educators have to almost take on a bit of that approach. We use those allegories and that understanding and that labelling and that visual language in order to identify these myths and phantasms that do end up as ruins – and monumental ruins.
- GB So therefore, shouldn’t we start our first lecture with the fact that art is dead?
- JG Very good point because then you allow the practitioner to walk amongst the ruins as ruins, to appreciate them monumentally; to appreciate them as myth, as phantasms, as a structure but also to encounter the space between. To actually look at the spaces between language and materiality, to look at the spaces between institution and their sense of being in the studio.
- RM But that’s not how art history works though is it?
- JG No…!
- RM Art history is dominated largely by a particular kind of right-wing thought. It’s about the assignation of fictive origins as I’ve said before… phantasmagorical ends, just like all history is played out to the tunes of the ruling class. Eventually these fictive origins and ends achieve a consensus and then become fact and then become history.
- TP Yet art history is just history; it’s not a history of art, and only adds to what history is and can be.
- MB It’s history with pictures.
- JG That’s why I like the use of the word phantasm because phantasm in itself is illusory, it is illusion. It’s not real, it’s not fact; it is interpreted, it is part of a narrative.
- RM So the primary task of us as educators is to make students realise that – to pick through reification and ideology.
- TP Or we could consider teaching a rumour of art history, or a rumour of art. If we declare art dead at the beginning of a lecture series we can then talk about the rumours of it, how they have become manifest and the relationship of such rumours to (art) events.
- GB And in fact perhaps what we end up doing is writing within in the margins a type of annotated practice.
- TP But do we acknowledge that there’s something outside of this history that we can’t teach?
- JG Yes and that’s their place to be in it and to and explore it – that’s their possibility and by presenting it in that way as possibility, how much more exciting for them?
- TP As with Wittgenstein’s unsayable –it’s beyond the pale!
- JG That was bloody brilliant!
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1 Fukuyama’s seminal argument appears in his paper, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest, Summer,1989. The thesis was later developed in his book, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press 1992
2 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
3 The master / slave dialectic can also be read as an internal debate, one that leads to self awareness. "On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other." Ibid Paragraph 179 Pg. 111.
4 Bataille, G & Strauss, J (1990) Hegel, Death and Sacrifice Yale French Studies No. 78 Bataille insists on “the continual connection between an abyssal aspect and a tough down-to-earth aspect” of Hegel’s philosophy. P.17
5 Zizek, S (1997) The Big Other Doesn’t Exist Journal of European Psychoanalysis No. 5 Spring – Fall. In this article Zizek unpicks Lacan’s use of the term the ‘Big Other’ in particular Zizek states, “the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist”. Paragraph 3
6 Rorty, R (ed.), 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. The relationship between philosophy and language is seen as inseparable and it is argued that we cannot state anything outside of the language that we use.
7 Benjamin’s argument can be found in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso, 1998; see ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’.
8 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations", with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. Fontana Press, London, 1972, reprinted in 1992, In the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin states “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” p. 221.
9 George Steiner (1972) In Bluebeard's Castle. Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture New York: Yale University Press
10 ‘The commodity is a “thing” without phenomenon, a thing in flight that surpasses the senses (it is invisible, intangible, inaudible, and odorless); but this transcendence is not altogether spiritual, it retains that bodiless body which we have recognised as making the difference between specter and spirit.’ Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 189
11 Geulen, The End of Art p.55
12 Zizek, S & Milbank, J (2009) The Monstrosity of Christ Paradox or Dialectic? London: MIT Press Zizek and Milbank attempt to illuminate the continuing paradox of God becoming human and trace the debate back to Hegel’s struggle with atheism.
13 Holderlin’s Hymne “Der Ister”. Lecture Series by Martin Heidegger, University of Freiburg, 1942.
14 Yeats, W. B. (1994). The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. London: Wordsworth Poetry Library
He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved
Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children’s children shall say they have lied.
15 Bungay, S (1984) Beauty and truth: a study of Hegel's Aesthetics Oxford: OU Press. Goethe never really understood Hegel's philosophy and always remained suspicious of it, in particular Hegel's thesis that both beauty and truth can be understood systematically and that art, as a type of truth, embodied the society’s beliefs ran counter to Goethe’s Romantic ideals, but Hegel it has been argued was attempting to synthesise Goethe’s position with Kant’s views on aesthetic judgement and was disappointed in Goethe’s responses to his aesthetic philosophy.
16 Friedrich Holderlin, ‘The declining fatherland’ in Essays and Letters by Friedrich Holderlin, Penguin, 2009
17 Johnson, M & Lakoff, G (1999) Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. London: Basic Books
18 The Walter Benjamin Memorial is located in the coastal Catalan town of Portbou where Benjamin died from a morphine overdose, after being told he would be denied passage out of Spain and would be deported to a concentration camp. Created by Dani Karavanhe and titled "Passages" in remembrance of his final passage from France to Spain, as well as his unfinished work Passagenwerk.
19 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Harvard University, Press, 1996
20 James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2001
21 In German Lichtung means a clearing, for example, a clearing in the forest. Deriving its origin from the German word for light (Licht), it is sometimes also translated as "lighting".
22 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921. The circumscription of what can and cannot be known, seeking to delineate the limits of language and outlining what is meant by the mystical.
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FURTHER READING
Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Benjamin, Walter, Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso, 1977
Danto, Arthur, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and thePale of History, Princeton University Press, 1998
- Beyond the Brillo Box: the visual arts in a post-historical perspective, University of California Press, 1998
- The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a philosophy of art, Harvard University Press, 1981
Derrida, Jacques, TheTruth In Painting, University of Chicago Press, 1987
Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, Avon, 1993
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Clarendon Press, 1975
Heidegger, Martin, Holderlin’s Hymn: ‘The Ister’, Indiana University Press, 1996
- ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, Harper and Row, 1977
Holderlin, Friedrich, Essays and Letters, Penguin, 2009
Kuspit, Donald, The End of Art, Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005
Luhmann, Niklas, Art as a Social System, Stanford University Press, 2000
Marx, Karl, Capital: an abridged edition, Oxford University Press, 2008
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Muses, Stanford University Press, 1996
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1999
Sim, Stuart, Derrida and the End of History, Icon Books, 1999
Sprinker, Michael, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Verso, 1999
Szondi, Peter, An Essay on the Tragic, Stanford University Press, 2002
