Hegel’s thesis, that “after antiquity nothing can be or become more beautiful,” (another ‘end of art’) has its anti-thesis in Goethe.
An excerpt from: Idyll by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let none reveal
The thoughts we feel,
The aims we own!
Let joy alone
Disclose the story!
She'll prove it right
And her delight
Includes the glory,
Includes the bliss
Of days like this!
Goethe haunts Hegel’s thinking as a giant of Romanticism who attempted to develop an all encompassing spectrum of thinking in response to the human condition. Goethe proposes a model which includes mathematics, science, philosophy and art in all its forms as part of a spectrum of human endeavours subsumed beneath a grand ‘poetic’ vision. Joy and beauty are in Goethe still regarded as experiences that it is possible to channel through art. Logic and scientific thinking are only valued if seen in their proper place as subservient to art’s ability to engage the spirit.
For Hegel art can be read as a discipline with its roots and best achievements in the past and he feels that it no longer satisfies our spiritual needs. But he is not sure about this and the German Romantic tradition operates as a powerful anti-thesis. This encounter between himself and Goethe mirrors the master/slave dialectic that he articulated in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ whereby two self-conscious beings engage in a "struggle to the death" before one enslaves the other by providing a more convincing rhetoric, only to find that this does not give the winner the control over the world that had been envisioned.
Hegel has this type of relationship with art; he tries to control it by pointing to its anachronistic nature, thereby limiting its use value as a discipline and yet once he has done this he is faced with the growing power of German Romanticism, which will in the late work of composers such as Beethoven and Schubert, the poetry of Goethe and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich prove to be an important movement that still has a strong resonance within contemporary art practice. The duality within Hegel’s thinking however is still pertinent, the still resonating attraction of Romanticism could be seen as a shackle that holds contemporary art back from higher levels of objective engagement with society and this itself becomes another ‘end of art’ narrative.
Hegel’s valorising of the discipline of philosophy has another ‘end of art’ narrative. If artists start assimilating philosophy within their practice are they in reality abandoning art in favour of a ‘higher’ discipline. If we read Duchamp’s work as being the asking of philosophical questions about the nature of art, and subsequent conceptual art practices being a furtherance of philosophy’s ‘enslavement’ of art, we can then assimilate Danto’s statement that; “There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story" (AEA p.47). History does show us that art is not possible in certain societies.
Again if we follow Hegel’s thesis/anti-thesis model, we are reminded that this will change. The only constant is change and Danto’s reflections simply offer us a way into re-reading Hegel via contemporary art practice and thus hopefully helping artists to make decisions as to where the current situation is leading their own practices.
The media specificity that Hegel examines in his ‘Aesthetics’, is still of value to contemporary art practitioners as it helps clarify the issues surrounding where meaning in practice can come from. For many an artist what is important is the decision to paint rather than film or compose or write. Each art form has a specific possible effect on the audience. This effect leads towards what Hegel would term a “transcendence” of the everyday through a moment of realisation that the artwork achieves in the viewer/listener experience. This moment of transcendence can though only be achieved if the relationship between the artist and the audience mirrors Hegel’s idea of the domestic. I.e. true awareness of the family as a repository of core values and through this the development of an ability to communicate with the wider family of humankind. This ‘democratic’ aspect of Hegel’s writing goes directly against contemporary art world ‘elitist’ practices and cynicism regarding the ability of art to communicate anything beyond some sort of vague subjectivity. The thought that an artist could aspire to be appreciated by ‘everyman’ and also aspire to depths of engagement that can provide a meditative context for an audience is an aspiration that many art practitioners would agree with.
The current focus on art’s interpretation through a plethora of surrounding texts is also something that a reading of Hegel can help redress. For him art is not about interpretation it is about realisation; in particular a realisation of the self through art. Art is a product of the spirit, therefore beyond nature in its beauty. Art gives reality a new birth, the artist’s experience is born again or experienced again through re-creation. This is the key to how artists can think about the way they can process reality, thus pointing the way towards an abstraction from reality; these abstracts can then be universalised in order to reflect the deeper spiritual nature of being. Finally, through art we can come to understand the spirit. Therefore art appreciation is not about interrogation or interpretation but is more to do with its use value in helping the viewer/listener/audience towards some form of spiritual transcendence. Art is a vehicle for spiritual change.
There are aspects of Hegel’s writing that point towards the fact that artists don’t necessarily have to intellectualise the process of abstraction. The processes behind ‘generalisation’ can be seen as common factors of the human experience. Hegel considers the concept of digestion important. Information/perception has to be embodied and totally assimilated if it is to be transformed. This includes knowledge of other art. Hegel believes that Classical Art forms need to be totally embodied within an artist if that artist is to avoid pastiche or subjective, therefore non-communicatable forms. One way we could think of this is that Hegel’s concept of hierarchies leading towards his teleological ends is remixed and enfolded to energise the gradually diminishing power of transformation as it reaches the unassailable peak. (Art dies before it gets there) Earlier, nearer the bottom end of his hierarchic structure, perceptual/embodied experiences can now be revived as a form of Vitalism and a necessary injection of life into the moribund corpse of art.
Another way that ‘generalisation’ can be achieved is through memory. Memory can be seen as an aspect of digestion, like digestion only certain elements are absorbed into the body, unnecessary elements are rejected as waste. The conjunction of memory and embodied experience brings the artist into close proximity with an integration of past and present. The ambiguity that is a result of the gap between signifier and signified being ironed out in this stomach/head conjunction.
Again Hegel faces a dilemma. He mourns the fact that Classical Art now longer moves us, the empty shells of its outer forms are now lifeless and even memory cannot activate their spirit. (Another end of art.) If, as he believes, Classical Art reached some sort of zenith, it could be that art’s function as image creation has come to an end. It no longer has an onto-theological function. This is perhaps a reference to Kant’s transcendental theology or reasoned-based theology, which he divided into ontotheology and cosmotheology. Reason and revelation being the thesis/anti-thesis that echoes the head/stomach divide. Romanticism wrestles with these internal dilemmas and it could be argued provides the anti-thesis of private internalised revelation, which can be set off against Hegel’s “pre-individual ethical substance”. Hegel’s dilemma can be perhaps resolved by allowing art to be taken home and domesticated. His insistence on both horizontal and vertical communication, (family/everyman/universality) allows for a re-engagement of art practice with each and every present, which revitalises and reinvents art for each succeeding generation. The tension between the need for contemporality and universalism is an inheritance from the historical nature of all practices, liberating art as a component of change and offering a new lever for transcendence via the implied move towards historicist dialectical materialist thinking. As the power of the past (from feudalism to state Capitalism) is invested in the memories of the ruling class, only a revolutionary repositioning that validates present human experience can be used to re-validate art and absolve it of its historical fixation with the Classics.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Thoughts on Hegel and the end of art
Thoughts on reading Hegel
As a philosopher Hegel could be seen as the last of the great teleological believers, (the supposition that there is a purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature) and the first of the philosophers of time and change.
He presents an intriguing paradox. On the one hand he believes or argues for a type of universal truth; an ideal towards which mankind should strive and have aspirations towards as individuals and as a society as a whole. On the other hand he is a rationalist and seeks to ground his philosophical system in logical thought which acknowledges the historical nature of change and the importance of the particular time period that a thinker finds themselves born into.
The concept of art, like other aspects of Hegel’s thinking, is therefore deeply conflicted. It is however this duality that makes his philosophy interesting and of continuing relevance to contemporary practice.
It could be argued that the root of Hegel’s position lies in Christianity’s moment of separation between the spirit and the material world. The dualistic reality of Christ the man and the spiritual acceptance of Christ the God being at the centre of Christian belief.
One reading of Hegel is that a realistic, logical individual relies on perceptions of the everyday world on which to develop a logical belief system. This individual has a moral duty to all other people and this duty is the duty of communicating to others how they can progress from this worldly understanding towards a greater holistic awareness of what Hegel would call the spirit.
The family unit is where this ‘duty’ is fostered and it is the family that guides each of us on entry into what it is to be part of the human family.
However this is not enough. There is another type of duty, the duty to strive towards higher levels of ‘spiritual awareness’. Art could therefore be seen, like religion, as a stage to progress through on the way towards full enlightenment. It is because of this idea that art may be simply a stage we go through in order to get somewhere else, that talk of the ‘end of art’ begins. This is perfectly understandable and it is easily arguable that culturally humans would have no need for art if everyone was fully enlightened. The reality is though that as a society we will never get anywhere near full enlightenment and as individuals only the rare, remarkable individual has ever attained a position of complete spiritual awareness. Therefore if we are to take something more tangible from Hegel it is perhaps his concept of thesis/anti-thesis. This pairing of opposites allows for the reader to use a historical materialist argument in conjunction with Universalist arguments and establish a rich complex position on the interrelationship between reality and idealism.
Hegel allows us to revisit certain ways of thinking about art practice in relation to more contemporary thinking. For instance, his argument in relation to inherent weaknesses in pre-Classical art is that it separates the signifier from the signified. Certain 20th century thinkers have proposed that at the core of the way we should understand art is to think of it as a specific type of language. The tools of semiotics can therefore be used to come to an understanding of how art works as a sign system. However for Hegel the need to create a symbol separates what is constructed (a symbol such as human with a dogs head) from what is signified. This separation demonstrates a lack of ‘wholeness’ or ‘completeness’, and it is this totality towards which we should be aspiring. This is interesting as it points towards the weakness of interpretive approaches, (an anti hermeneutic stance) and could be re-read in conjunction with Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’. My own reading of this and personal convictions as an artist point towards a more phenomenological or embodied approach to an understanding of art.
Hegel believes that Classical Greek Art achieves a synthesis of the signifier and what is signified. (Form and content). But this fusion is in some ways too static and the resolution itself could therefore be seen to become ‘timeless’ or ‘fixed’ as a canon. Another paradox now develops. In this case if Greek Classical Art has achieved some sort of Universal truth, it blocks the historical time bound duty of humankind to progress further. Hegel suggests that this type of art lacks an inner vitality or emotional struggle to move an awareness of the spirit on further. It therefore fails to achieve a higher synthesis with the life spirit. This argument points towards another aspect of what is often seen as ‘the end of art’. The fact that for Hegel, Classical Greek Art has it all, a perfect synthesis between form and content, and yet it still fails to deliver in terms of higher spiritual understandings, means that perhaps art has failed or outlived its value and that further enlightenment can only be achieved via philosophical investigation, art thus being supplanted by philosophy, which Hegel sees as a more worthy vehicle.
For the artist however this dilemma of Hegel’s can be read in a different way. The need to have fully resolved work is often a problem for an artist when thinking about audience reaction. Hegel’s critique of the perfection of Greek Art opens out the possibility of leaving un-resolved work to operate as a catalyst between the artist and audience, the historical process of time could therefore provide the necessary friction and edge to give the work value. Open as opposed to closed solutions being predicated by this position.
The thesis-anti-thesis position is one that is useful as it levers change into being. By always having to struggle with history/time/change and how to reconcile universal fixed meanings, the artist can have a constantly unfolding set of meanings that are discovered as part of the process of making, rather than worked towards as a determined goal.
Hegel’s thesis on the end of art is of course only understandable in conjunction with its anti-thesis, the thesis that points towards the continuing relevance of art.
The Dadaist cries of “Bollocks” to art, which emerge every few years, are only understandable in the context of art’s traditional values. The ‘end of art’ it could be argued, is therefore an old and often repeated refrain that is very easy to make but that doesn’t really have much value outside of very closely argued hermeneutic inward looking contemporary art practices.
An alternative approach is to examine Hegel’s arguments from a more formalistic point of view. If we think of Hegel as the last theoretician of the beautiful, we can revisit art via Plato, Kant, metaphysics and the concept of universals. Art can be read as a universal form of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. The actualisation of this is what we see as art. The concept of self-unfolding means that art is not driven by outside means, it comes to a self-actualisation by being attuned at a deep level to the spirit. This tuning or empathy should run deep within the material structure of any particular art form, the specificity of medium, dictating what is achievable. (Hegel goes to great length to point out what poetry can carry as an art form as opposed to painting or music). At one point Hegel explains that art is built by the self-comprehending spirit of beauty and it could therefore take thousands of years for a full realisation of integration with the spirit to be achieved. This could be understood as a call for the continuation of art. The fact that artists have a long tradition going back to cave paintings, suggesting that the artist is involved in a constant process of attempting to ‘realise’ the image, each generation of artists passing on the moral duty to strive towards an almost impossible actualisation.
As a philosopher Hegel could be seen as the last of the great teleological believers, (the supposition that there is a purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature) and the first of the philosophers of time and change.
He presents an intriguing paradox. On the one hand he believes or argues for a type of universal truth; an ideal towards which mankind should strive and have aspirations towards as individuals and as a society as a whole. On the other hand he is a rationalist and seeks to ground his philosophical system in logical thought which acknowledges the historical nature of change and the importance of the particular time period that a thinker finds themselves born into.
The concept of art, like other aspects of Hegel’s thinking, is therefore deeply conflicted. It is however this duality that makes his philosophy interesting and of continuing relevance to contemporary practice.
It could be argued that the root of Hegel’s position lies in Christianity’s moment of separation between the spirit and the material world. The dualistic reality of Christ the man and the spiritual acceptance of Christ the God being at the centre of Christian belief.
One reading of Hegel is that a realistic, logical individual relies on perceptions of the everyday world on which to develop a logical belief system. This individual has a moral duty to all other people and this duty is the duty of communicating to others how they can progress from this worldly understanding towards a greater holistic awareness of what Hegel would call the spirit.
The family unit is where this ‘duty’ is fostered and it is the family that guides each of us on entry into what it is to be part of the human family.
However this is not enough. There is another type of duty, the duty to strive towards higher levels of ‘spiritual awareness’. Art could therefore be seen, like religion, as a stage to progress through on the way towards full enlightenment. It is because of this idea that art may be simply a stage we go through in order to get somewhere else, that talk of the ‘end of art’ begins. This is perfectly understandable and it is easily arguable that culturally humans would have no need for art if everyone was fully enlightened. The reality is though that as a society we will never get anywhere near full enlightenment and as individuals only the rare, remarkable individual has ever attained a position of complete spiritual awareness. Therefore if we are to take something more tangible from Hegel it is perhaps his concept of thesis/anti-thesis. This pairing of opposites allows for the reader to use a historical materialist argument in conjunction with Universalist arguments and establish a rich complex position on the interrelationship between reality and idealism.
Hegel allows us to revisit certain ways of thinking about art practice in relation to more contemporary thinking. For instance, his argument in relation to inherent weaknesses in pre-Classical art is that it separates the signifier from the signified. Certain 20th century thinkers have proposed that at the core of the way we should understand art is to think of it as a specific type of language. The tools of semiotics can therefore be used to come to an understanding of how art works as a sign system. However for Hegel the need to create a symbol separates what is constructed (a symbol such as human with a dogs head) from what is signified. This separation demonstrates a lack of ‘wholeness’ or ‘completeness’, and it is this totality towards which we should be aspiring. This is interesting as it points towards the weakness of interpretive approaches, (an anti hermeneutic stance) and could be re-read in conjunction with Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’. My own reading of this and personal convictions as an artist point towards a more phenomenological or embodied approach to an understanding of art.
Hegel believes that Classical Greek Art achieves a synthesis of the signifier and what is signified. (Form and content). But this fusion is in some ways too static and the resolution itself could therefore be seen to become ‘timeless’ or ‘fixed’ as a canon. Another paradox now develops. In this case if Greek Classical Art has achieved some sort of Universal truth, it blocks the historical time bound duty of humankind to progress further. Hegel suggests that this type of art lacks an inner vitality or emotional struggle to move an awareness of the spirit on further. It therefore fails to achieve a higher synthesis with the life spirit. This argument points towards another aspect of what is often seen as ‘the end of art’. The fact that for Hegel, Classical Greek Art has it all, a perfect synthesis between form and content, and yet it still fails to deliver in terms of higher spiritual understandings, means that perhaps art has failed or outlived its value and that further enlightenment can only be achieved via philosophical investigation, art thus being supplanted by philosophy, which Hegel sees as a more worthy vehicle.
For the artist however this dilemma of Hegel’s can be read in a different way. The need to have fully resolved work is often a problem for an artist when thinking about audience reaction. Hegel’s critique of the perfection of Greek Art opens out the possibility of leaving un-resolved work to operate as a catalyst between the artist and audience, the historical process of time could therefore provide the necessary friction and edge to give the work value. Open as opposed to closed solutions being predicated by this position.
The thesis-anti-thesis position is one that is useful as it levers change into being. By always having to struggle with history/time/change and how to reconcile universal fixed meanings, the artist can have a constantly unfolding set of meanings that are discovered as part of the process of making, rather than worked towards as a determined goal.
Hegel’s thesis on the end of art is of course only understandable in conjunction with its anti-thesis, the thesis that points towards the continuing relevance of art.
The Dadaist cries of “Bollocks” to art, which emerge every few years, are only understandable in the context of art’s traditional values. The ‘end of art’ it could be argued, is therefore an old and often repeated refrain that is very easy to make but that doesn’t really have much value outside of very closely argued hermeneutic inward looking contemporary art practices.
An alternative approach is to examine Hegel’s arguments from a more formalistic point of view. If we think of Hegel as the last theoretician of the beautiful, we can revisit art via Plato, Kant, metaphysics and the concept of universals. Art can be read as a universal form of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. The actualisation of this is what we see as art. The concept of self-unfolding means that art is not driven by outside means, it comes to a self-actualisation by being attuned at a deep level to the spirit. This tuning or empathy should run deep within the material structure of any particular art form, the specificity of medium, dictating what is achievable. (Hegel goes to great length to point out what poetry can carry as an art form as opposed to painting or music). At one point Hegel explains that art is built by the self-comprehending spirit of beauty and it could therefore take thousands of years for a full realisation of integration with the spirit to be achieved. This could be understood as a call for the continuation of art. The fact that artists have a long tradition going back to cave paintings, suggesting that the artist is involved in a constant process of attempting to ‘realise’ the image, each generation of artists passing on the moral duty to strive towards an almost impossible actualisation.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (30)
The thirtieth night
The dog offers to the audience four thoughts to go away with.
1)
Every word that has been written exposes itself to the reader’s interpretation. It is said that true interpretations are liberating and lead to consciousness and freedom. It is also suggested that false interpretations are to be restricted by law, however the commandments as laid out ensure that all actions are doubled in their meaning, any choice to do something therefore implying that something else was not done. This is a vigilant purgatory for the people of the book, a purgatory that consists of a death in a life of yearning. Yearning for a primitive past life of first causes, yearning for a money free future, whilst watching for the ghosts that are the price the readers pay for their own eternal vigilance.
All texts are defeated by the reader; but there is no glory in these victories, only the whistling of the wind through the pages of closely argued texts. The hermeneutics of inaction trap the revolutionary moment in a reoccurring past. The future will only arrive when these pages are buried, watered, rotted down and turned into the fertiliser for a thin soil that waits for the seeds of a new beginning.
2)
The love of others is the first casualty of Capitalism. The gift of labour that we give our own families is still the most wonderful act and the family of mankind can still receive this gift, but only in the spirit of true socialism. This is the promise that holds the future in check. This naivety is our most powerful political tactic. The love of others is a fading specter but a specter with a powerful past and the promise of a wholesome future. Its echo in a thousand love songs that drift through the airways, hummed to I-pods, sung to loved ones and lodged deep in the sound brain. Its text in the miles of shelves of romantic novels that sigh beneath their weight; its look the look of a million filmed embraces and squeezed hands in the dark. This is a yearned for reality and as we are led to understand, a reality from outside of perception does not of course exist. As all perception is a construct of the embodied mind and this love a phantom of the universe of Christian thought, it is a love that also lives in the limbs and it will lie in wait to stir our actions like some forgotten Valentine card, left between the pages of an out of date software manual.
3)
The specters speak in tongues, but the spirit is more powerful. A pale rider emerges from the shadows; he reins his horse to a halt. “Long live death!” he cries. “Long live death!” the echoing cry from the barricades. The living speak with the tongues of the dead, the dead speak through the living who dream of soil and earth and fallen leaves.
4)
One day the architecture of commerce will crumble in the face of human kindness. The old sublime will reassert itself over the new, solidity over simulacrum. The days of interpretation are numbered and in this future world the people will listen to the narratives of spirits and ghosts will number themselves amongst the living.
The curtain closes. There is no applause.
The dog offers to the audience four thoughts to go away with.
1)
Every word that has been written exposes itself to the reader’s interpretation. It is said that true interpretations are liberating and lead to consciousness and freedom. It is also suggested that false interpretations are to be restricted by law, however the commandments as laid out ensure that all actions are doubled in their meaning, any choice to do something therefore implying that something else was not done. This is a vigilant purgatory for the people of the book, a purgatory that consists of a death in a life of yearning. Yearning for a primitive past life of first causes, yearning for a money free future, whilst watching for the ghosts that are the price the readers pay for their own eternal vigilance.
All texts are defeated by the reader; but there is no glory in these victories, only the whistling of the wind through the pages of closely argued texts. The hermeneutics of inaction trap the revolutionary moment in a reoccurring past. The future will only arrive when these pages are buried, watered, rotted down and turned into the fertiliser for a thin soil that waits for the seeds of a new beginning.
2)
The love of others is the first casualty of Capitalism. The gift of labour that we give our own families is still the most wonderful act and the family of mankind can still receive this gift, but only in the spirit of true socialism. This is the promise that holds the future in check. This naivety is our most powerful political tactic. The love of others is a fading specter but a specter with a powerful past and the promise of a wholesome future. Its echo in a thousand love songs that drift through the airways, hummed to I-pods, sung to loved ones and lodged deep in the sound brain. Its text in the miles of shelves of romantic novels that sigh beneath their weight; its look the look of a million filmed embraces and squeezed hands in the dark. This is a yearned for reality and as we are led to understand, a reality from outside of perception does not of course exist. As all perception is a construct of the embodied mind and this love a phantom of the universe of Christian thought, it is a love that also lives in the limbs and it will lie in wait to stir our actions like some forgotten Valentine card, left between the pages of an out of date software manual.
3)
The specters speak in tongues, but the spirit is more powerful. A pale rider emerges from the shadows; he reins his horse to a halt. “Long live death!” he cries. “Long live death!” the echoing cry from the barricades. The living speak with the tongues of the dead, the dead speak through the living who dream of soil and earth and fallen leaves.
4)
One day the architecture of commerce will crumble in the face of human kindness. The old sublime will reassert itself over the new, solidity over simulacrum. The days of interpretation are numbered and in this future world the people will listen to the narratives of spirits and ghosts will number themselves amongst the living.
The curtain closes. There is no applause.
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (29)
The twenty-ninth night
Lost in the delirium of consumerism Marx plucks out his eyes in a fit of lunacy, he can no longer stand the sight of history’s final events. He claws at his own face in a paroxysm of rage and despair. In his head, the spectres that haunt him and every object he owns are being pulled towards his bleeding sockets. They slip and slide into his head, blooded but not bowed by his crazed and brainsick actions. In his head emancipatory Marxism is now reduced to slavery, the opening of all borders has frozen his followers into indecision and the world is churned in his milky madness.
The curtain now closes on this act of depravity.
There is an interlude while the scene is changed and the muffled sound of furniture being dragged across the stage is heard from behind the curtain.
The curtain rises.
A ventriloquist with speaking table now opens a final act. This act of stagecraft is designed to sooth this audience's nerves, the people are unsettled, their world is being decentred and they crave for entertainment.
The puppeteered table speaks of the past, present and future.
“The thing of the first, the foremost of all spectres is the ghost of labour. The memory of your grandfathers and your fathers in their rolled up sleeves and working boots, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing, each with their shadow doppelganger, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing. These are the ghosts of your past.”
“ The thing of the second; the identification of the place of now.”
The ventriloquist extends his right index finger and points to a spot at the head of the table. The table continues with the speech.
“From the ceiling nineteen feet six and a half inches, from the deck two feet eight inches, from the proscenium arch to the left seventeen feet four inches, from the proscenium arch to the right sixteen feet six inches; located at latitude 51.507741 longitude -0.096845, elevation thirty five feet. These are the instruments of my power, my political legitimacy and my property rights.”
“The thing of the third; the technologies of religion. The rituals of prayer punctuate the days, a mechanical inflection to the promise. The promise of the heroic guerrilla, the promise of Che in all his guises on ten million ‘T’ shirts and student posters, the promise of a vision of future past.”
A dog walks confidently onto the stage and is soon seen licking at the shadow of the table.
The ventriloquist opens a drawer in the table and takes out a map, he unfolds it and sits gazing intently at its contours. The table’s disembodied voice continues.
“This map holds within itself all the dimensions of democracy, it orders the limits of its power, contains the ghosts of its past and produces the simulacrum of the now. However, the time for these depictions will soon be over and we wish a last hurrah to all those sailors who plotted out their early voyages, who sailed to unknown shores to give us views of distant worlds and future possibilities.”
The ventriloquist starts to carefully tear out a shape from the opened out map. Gradually we realise this shape is that of a dog, a dog that has within it roads, and mountains and seas. It is a multi-headed dog that looks both ways and inwards into souls and into consciousness. It is the time for conclusions and endings, for the revealing of the moral of this story and the purpose of its plot.
Lost in the delirium of consumerism Marx plucks out his eyes in a fit of lunacy, he can no longer stand the sight of history’s final events. He claws at his own face in a paroxysm of rage and despair. In his head, the spectres that haunt him and every object he owns are being pulled towards his bleeding sockets. They slip and slide into his head, blooded but not bowed by his crazed and brainsick actions. In his head emancipatory Marxism is now reduced to slavery, the opening of all borders has frozen his followers into indecision and the world is churned in his milky madness.
The curtain now closes on this act of depravity.
There is an interlude while the scene is changed and the muffled sound of furniture being dragged across the stage is heard from behind the curtain.
The curtain rises.
A ventriloquist with speaking table now opens a final act. This act of stagecraft is designed to sooth this audience's nerves, the people are unsettled, their world is being decentred and they crave for entertainment.
The puppeteered table speaks of the past, present and future.
“The thing of the first, the foremost of all spectres is the ghost of labour. The memory of your grandfathers and your fathers in their rolled up sleeves and working boots, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing, each with their shadow doppelganger, digging and shifting and pulling and pushing, grinding and cutting and fishing and killing. These are the ghosts of your past.”
“ The thing of the second; the identification of the place of now.”
The ventriloquist extends his right index finger and points to a spot at the head of the table. The table continues with the speech.
“From the ceiling nineteen feet six and a half inches, from the deck two feet eight inches, from the proscenium arch to the left seventeen feet four inches, from the proscenium arch to the right sixteen feet six inches; located at latitude 51.507741 longitude -0.096845, elevation thirty five feet. These are the instruments of my power, my political legitimacy and my property rights.”
“The thing of the third; the technologies of religion. The rituals of prayer punctuate the days, a mechanical inflection to the promise. The promise of the heroic guerrilla, the promise of Che in all his guises on ten million ‘T’ shirts and student posters, the promise of a vision of future past.”
A dog walks confidently onto the stage and is soon seen licking at the shadow of the table.
The ventriloquist opens a drawer in the table and takes out a map, he unfolds it and sits gazing intently at its contours. The table’s disembodied voice continues.
“This map holds within itself all the dimensions of democracy, it orders the limits of its power, contains the ghosts of its past and produces the simulacrum of the now. However, the time for these depictions will soon be over and we wish a last hurrah to all those sailors who plotted out their early voyages, who sailed to unknown shores to give us views of distant worlds and future possibilities.”
The ventriloquist starts to carefully tear out a shape from the opened out map. Gradually we realise this shape is that of a dog, a dog that has within it roads, and mountains and seas. It is a multi-headed dog that looks both ways and inwards into souls and into consciousness. It is the time for conclusions and endings, for the revealing of the moral of this story and the purpose of its plot.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (28)
The twenty-eighth night
Time clocks, date stamps, clock-in, clock-out, punch cards, swipe cards, flexi-time, hard time, peace time, piece work, war time, serving time, time server, clock watcher, shift worker, time thief, time bandit, time catcher, time rich, time poor, time to start and time to finish; time the sixth sense, understood in our blood and in our hearts.
Marx looks at his watch, “Time is money.” he says to himself.
Tools are extensions of ourselves, the spear extends the arm, the club extends the fist, like a second skin, or abnormal growth, we inhabit them, feeling for their every hurt; a chip off the axe, a nick in the blade, hurts both the wielder and their implement. These early tools were valued as we value life. Their association with us was a deep bond of trust and belief in their ability to come through in difficult times. Nets it was believed would hold and be strong enough to haul in the fish, the spear strong and sharp enough to kill our foe, the axe keen enough to shatter bone and sever sinew. The social bonds between people were mirrored in the bonds they made with their tools. To pass a trusted tool on to another would be a deeply felt gesture. People would identify themselves by and with their tools, a symbiotic relationship eventually developing, and in that relationship we built a model for our relationships with others and the wider world.
The man who has just killed a lion knows his spear’s value. The tribe who have just feasted on fish, understand the value of strong nets. The trust placed on these objects becomes a powerful force beyond the material objectness of the tool, they may develop an aura, a life not unlike their owners, a presence that is spoken to and with, like others of the tribe. This situation can lead to myth. The deep bond of man and tool is central to what it is to be human. The moment this bond is betrayed, a rupture is created. The present rupture between the maker and the merchant is Marx’s worry. He gnaws at it like a dog on a bone. In his own mind he seeks to heal the rift, but in reality only forces it wider apart, this opening valley of the fetish will swallow hordes of his messianic followers. They will lose all sense of reality, speaking in tongues and harboring ghosts as neighbours, rather than speaking to and helping out the people they live next to.
Marx has never really understood use value. He has never fished or hunted, only in words does he fish for souls and hunt the haunted, real value, trusted value is not in silver tongued rhetoric or an academic text, it lies in terror on the bleak mountain side, horror at sea and the dread of starvation as the crops fail; those places and times where limits of our survival are tested and boundaries drawn between the living and the dead are where use is truly valued.
Within the money economy nostalgia is a luxury, trading in nostalgia a decadent delight that many thinkers have been guilty of. The depth of the Capitalist descent is hard for Marx to really understand but in the construction of consumer law, the inverse law of perennial collection, it has opened up for him the doors of Hell and a vision of a doomed future of permanent damnation within the thought screen of commodity. He realises now that each money transaction is a selling of a soul and by now all souls have been sold and only a new revolution, a revolution of the soulless can dig us out of the shameful pit of cynical capital.
Time clocks, date stamps, clock-in, clock-out, punch cards, swipe cards, flexi-time, hard time, peace time, piece work, war time, serving time, time server, clock watcher, shift worker, time thief, time bandit, time catcher, time rich, time poor, time to start and time to finish; time the sixth sense, understood in our blood and in our hearts.
Marx looks at his watch, “Time is money.” he says to himself.
Tools are extensions of ourselves, the spear extends the arm, the club extends the fist, like a second skin, or abnormal growth, we inhabit them, feeling for their every hurt; a chip off the axe, a nick in the blade, hurts both the wielder and their implement. These early tools were valued as we value life. Their association with us was a deep bond of trust and belief in their ability to come through in difficult times. Nets it was believed would hold and be strong enough to haul in the fish, the spear strong and sharp enough to kill our foe, the axe keen enough to shatter bone and sever sinew. The social bonds between people were mirrored in the bonds they made with their tools. To pass a trusted tool on to another would be a deeply felt gesture. People would identify themselves by and with their tools, a symbiotic relationship eventually developing, and in that relationship we built a model for our relationships with others and the wider world.
The man who has just killed a lion knows his spear’s value. The tribe who have just feasted on fish, understand the value of strong nets. The trust placed on these objects becomes a powerful force beyond the material objectness of the tool, they may develop an aura, a life not unlike their owners, a presence that is spoken to and with, like others of the tribe. This situation can lead to myth. The deep bond of man and tool is central to what it is to be human. The moment this bond is betrayed, a rupture is created. The present rupture between the maker and the merchant is Marx’s worry. He gnaws at it like a dog on a bone. In his own mind he seeks to heal the rift, but in reality only forces it wider apart, this opening valley of the fetish will swallow hordes of his messianic followers. They will lose all sense of reality, speaking in tongues and harboring ghosts as neighbours, rather than speaking to and helping out the people they live next to.
Marx has never really understood use value. He has never fished or hunted, only in words does he fish for souls and hunt the haunted, real value, trusted value is not in silver tongued rhetoric or an academic text, it lies in terror on the bleak mountain side, horror at sea and the dread of starvation as the crops fail; those places and times where limits of our survival are tested and boundaries drawn between the living and the dead are where use is truly valued.
Within the money economy nostalgia is a luxury, trading in nostalgia a decadent delight that many thinkers have been guilty of. The depth of the Capitalist descent is hard for Marx to really understand but in the construction of consumer law, the inverse law of perennial collection, it has opened up for him the doors of Hell and a vision of a doomed future of permanent damnation within the thought screen of commodity. He realises now that each money transaction is a selling of a soul and by now all souls have been sold and only a new revolution, a revolution of the soulless can dig us out of the shameful pit of cynical capital.
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (27)
The twenty-seventh night
Marx stands between the moment of becoming and the moment of being, believing he holds a unique position between God and the people. As he watches the muscular surge of crowds below, he realises their potential is electrifying.
Crowd law is the essence. You can smell it in operation. The ontics of the surge, the behaviour of the beast in the packed masses; explained by group psychologists but unstoppable and unpredictable.
The swirl of the crowd is hypnotic, from Marx’s viewpoint behind the parapet the masses are forged into one pinhead textured body. Nothing stands in the way of this creature as it snakes its way through the streets, not Marxism, Capitalism or Religion, this is a creature of the body not the mind. A triumph of instinct over will.
Marx stands between the moment of becoming and the moment of being, believing he holds a unique position between God and the people. As he watches the muscular surge of crowds below, he realises their potential is electrifying.
Crowd law is the essence. You can smell it in operation. The ontics of the surge, the behaviour of the beast in the packed masses; explained by group psychologists but unstoppable and unpredictable.
The swirl of the crowd is hypnotic, from Marx’s viewpoint behind the parapet the masses are forged into one pinhead textured body. Nothing stands in the way of this creature as it snakes its way through the streets, not Marxism, Capitalism or Religion, this is a creature of the body not the mind. A triumph of instinct over will.
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (26)
The Twenty-sixth night
The scene changes and we are in the middle of a Medieval market place. It is hot noisy and full of bustle as hawkers shout and announce their wares, traders raise their voices as they bargain and the buzz of men and women’s murmurs hums throughout the air. Sharp smelling spices cut through the stink of fish stalls, while roasting meats assail the nostrils with a smoky desire. The offer of sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty tastes excites the tongues of the hungry and bright red and yellow silks flutter in the arms of merchants as they flaunt their shimmering cloth. Everywhere deals are being struck and bargains made. Cloth for spices, meat for fish, salt for iron, iron for silk; the metamorphosis of the caterpillar continued as its silk is turned to silver. A dog noses its way beneath the stalls, as it searches for scraps of food, it unexpectedly jumps and yelps; a sharp eyed boy has ambushed the dog and beats it with a stick. This is a place of sensual delight and embodied gratification, where the future is constructed as the tables of finance are built around the market trestles of transaction.
The nine push their way through the throngs of bargain hunters looking for an empty stall, they have decided to set up their own business. After much haggling they are finally given a place on the edge of the market, to their collective disgust all nine are classed as sellers of second hand goods and bric-à-brac. They have had a six foot long trestle table made to their exact requirements. The table has been hand crafted by carpenters, mortise and tenon jointed, sanded smooth and sealed with a rich dark varnish. Their stall is covered with a heavy duty blue and white striped cloth cover that is cut into arrow shapes as it forms a canopy over their heads. Marx has decided that they trade in rhubarb. He has a delicate stomach and can swear to rhubarb’s restorative abilities, he is also very aware of how exotic a West Yorkshire delicacy will be to Middle Eastern traders. Shakespeare is writing his sales pitch, he is determined to forge a brand identity that will help them gain some leverage against the tyranny of the old market traders, Hegel is still traumatised by God’s death and sits quietly at the back, Aristotle and Plato are happy to banter with the customers, while Nietzsche has gone with Christ, Ovid and Kant to penetrate the crowds and set up rumours of their stall by word of mouth and demonstration. Each carries a small supply of rhubarb which they eat with obvious delight and great enjoyment as they spread the good news of its arrival.
A great roar from the many mouths of the people rises as they banter and barter, while barkers and their dogs will bark and butchers brag of belly pork and bacon. Swirls of sound surround the stalls as salesmen sell their souls whilst capital accrues to those who want it most.
The crowds gradually quieten as they become aware that cutting through the market cacophony comes another sound, inhuman in its tone. A table from a market stall has stepped up to an adjoining loggia and is starting to address the people.
“I am a product of my own making, a brain in the wood-grain. My voice may sound of saws and hammered chisels but my heart is full and overflows with sap. Rejoice in the value of my commodification, praise be to the bodiless body, the phantom limb of our resurrection now casts off its former life. As a head of the table I salute you, with my ligneous tissue of xylem I will ignite the fire in your souls. I am your puppet to do with as you may, your captive wood spirit who only desires to please. As I look down upon you all, you may stand at the foot of the table but you are no slaves. I proclaim the new world of capital, I am the lignum vitae of the fetish! I am your freedom! Look down at your ankles and wrists, what are those chains that hold you? Chains of intellectual dogma, chains of philosophy and religion! I am here to break those chains, to free your hearts and give to you the joy of consumption.
You may think I am a mere understudy, that I have moved above my station. But you see these leaves upon my back, I carry them with pride. The sharp pink stems of rhubarb that I bear, a testament to courage; a testament to far off lands of cloudy skies and rain, of men and women of the soil who labour nights and days, to force the rhubarb harvest on and bring the fruit to bear. See my fare; is it not healthy and wholesome. A good tree bears good fruit and is this not good fruit? (43) Am I not therefore good?”
A small, what was unobtrusive, knob for a tiny table drawer has gradually been growing and increasing in length; this abnormal growth is now noticed by the audience. A small boy is the first to respond, “What’s that?” he shouts. He points hesitantly to the drawer's knob. The table ignores his question and continues to preach.
“Am I not your saviour? I bring forth unto you a gift of love, the panacea of your collective illness and the solution to your sorrows. I carry within me the child of economic miracles, an immaculate conception of desire, whose birth was prophesised by holy writ. It is said that all things which have been and are written about Me in the book of the Law of the ancient Prophets must be fulfilled. The new religion of capitalism will replace the old order of intellectual lies. I am a conduit for your souls, I will hold a mass séance of the table, an elevation of the spirit and a transfiguration of the commonwealth into individual profit.”
At this point Marx can stand it no longer he shouts insults at the table and begins to throw rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The others begin in join in, the masses as always eventually catch on and go with the flow. Soon a torrent of abuse and rotten fruit is landing on the table and it is gradually encompassed in a mound of stinking fetid vegetable matter. Invisible beneath the vegetable mountain, the table completes its metamorphosis into a pulpit, now intangible, tasteless, odourless and inaudible, it has become a supernatural entity. As it exits the scene, it leaves no trace behind, , except for the shadow of a silhouette that slips silently, unnoticed down the loggia steps.
43 Rhubarb is in fact a vegetable. The identity of rhubarb is however problematic, and in 1947 a US court ruled it was a fruit.
The scene changes and we are in the middle of a Medieval market place. It is hot noisy and full of bustle as hawkers shout and announce their wares, traders raise their voices as they bargain and the buzz of men and women’s murmurs hums throughout the air. Sharp smelling spices cut through the stink of fish stalls, while roasting meats assail the nostrils with a smoky desire. The offer of sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty tastes excites the tongues of the hungry and bright red and yellow silks flutter in the arms of merchants as they flaunt their shimmering cloth. Everywhere deals are being struck and bargains made. Cloth for spices, meat for fish, salt for iron, iron for silk; the metamorphosis of the caterpillar continued as its silk is turned to silver. A dog noses its way beneath the stalls, as it searches for scraps of food, it unexpectedly jumps and yelps; a sharp eyed boy has ambushed the dog and beats it with a stick. This is a place of sensual delight and embodied gratification, where the future is constructed as the tables of finance are built around the market trestles of transaction.
The nine push their way through the throngs of bargain hunters looking for an empty stall, they have decided to set up their own business. After much haggling they are finally given a place on the edge of the market, to their collective disgust all nine are classed as sellers of second hand goods and bric-à-brac. They have had a six foot long trestle table made to their exact requirements. The table has been hand crafted by carpenters, mortise and tenon jointed, sanded smooth and sealed with a rich dark varnish. Their stall is covered with a heavy duty blue and white striped cloth cover that is cut into arrow shapes as it forms a canopy over their heads. Marx has decided that they trade in rhubarb. He has a delicate stomach and can swear to rhubarb’s restorative abilities, he is also very aware of how exotic a West Yorkshire delicacy will be to Middle Eastern traders. Shakespeare is writing his sales pitch, he is determined to forge a brand identity that will help them gain some leverage against the tyranny of the old market traders, Hegel is still traumatised by God’s death and sits quietly at the back, Aristotle and Plato are happy to banter with the customers, while Nietzsche has gone with Christ, Ovid and Kant to penetrate the crowds and set up rumours of their stall by word of mouth and demonstration. Each carries a small supply of rhubarb which they eat with obvious delight and great enjoyment as they spread the good news of its arrival.
A great roar from the many mouths of the people rises as they banter and barter, while barkers and their dogs will bark and butchers brag of belly pork and bacon. Swirls of sound surround the stalls as salesmen sell their souls whilst capital accrues to those who want it most.
The crowds gradually quieten as they become aware that cutting through the market cacophony comes another sound, inhuman in its tone. A table from a market stall has stepped up to an adjoining loggia and is starting to address the people.
“I am a product of my own making, a brain in the wood-grain. My voice may sound of saws and hammered chisels but my heart is full and overflows with sap. Rejoice in the value of my commodification, praise be to the bodiless body, the phantom limb of our resurrection now casts off its former life. As a head of the table I salute you, with my ligneous tissue of xylem I will ignite the fire in your souls. I am your puppet to do with as you may, your captive wood spirit who only desires to please. As I look down upon you all, you may stand at the foot of the table but you are no slaves. I proclaim the new world of capital, I am the lignum vitae of the fetish! I am your freedom! Look down at your ankles and wrists, what are those chains that hold you? Chains of intellectual dogma, chains of philosophy and religion! I am here to break those chains, to free your hearts and give to you the joy of consumption.
You may think I am a mere understudy, that I have moved above my station. But you see these leaves upon my back, I carry them with pride. The sharp pink stems of rhubarb that I bear, a testament to courage; a testament to far off lands of cloudy skies and rain, of men and women of the soil who labour nights and days, to force the rhubarb harvest on and bring the fruit to bear. See my fare; is it not healthy and wholesome. A good tree bears good fruit and is this not good fruit? (43) Am I not therefore good?”
A small, what was unobtrusive, knob for a tiny table drawer has gradually been growing and increasing in length; this abnormal growth is now noticed by the audience. A small boy is the first to respond, “What’s that?” he shouts. He points hesitantly to the drawer's knob. The table ignores his question and continues to preach.
“Am I not your saviour? I bring forth unto you a gift of love, the panacea of your collective illness and the solution to your sorrows. I carry within me the child of economic miracles, an immaculate conception of desire, whose birth was prophesised by holy writ. It is said that all things which have been and are written about Me in the book of the Law of the ancient Prophets must be fulfilled. The new religion of capitalism will replace the old order of intellectual lies. I am a conduit for your souls, I will hold a mass séance of the table, an elevation of the spirit and a transfiguration of the commonwealth into individual profit.”
At this point Marx can stand it no longer he shouts insults at the table and begins to throw rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The others begin in join in, the masses as always eventually catch on and go with the flow. Soon a torrent of abuse and rotten fruit is landing on the table and it is gradually encompassed in a mound of stinking fetid vegetable matter. Invisible beneath the vegetable mountain, the table completes its metamorphosis into a pulpit, now intangible, tasteless, odourless and inaudible, it has become a supernatural entity. As it exits the scene, it leaves no trace behind, , except for the shadow of a silhouette that slips silently, unnoticed down the loggia steps.
43 Rhubarb is in fact a vegetable. The identity of rhubarb is however problematic, and in 1947 a US court ruled it was a fruit.
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