In considering the relationship between art & politics, I was struck by Terry Eagleton’s book The Ideology of the Aesthetic on Saturday at Bluestockings. These are some preliminary passages that struck me in reading the introduction and the chapter on Adorno “Art After Auschwitz.” Possibly some starting points for further developing thinking about how our activity has operated in this field of political action and artistic practice. A couple of particularly salient statements on autonomy, which also reflect certain elements of thinking aroudn The Commons and I v Us.

Why…should this theoretical persistence of the aesthetic typify an historical period when cultural practice might be claimed to have lost much of its traditional social relevance, debased as it is to a branch of general commodity production?

My argument, broadly speaking, is that the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order. It is on this account, rather than because men and women have suddenly awoken to the supreme value of painting or poetry, that aesthetics plays so obtrusive a role in the intellectual heritage of the present. But my argument is also that the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon.

(pages 2-3)

Once artefacts become commodities in the market place, they exist for nothing and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for themselves. It is this notion of autonomy or self-referentiality which the new discourse of aesthetics is centrally concerned to elaborate; and it is clear enough, from a radical political viewpoint, just how disabling any such idea of aesthetic autonomy must be. It is not only, as radical thought has familiarly insisted, that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather more subtly, that the idea of autonomy — of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining — provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations. Yet this concept of autonomy is radically double-edged: if on the one hand it provides a central constituent of bourgeois ideology, it also marks an emphasis on the self-determining nature of human powers and capacities which becomes, in the work of Karl Marx and others, the anthropological foundation of a revolutionary opposition to bourgeois utility. The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with a subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity.

(page 9)

The aesthetic…is that privileged condition in which the law of the whole is nothing but the interrelations of its parts.

(page 347)

Culture is deeply locked into the structure of commodity production; but one effect of this is to release it into a certain ideological autonomy, hence allowing it to speak against the very social order with which it is guiltily complicit. It is this complicity which spurs art into protest, but which also strikes that protest agonized and ineffectual, forma gesture rather than irate polemic. Art can only hope to be valid if it provides an implicit critique of the conditions which produce it — a validation which, in evoking art’s privileged remoteness from such conditions, instantly invalidates itself. Conversely, art can only be authentic if it silently acknowledges how deeply it is compromised by what it opposes; but to press this logic too far is precisely to undermine authenticity. The aporia of modernist culture lies in its plaintive, stricken attempt to turn autonomy (the free-standing nature of the aesthetic work) against autonomy (its functionless status as commodity on the market); what warps it into non-self-identity is the inscription of its own material conditions on its interior. It would seem that art must now either abolish itself entirely — the audacious strategy of the avant garde — or hover indecisively between life and death, subsuming its own impossibility into itself.

(page 349)

Art for Adorno is thus less some idealized realm of being than contradiction incarnate. Every artefact works resolutely against itself, and this in a whole variety of ways. It strives for some pure autonomy, but knows that without a heterogeneous moment it would be nothing, vanishing into thin air. It is at once being-for-itself and being-for-society, always simultaneously itself and something else, critically estranged from its history yet incapable of taking up a vantage-point beyond it. By forswearing intervention in the real, artistic reason accrues to itself a certain precious innocence; but at the same time all art resonates with social repression, and becomes culpable precisely because it refuses to intervene. Culture is truth and illusion, cognition and false consciousness, at a stroke: like all spirit, it suffers from narcissistic delusion of existing for itself, but does so in a way which offers to negate all false claims to such self-identity in the commodified world around it. Delusion is art’s very mode of existence, which is not to grant it a license to advocate delusion. If the content of the art work is an illusion, it is in some sense a necessary one, and so does not lie; art is true to the degree that it is an illusion of the non-illusory. In positing itself as illusion, it exposes the realm of commodities (of which it is one) as unreal, thus forcing illusion into the service of truth. Art is an allegory of undeluded happiness — to which it adds the fatal rider that this cannot be had, continually breaking the promise of the well-being it adumbrates.

(page 352)

I’ll be coming to this with more personal comments and edits. Photo tagged with aesthetic from f-auto on Flickr.

In response to the evolving conservations about Slavoj Zizek, I purchased Interrogating the Real today. In the author’s introduction, he provides a useful investigation of the relationship between the individual and the collective today. A full transcription of pages 14-15 seems in order.

Along the lines of this constitutive ‘homelessness’ of philosophy, one should rehabilitate Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan ‘world-civil-society’ (Weltburgergesellschaft), which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation state to the citizenship of a global trans-national state, instead, it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s ‘organic’ ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition to a radically different principle of identification. Recall Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of Individuality-Particularity-Universality — this opposition is precisely the opposition between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, ‘world-civil-society’ is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality, i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not substantially grasp the subject; the only way for an individual effectively to participate in universal humanity is therefore through a full identification with a particular Nation-State (I am ‘human’ only insofar as I am German, English …). For Kant, on the contrary, ‘world-civil-society’ designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypasses the mediation of the particular by directly participating in the Universal. This identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (’humanity’), but an identification with a universal ethico-politcal principle — a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are accessible to everyone. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, means by ‘public’ as opposed to ‘private’: ‘private’ is not one’s individuality as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification; while ‘public’ is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the ‘public’ sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification — one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. And what we find at the end of this road is atheism — not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a god. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behaviour would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God.

Brecht is right here: we are never in a position directly to choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is already located within the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserable, pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question is irrelevant — this is the stance of a truly atheistic subject.

The standard critical procedure today is to mobilize opposition of human and subject: the notion of subjectivity (self-consciousness, self-positing autonomy, etc.) stands for dangerous hubris, a will to power, which obfuscates and distorts the authentic essence of humanity; the task is thus to think the essence of humanity outside the domain of subjectivity. What Lacan tries to accomplish seems to be the exact opposite of this standard procedure: in all his great literary interpretations — from Oedipus and Antigone through Sade to Claudel — he is in search of a point at which we enter the dimension of the ‘inhuman’, the point at which ‘humanity’ disintegrates, so that all that remains is the pure subject. Sophocles’ Antigone, Sade’s Juliette, Claudel’s Sygne — they are all these figures of such an ‘inhuman’ subject (in contract to their ‘human counterpoint: Ismene, Justine …). To paraphrase Nietszche, what one should render problematic is what in us is ‘human, all too human’. One should not be afraid to apply this insight also to politics: it is all too simple to dismiss Nazis as inhuman and bestial — what if the real problem with the Nazis was precisely that they remained ‘human, all too human’?

Johanna also passed along this essential NY Times op-ed article by Zizek following Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s ‘confessions.’

From Black’s Law Dictionary (Abridged Eighth Edition) (I think strictly defined legal langauge is described ‘terms of art’ - please correct me if I’m wrong):

ACT 1. Something done or performed, esp. voluntarily … 2. The process of doing or performing; an occurrence that results from a person’s will being exerted on the external world.

INTENT The state of mind accompanying an act.

MALICE The intent, without justification or excuse, to commit a wrongful act.

NEGLIGENT Characterized by a person’s failure to exercise the degree of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised in the same circumstance.

RECKLESS Characterized by the creation of a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to others and by a conscious (and sometimes deliberate) disregard for or indifference to that risk; heedless, rash. Reckless conduct is much more than mere negligence: it is gross deviation from what a reasonable person would do.

The above has a strange emotional resonance - partly the distancing effect of familiar terms technically defined, partly the spin-cycle from too much thinking about the (potentially fictional - thanks CA) ‘reasonable person.’ Mostly, though, it’s the practicality. Or rather, it’s the practicality next to the awfulness. Thinking about malice as “the intent, without justification or excuse, to commit a wrongful act” both heightens and dulls the term. That tension’s compelling.

Less abstractly, here’s some more on the Sean Bell case indictments. There was a lot of coverage today, which indirectly prompted this post.

Currently, the two most recent local instances of a particularly intense and troubling confluence of individual, collective and body:

From the NY Times, March 15th and March 17th.

In the ongoing conversation about the body and whether it belongs to the Individual or the Collective:

Here’s a 2005 video with Francis Cardinal Arinze elaborating on Pope John Paul II’s 2003 encyclical on the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. Consuming the body of Christ; contributing to the growth of the body of the Church… Part of a video podcast from this organization. Arinze is a controversial figure and responses to this could be wildly diverse and complicated. The only thing I’ll say is notice the transitions. Two conflicting interests: breaking for program identification and not interrupting the Cardinal…
Encyclical text here.

On the Individual/Collective tip:

Pretty much my favorite Utopian living experiment, the Oneida Perfectionists inhabited a compound of sorts in upstate NY for over three decades in the middle of the 19th century. As Perfectionists, they believed the kingdom of God was achievable on earth, and they developed two practices geared towards building it. Complex Marriage, the more lurid and consequently more well known, involved a complicated system whereby all the men had sexual access to all the women (and, rather progressively, vice versa), provided they used the appropriate channels. No innuendo there - the system involved a bureacracy of go-betweens in charge of granting permission.

The second, and way more wild, practice they called Mutual Criticism. Basically, at regular intervals a member of the community would volunteer to be observed by a rotating committee of peers. At the end of this period of scrutiny, the member would appear in front of the entire group (300+ in its heyday) and the committee would report on his or her faults, making reccommendations for improvement. Here’s a chapter from the community handbook on Mutual Criticism - pretty much a guide to taking it like a man (paraphrasing but not much). Marshalling the natural impulse of people living together to get annoyed and talk about each other, Oneida Perfectionists thus attempted to form a totally harmonious environment, free of jealousy and irritation.

I think my favorite part of this story, though, is the way it defies narrative closure. Predictably, the living situation fell apart after the death of the community’s charismatic leader, John Humphrey Noyes. Rather than disbanding completely, though, the group formed a corporation and continue to this day, manufacturing silverware and plates. They’re incredibly successful.

The mansion that housed the community is still around, too. Still occupied, actually. In fact, since it was built, it’s never been unoccupied. I visited it last spring and it’s a bit strange to walk around the museum in the middle of the building and pass residents going about their business. They seem to be largely, but not exclusively, elderly, perhaps attracted to the inexpensive rent and the built-in company. Inside the mansion, there’s a sense of things going on as they have because there’s no reason for them not too. Kind of like a harmony achieved once, a long time ago, and remembered vaguely; like a distant tone that’s still ringing.