The Persistent Ideological Valorization of Handcraft Production (pt. 2 of 2)

This scandal is everywhere known, everywhere repressed—un secret de tous connu. It is, for example, instructive that the text of Tolstoy upon which the Russian formalists founded their canonical theory of artistic defamiliarization should be a text about work—indeed, contemporary feminism makes the recognition of this labor as housework, women’s work, the oldest form of the division of labor, quite unavoidable:

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached a sofa and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgot—that is, had acted unconsciously—then it was the same if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or was looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. (1)

This waste of human life—what Tillie Olsen has called the silences into which such large parts of so many people’s lives, and not merely women’s lives, disappear—is evidently not rectified by the self-consciousness by which the formalists (and perhaps Tolstoy himself) proposed to recuperate it. The whole classical doctrine of aesthetics as play and nonfinalizable finality, as well as the persistent ideological valorization of handcraft production are also desperate attempts to think away the unthinkable reality of alienated labor. The later finally grounds the phenomenon of reification itself, described for instance, by the Tel Quel group as the “effacement of the traces of production on the object”: yet even here the category of “production” remains a still too tolerable and recuperable one, which in a pinch any modernist would be willing to salute. The deeper hold of reification lies in its promise to obliterate from the object world that surrounds us the dizzying and culpabilizing presence of the stored alien labor of other people.

- Marxism and Historicism, Fredric Jameson, 1979; New Literary History

Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 41-73 (33 pages)

This Ultimately Scandalous Fact (pt. 1 of 2)

From this vaster perspective, then, it would seem that only indifference suspends a lived relationship to the past that can be registered in intensities of any conceivable quality: for even boredom, in its strong Baudelairean form, is a way of sensing and living the specificity of certain moments of the cultural past. If this is the case with boredom, however, as a resistance of the organism to culturally alien and asphyxiating forms, perhaps we may want to take into consideration the possibility that indifference is itself ultimately also a mode of relationship, something like a defense mechanism, a repression, a neurotic denial, a preventive shutting off of affect, which itself finally reconfirms the vital threat of its object. In that case, the “nightmare of history” becomes inescapable: we are everywhere in relation to it, even in its apparent absences, and the therapeutic Nietzschean “forgetfulness” of history is fully as reactive to the fact of history as is Michelet’s “resurrection.” How are we to understand this “absent cause” (Althusser), to which we cannot not react with the whole range of our affective intensities, and which at the same time would seem to be so charged with dread as to make the occasional prospect of its occultation—its repression or its amnesia—come before us like a momentary relief? It does not seem to me that the immemorial record of violence and the most brutal as well as the most intangible forms of domination are sufficient to motivate this mental flight, these ingenious subterfuges. Violence is a sheerly ideological category, as the popularity of this “concept” in American social criticism today testifies; and as for domination, social Darwinism and neo-fascism make it plain that under certain circumstances this phenomenon can also be contemplated with complacency or even a somber exhilaration. For Marixism, indeed, the categories of power are not the ultimate ones, and the trajectory of contemporary social theory (from Weber to Foucault) suggests that the appeal to it is often strategic, and involves a systematic displacement of the Marxian problematic. No, the ultimate form of the “nightmare of history” is rather the fact of labor itself, and the intolerable spectacle of the backbreaking millenial toil of millions of people from the earliest moments of human history. The more existential versions of this dizzying and properly unthinkable, unimaginable spectacle—as in horror at the endless succession of “dying generations,” at the ceaseless wheel of life, or at the irrevocable passage of Time itself—are themselves only disguises for this ultimately scandalous fact of mindless alienated work and of the irremediable loss and waste of human energies, a scandal to which no metaphysical categories can give a meaning.

- Marxism and Historicism, Fredric Jameson, 1979; New Literary History

Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 41-73 (33 pages)

On the Origin of Poetry

On the origin of poetry. - The lovers of what is fantastic in humans, who also advocate the view that morality is instinctive, reason as follows: 'Supposing that usefulness has always been venerated as the supreme deity, then where in all the world does poetry come from? This art of making speech rhythm counteracts rather than contributes to the clarity of communication, and yet it has shot up and is still shooting up all over the earth like a mockery of all useful expediency! The wildly beautiful irrationality of poetry refutes you, you utilitarians! Precisely to want to get away from usefulness for once - that is what has elevated humanity; that is what has inspired it to morality and art!' Now, in this case I must side with the utilitarians for once - after all, they are so seldom right, it is pitiful! In those ancient times that called poetry into being, one really did aim at utility, and a very great utility at that; back then, when one let rhythm penetrate speech - that rhythmic force that reorganizes all the atoms of a sentence, bids one to select one's words and gives thoughts a new colour and makes them darker, stranger, more distant: a superstitious utility, of course! Rhythm was supposed to make a human request impress the gods more deeply after it was noticed that humans remember a verse better than ordinary speech; one also thought one could make oneself audible over greater distances with the rhythmic tick-tock; the rhythmic prayer seemed to get closer to the ears of the gods. Above all, one wanted to take advantage of that elemental over- powering force that humans experience in themselves when listening to music: rhythm is a compulsion; it engenders an unconquerable desire to yield, to join in; not only the stride of the feet but also the soul itself gives in to the beat - probably also, one inferred, the souls of the gods! By means of rhythm one thus tried to compel them and to exercise a power over them: one cast poetry around them like a magical snare. There was another, stranger notion, and it may be precisely what contributed most powerfully to the origin of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans it appears as a philosophical doctrine and as an educational contrivance; but even long before there were philosophers, one acknowledged music to have the power to discharge the emotions, to cleanse the soul, to soothe the ferocia animi - and indeed precisely through its rhythmic quality. When one had lost the proper tension and harmony of the soul, one had to dance to the beat of the singer - that was the prescription of this healing art. With it, Terpander quelled an uprising; with it, Empedocles pacified a lunatic; with it, Damon purged a youth who was languishing from love; with it, one also sought to appease the ferocious, vindictive gods. One began by driving the giddiness and exuberance of their passions to their peak, that is, one drove the madman wild, made the vindictive person drunk with lust for revenge. All orgiastic cults wanted to discharge the ferocia of some deity all at once and turn it into an orgy so that the deity would feel freer and calmer afterwards and leave man in peace. Etymologically, melos means a tranquillizer, not because it is itself tranquil, but because its effect makes one tranquil. And not only in the cult song, but also in the mundane song of the most ancient times there is the presumption that rhythmic quality exercises a magical force; when bailing water, for instance, or rowing, the song is a bewitchment of the demons believed to be at work here; it makes them compliant, unfree, and a tool of humans. And whenever one acts, one has an occasion to sing - every action is tied to the assistance of spirits: incantation and conjuration seem to be the primordial form of poetry. When verse was used in oracles - the Greeks said that the hexameter was invented at Delphi - rhythm was also supposed to exercise a compulsion. To ask for a prophecy - that meant originally (according to the derivation of the Greek word that seems most probable to me) to have something determined: one thought one could force the future by gaining Apollo's favour - he who according to the oldest views is much more than a god of foresight. The way the formula is pronounced, with literal and rhythmic precision, is how it binds the future; the formula, however, is the invention of Apollo, who as god of rhythm can also bind the goddesses of fate. In short: was there anything more useful than rhythm to the old superstitious type of human being? One could do everything with it: promote some work magically; compel a god to appear, to be near, to listen; mould the future according to one's own will; discharge some excess (of fear, of mania, of pity, of vengefulness) from one's soul, and not only one's own soul but also that of the most evil demon. Without verse one was nothing; through verse one almost became a god. Such a basic feeling cannot be completely eradicated - and still today, after millennia of work at fighting such superstition, even the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm, if only insofar as he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metric form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip, and jump. Is it not amusing that the most serious philosophers, strict as they otherwise are in all matters of certainty, still appeal to the sayings of poets to lend their thoughts force and credibility? And yet it is more dangerous for a truth when a poet agrees with it than when he contradicts it! For as Homer says: 'The bards tell many a lie'.

section 84, The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

the complete absense of good or bad taste.

Because of the importance of its nonvisual contextual frame, the readymade was not a purely visual phenomenon. As Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne when asked about which objects he chose, “In general one had to defend oneself against the ‘look.’ It is very difficult to choose an object because after a couple of weeks you come to like it or detest it. You have to achieve something so indifferent to you that you have no aesthetic emotion. The choice of ready-mades is always based on visual indifference as well as on the complete absence of good or bad taste.”(1) According to Rosalind Krauss, it owed something the to the photograph, or more specifically, the snapshot: “The readymade’s parallel with the photograph is established by its process of production. It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection.”(2) In both cases, what you see is not what you get, because of the insufficiency of the decontextualized image by itself.

Duchamp’s provocations, like those of other artists in the Dadist camp, could quickly be recuperated by the ideological and commercial pressures of the institution he tried to subvert. It is now in fact commonplace to note that museums proudly exhibit the “originals” of his readymades, as indeed he himself knew they would. (3) Duchamp’s more radical gesture then was the virtual abandonment of artistic production itself after 1924 in favor of chess, a game he played with considerable success. His deliberately uncompleted Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), damaged in transit after its exhibition in Brooklyn in 1926, came to be seen as symbolic of this rejection. Or at least so it seemed until the posthumous installation of his remarkable Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, a surprising revelation that he had in fact been working on something for the previous twenty years.

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay, 1993 (p.163)

1. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1967), pp.83-84

2. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p.206

3. see remarks to Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, p.139

the individual into a malleable commodity

The acceptance of the carte portrait as an item of exchange, a collectable, by the middle class and the subsequent adoption of the practice by the workers themselves represent to the insidious transformation of the individual into a malleable commodity. Direct human intercourse was in a sense supplemented by the interaction with a machine-generated and therefore irrefutably exact alter-ego, a fabricated “other.” The creation and popularization of the care de visite during the Second Empire therefore represents an early step toward the simplification of complex personalities into immediately graspable and choreographed performers whose faces rather than actions win elections.

A.A.E. Disdéri, Anne McCauley, 1985. p. 224

precisely the present moment

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854

When brand awareness is the goal shared by all...

When brand awareness is the goal shared by all, repetition and visibility are
the only true measures of success. The journey to this point of full integration between ad
and art, brand and culture, has taken most of this century to achieve, but the point of no
return, when it arrived, was unmistakable: April 1998, the launch of the Gap Khakis
campaign…

No Logo, Naomi Klein, 1999