Discussion → writing year zero
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Re Zog Kadare’s comments re my comment on his comment on my comments on The Nest.
Zog. I can’t let you get away with asserting that writing is moving towards a terminal position, which is really what you’re saying (‘dead end, full stop’). I do agree, though, that writing is challenged to find new ways of getting past certain impasses of form that it has found itself in. It is as true to say that it appears that form has been exhausted as much as have themes and plots. But please key the word appears, because if there is one thing you can be confident in, it is that a true innovator will appear when you least expect it. Or at least appear to, which is probably the same thing.
Besides, certain form paths have been barely marked out in incoherent scratches, and the paving, landscaping etc is as yet ongoing.
As for writing needing to learn something from painting – well, the reverse has certainly been true. So if I can quote from one of my old essays:
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Theory theorises about art. Art theorises about theory. Art is theory.
It should be obvious … that what we are really talking about [ie art] is language. Early practitioners, Kosuth is one, made heavy use of verbal texts, that is images of texts, and in ways that were more than mere extensions of art's historical linkages with language. Although there had been a long tradition in literature of the use of pictorial and typographic devices, these had primarily been to achieve metaphoric or symbolic effects, and conversely in painting, from the inscriptions in religious tableaux to the labels poetica or philosophica on canvas frames to the Lichtenstein balloon, text had served the same paradigmatic function. But the (so called) conceptual picture-of-word-as-picture reaches back much further, beyond even the illuminated manuscript, to a more primal eloquence. Like those most ancient glyphs, text-as-image seduces us into an act of deciphering. It invites us to contemplate a significance hidden behind the innocuous meaning of its textual symbols, its glyphs. Herein lies its irony, which is this: the Rosetta Stone could not be art, but its inversion could. Kosuth theorises about Kosuth. Kosuth is Kosuth.
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Your most interesting point, for mine, is your conjunction of art and the bourgeois. With visual art, particularly, art has become, in one sense, devalued into a form of hard currency. Once a prerogative of the rich elite, it is now widely and more usefully disseminated as appartment decoration (with the smartest apartments being the institutions’ galleries) , hopefully of an appreciating kind. And the reason this has become so is that, after Manet, art theory has reached critical mass and can influence reputations (in the minds of media, art purveyors and canny collectors), and thus prices. You don’t for one moment think that a painting is bought because a buyer likes the painting, do you?You make a related point about writing’s old functions being made irrelevent by media. D F Wallace runs a very similar argument about television in his essay ‘E Pluribis Unam” (‘A supposedly funny thing etc’).
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Television … has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynacism that television requires of Audience in order to be commercially and pyschologically viable at doses of several hours per day.
----Very depressing, isn’t it? But can I put it to you that all such nihilist arguments are very much just that – pessimistic facets of a multi-faceted mind. The one essential left is that writers will still get on with it – still are, in fact.
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"Terminal position" - This (refraction of my own view) makes me smile; the awareness of all the mortuary announcements on avant garde work : Art is dead, the Cinema is dead etc. (God is dead...which God? Which cinema? which writing?). Still, what I meant to say is: Where is the best of the new today? Is it that natural and inevitable process leads to it or is some revolutionary exertion required to bring it into existence?
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Within the realm of Philosophy i.e. the Real:If theory is that which hatches out meaning for the benefit of the understanding, IMHO, it still can not be identical to art itself: It is only identical so long as one remains within the cultural sphere and the areas of life evacuated by symbolization for human use (But this should not be mistaken for the whole of, in Lacanian jargon, "the Real" i.e. it is only for specifically human cultural reality.).
It seems to me that any Thesis that makes the claim "Art is Language" or "Art is = Theory" (If we are permitted to step outside of the edifice of 'Language as Everything' i.e. Language as the 'monovalence'/universal principle, signs speaking to signs etc, and attempt to look at things in some form of particularity.), in my opinion, should be contrasted and analyzed in the light of the philosophical logic that demonstrates that Music is not language. As I understand the topic: Sound in itself is a kind of substance (an external thing) and it remains a thing in the given environment, escaping symbolization, it is heterogeneous to conceptual knowledge (To properly human conscious understanding and so forth.). Of course latter, after listening to Beethoven, we can speak about music in language, but a certain "something" is lost (With music we still do not reach the "thing itself" just as with language, but the sidestep is different.). Language, as I understand it, is a system of signs that symbolize substances (given/natural environment objects are assigned a signifier: xyz, some marks or whatever, that is connected to a meaning/concept, the so called signified, i.e. signified concept.).
Art/Painting has, in my opinion, an element of the non-symbolized (a leakage into the chaos of the pre-cultural given world, the things that are of a different order then concepts and utterly alien.) whereas Language is always human culture, always the bulwark that gives things a specifically human meaning and function, precisely the domestication agent of human consciousness that orders the given world to further a "human, all too human" project.
From my standpoint, when Art puts language into painting it can only be interpreted as an ironic gesture, as if to say, look at what is (the non-symbolized world of things themselves) as it contrasts culture the dissembler (that second, human specific value.).
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Withing the Realm of Society and it Vicissitudes:
Art and the so called bourgeois"(in the minds of media, art purveyors and canny collectors), and thus prices. You don’t for one moment think that a painting is bought because a buyer likes the painting, do you?"
I have read something in Sarte recently where he points out that the logic of 'high art' is not only that which defines what is Art, but also what is kitch and what is the trash that the so called bourgeois (The ones without the leisure to rise to the level of culture necessary to appreciate high art.) are enjoying/consuming. It seems to me that he is pointing to the idea that it is as if the choice of the elite is almost contingent (and beside the point), although once made, the logic 'les non-dupes errant' (the ones who are not taken in are wrong.) is in effect. Meaning that the power of society is such that not to believe that what is theorized (by the elite) into the object supposed to be 'high art' and so enjoyed by the cultured (the ones educated to enjoy.) is to be out in the cold.
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"But can I put it to you that all such nihilist arguments are very much just that – pessimistic facets of a multi-faceted mind. The one essential left is that writers will still get on with it – still are, in fact."
I do not find that it is nihilistic to say something is dead when it is, rather it opens up the possibility of informed effort. It is possible that those who get on will only be doing so within the pathetic bubbles of freedom allowed by an increasingly locked down power structure - True, they may not care.
or as Zizek puts it "The problem for me is that if we don't want to end up in some kind of neo-authoritarian society, in which we'll have all our private freedoms (you can have sex with animals and so on), but in which the social space will be depoliticized and much more authoritarian" - from http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism
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A quick reposte. Our positions on this are pretty close. Maybe we intersect a little over the concept of elite. When you think of it, there are two kinds of elite: rich elite and not-rich elite. We are probably non-rich elite, to be having this type of conversation.
Here is an obvious-type non-rich elite thought. Art today (all types of art) has a monetary value that is, in both the minds of artist and consumer, a main value. Perhaps it is even THE main value. And for this to be so, art needs theory. Theory is art's great stooge. It's purpose is to raise art's value in the marketplace. And the stooge of theory is writing. Writing should therefore not be underestimated. Damien Hirst's skull would not have been worth so much without writing. He titled it 'for the love of god'. That title was worth the skull's diamonds. It added millions to the skull's sale price.
You must pardon my nonsense writing. But it is worth double Lacan's writing. But it is not worth as much as Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull's writing.
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For me it seems the opposite, in regard to poor old Lacan. Insight that stretches past the bounds of the polity/society is at least twice as valuable as money, specifically social value (i.e. demand met by others). Of course this view makes me an "idler" from the stance proper to the West (Pax Capitalisma- Capitalist Peace), the West that is so profitably/properly compared to old Rome.
My Amateur Analysis:
The Art Object (a skull, a painting) may produce spontaneous "meaning" for a viewer. Only when the artist's statement (The title in this case, in my view a deplorable obscurantism, but that is beside the point.) is affixed to it ( When signs made of specifically human concepts are attached to it.) does it, in its now "domesticated" form, cease to be opaque for the polity/society (for its standard archive one might say.), it is now available to the understanding.
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Quite right. Analysis should be left to amateurs. We shouldn’t have to draw upon French philosophers. Let’s see if I understand you. An object has meaning in the mind of the viewer. That’s the starting point. An explanatory statement is required to make the object ‘understandable’, to put it into ‘domesticated’ form. Enter theory. Art for dummies, as it were (an overly elitist idea - but on the other hand, art is by definition elite. No matter.) It explains why you take Beckett’s position (a common enough one) and eschew all such ‘statements’. Not your job. Fair enough, no problem at all with that. It’s my view also. (Except I rather enjoy offering unsolicited analyses on the objects of others.)
My amateur position is close to Barthes’ author-death idea, and draws on considerations of modern art. Duchamp-Kosuth-Hirst are part of a continuum started by Manet, the moving away from establishment or bespoke art (ie of the Salon or the rich patron) to entrepreneur art (ie artists’ statements of ego or ambition). Here’s maybe where our views part company, just slightly. For you, the production is the object, the explication brings it from private to public understanding, ironically speaking, for its real meaning remains with the artist’s private intent. For me, the essential property of the object is just that – its objecthood. The signage alone gives it its ‘significance’ as an art piece (and most certainly its auction-room value). All artists sign their work, except those who are well-known for not doing so. (We haven’t really diverged yet.) But here’s the thing. The enigmatic artist has the luxury of standing aside from the enigmatic object. The ‘artist’ leaves it to ‘art theory’ to explicate the object, thus elevating it to a sufficient importance to attract consumers (intellectually, as admirers, or financially, as purchasers). That to me is the key. Not so much as to make it less opaque, but to commercialise it, or to aggrandise the artist in some way. But, really, it’s a total charade on the part of the artist, who is, almost without exception, obsessed with recognition, career success, immortality even. (Stroke the artist and the artist will purr. Though not usually in public.) Thus, Barthes’ idea speaks for the object only. It does not really address the concerns of the artist, who is a schmuck (in relation to the object), though undoubtedly deserving of our sympathy. And that’s exactly what I meant when I said of A Mess that the text couldn’t care less, and the author doesn’t matter.
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Title:The Intractable Explosion of Idiotology and Freedom Infests the Human Minds Once Again and as Always
I have been somewhat abstracted in my argumentation as I am preoccupation with certain philisophical questions, but mainly I think the question here boils down to: Is there or is there not anything beyond the social sphere, the sphere proper to money?
I hash out a few of my usual patented inchoate remarks in response:
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Title:The Intractable Explosion of Idiotology and Freedom Infests the Human Minds Once Again and as Always
I have been somewhat abstracted in my argumentation as I am preoccupation with certain philisophical questions, but mainly I think the question here boils down to: Is there or is there not anything beyond the social sphere, the sphere proper to money?
I hash out a few of my usual patented inchoate remarks in response:
"Not so much as to make it less opaque, but to commercialize it, or to aggrandize the artist in some way"
To me this means to make it less opaque to the commercial market, i.e now we know the cash value (cash is social recognition/ is the right to have one's demands met etc.)."a total charade on the part of the artist, who is, almost without exception, obsessed with recognition, career success, immortality even." - You are right that I don't agree with this, it is partly true, of course, but never the entire motivation - the underlying point being that for me their is an outside of polity/society and it is not the whole of existence, if one believes it is then one must surely accept your argument.
Although I can sympathies with this, we shouldn't have to drawn on French philosophers (If you mean that our thinking should be "our own", so to speak I think it is both right and wrong.)it is wrong when one reproduces arguments that have not been properly digested and understood, it is right because otherwise the logical extension can only be that we shouldn't bother to learn to read and write, as it is only a form of indoctrination and so forth - and it is indoctrination. Unfortunately, for me, "high theory' and 'privileged tools'...are like that $4.oo cup of coffee, or what have you, everything else becomes slightly unsatisfactory after having imbibed.
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Don't always understand your points, Zog, but I feel we're close enough on this to call it a draw.
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I just enjoyed reading this diatribalogue. Keep going! Both of you!
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i'm written out
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Yea, I was going into demagogueolog mode, but for this u need a caged polit bureau for the proper result to birth out :P thx
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Reading over it, I can't resist adding for my own clarification if no one else's:
"brings it from private to public understanding"
: not from "private to public" , from non-human to human, from before language (pretend a million years ago, to be concrete.) to today, from "world itself"(as it would be/is with no 'interpreter'/perceiver) to world for (culturally programed)humans.
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