Elizabeth Hayes here. LeftFlank upvoted me when I asked if I should post this, so I'll take that as a yes and you all can blame him for assaulting you with an intellectual, artistic point of view. So, as I usually say, thank you [LeftFlank] for contributing this article. Personally, I always find Steppling's essays worth reading twice or more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is the Experiment, again?
July 22, 2021
Hans Federle
“Up until 1909, Freud, to speak broadly, had been fascinated with
the dynamics of desire. He wanted to know how the unconscious, the seat
and source of desire, worked and in particular how it expressed itself
in neuroses and dreams and in works of art. It was during this period
that Freud was inclined to see erotic urges—and also, less
consequentially, aggressive drives—at the root of human behavior. But as
time went on, Freud became more and more preoccupied with the issue of
authority, and with the agency that he thought of as the center of
authority in the human psyche, the superego, or over-I.”
Mark Edmundson (The Death of Sigmund Freud)
“Impressionism depended for its force on something more than
painterly hedonism or a simple appetite for sunshine and colour. The art
of Manet and his followers had a distinct “moral aspect,” visible above
all in the way it dovetailed an account of visual truth with one of
social freedom.”
Meyer Shapiro (Marxist Quarterly, 1937)
“{ Godard’s Hail Mary} distorts and slanders the spiritual
significance and historic value’ of ‘fundamental themes of the Christian
faith’ and ‘profoundly wounds the religious sentiment of believers.”
Pope John Paul II
“…play only fulfills its human potential—only carries an
insubordinate charge—if it is posited as a counterweight to the grownup
world of purposiveness. We, on the other hand, exist in a world where
the ‘adult’ and the ‘juvenile’ are hopelessly commingled; where leisure
time has been both increasingly infantilized and increasingly regulated,
depoliticized, dosed and packaged.”
T.J. Clark (Heaven On Earth)
The seeming lack of resistance to vaccine passes, or passports, or
whatever one wants to call them, is both astonishing and, sadly, not
astonishing. There is resistance, huge and profound degrees of
resistance, in France for example, but in the UK, too. There is little
to none in the U.S. (or Norway or most of Scandinavia, nor in Canada or
Australia or New Zealand). And I was reminded this week (by Molly Klein)
of T.J. Clark’s books on the art of the French Revolution (Absolute Bourgeois and his study of Courbet, The Image of the People). And first, to re read The Image of the People was startling, because I had somewhat forgotten how good it was, and then Absolute Bourgeois,
which I had never really read, and which was equally brilliant, was a
revelation of sorts. And the latter feels especially relevant to current
moment. For Clark feels the trends of reaction in Western culture, and
sees the resemblance to that period both before and after the Revolution
in France (1788/89) with the climate today. I would suggest that if I
were to teach the aesthetics of Covid the curriculum would start with Diary of a Man in Despair (Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen), and Absolute Bourgeois. I might then add any of several books by Franco Moretti (Far Country
perhaps?) And when I say the aesthetics of Covid I must, of necessity,
focus on the United States. For the stamp of U.S. culture is indelibly
stained into the fabric of the entire Covid narrative.
Alfred Rethel (1851)
And this culture of which I speak is one that has been developed (in
its current specific form) for about the last thirty or so years.
Perhaps longer, perhaps from the 70s onward. You could make a case that
even this current version began before that, began after WW2. All are
true. But the post internet phase describes something qualitatively
different from all that came before.
“Traditional societies tend to produce heteronomous individuals
who,like the society,exist in a state of closure. In other words,there
isa close functional fit between the belief system of the group and the
superegos and ego ideals of its members. Unlike Hamlet,for example—a
quintessentially modern man tortured by the question of his identity—it
is difficult to imagine an Athenian citizen,a medieval knight,an Ottoman
pasha,a Comanche warrior,or a Chinese Maoist ruminating about
theirs.According to Castoriadis,an autonomous society began to emerge
when the “new men”of early modern Europe—the city dwellers,the
burghers,the bourgeoisie—started to fight for a different form of
life.They did not simply criticize the particular authority of the
Church or of the feudal system; they challenged the notion of
traditional authority as such.”
Joel Whitebook (Hans Loewald, Psychoanalysis and the Project of Autonomy)
Now, I don’t actually agree with the above quote, or not entirely
anyway. But it serves the purpose here of helping frame this question.
William Henry Jackson, photography (1872, Yellowstone survey team).
Now Whitebook (per Hobbes) sees the emergence of science as an
ambivalent form of study, he extrapolates that modernity itself was
foundationally ambivalent.
“Insofar as modern science was mathematical,it contained the
potential for modern technology and carried the seeds of the domination
of nature within it. Thus it became essential to the project of
instrumentalization. But to the extent that modern science rejected all
appeals to authority and dogma in the justification of truth-claims and
maintained that all assertions—about the polis as well as about
nature—must be validated by argument and demonstration,it became an
essential part of the project of autonomy.The emergence of modernity
marked a rupture of the closure that characterized all previously
existing societies and initiated a program for the creation of a
new,autonomous form of society.”
Joel Whitebook (Ibid)
Whats missing here is the colonial project, the sense of European
superiority, and justifications for conquest. Edward Said was very good
at tracing all this in his book Orientalism. The idea of
Enlightenment values driving this instrumentalized modernity has been
pretty well explored. And so for the sake of another approach to the
current state of things (and as I write this Australia just shut down
most of Sydney, literally almost completely because of, I believe, 13
deaths from, allegedly, Covid). And to be clear, locking up healthy
people is not strictly speaking quarantine, its arrest or detention.
Language is becoming very important to rectify — this is the age of spin
for sure.
Adam Collier Noel
Now Castoriadis, who Whitebook is following here, saw the new age of
criticism (per Kant) as resulting in a populace in search of identity.
(see Death of God etc). And that while that did spur creativity (did
it?) and autonomy, it also increased pathologies. Enter psyhoanalysis.
Ok, so far I can mostly agree with this. But it is feeling perilously
anti-Marxist here. But the point is that, the emergence of
psychoanalysis coincided with a number of technical discoveries (I have
noted all this before) especially optical discoveries. Now Whitebook is a
strangely anti-communist conservative, but his reading of Freud is
pretty good and it strikes me he something of an auteur here (if he were
a movie) because ambivalence is exactly the quality of his writing (at
least of late). And he does note the obvious fact that the fall of the
U.S.S.R. signaled the unchecked expansion of instrumental thinking and
what I might here call ‘techno values’. America was free to define
progress any way it chose.
So it might be that this current phase of culture began in 1989, with a precursor decade preceding it.
Here it is important to note that the word ‘science’ has to be
reevaluated. Or perhaps just defined better. For Freud it was simply
(for better or worse) a tool to soberly examine illusion (his idea of
illusion). To understand the personal individual (through the forces of
society) creation of mythologies. Personal myths. But science exceeded
ambivalence almost from the start. It early on became a cult like
worship of authority, an authority that appealed to its technical
principles as a kind of God. Now, these personal mythes were mediated by
social and economic forces. And above all else (as cause and effect) by
class. And class is not a thing, it is a relation. It is social
relations. And what Whitebook and even Castoriadis are guilty of is the
minimizing of class struggle. For religious fundamentalism (a topic for
Whitebook) is directly related to colonialism and class domination. But
the main point here for the purposes of this post is that what for Freud
was illusion (and by extension most secular scientists) is not a simple
one dimensional thing. And the discarding of religious belief, for
example, also tended, or has tended, to result in a kind of historical
amnesia. It results in a de-emphasizing of tradition. Of memory, even.
Danny Lyon, photography.
So one might well argue that the rise of a social media culture, of
mass electronic media platforms, and smart phones was linked directly to
the fall of the Soviet Union. The other aspect of this was the
transference of wealth to the very top — to the one half of one percent.
And Covid is a project, however one tweezes it apart, of an unelected
billionaire class that continues to amass enormous almost unthinkable
amounts of money and property, beginning a project of reshaping the
planet. And their influence is now expressed in global corporations and,
more, in NGOs and institutions such as the WHO and World Bank, the UN
(symbolically, sort of) and the World Economic Forum. That they are
ignorant of their own hubris is perhaps the most terrifying part of this
entire scenario. This is the age of the rigid and weak ego. And Hans
Loewald was very prescient about this. The threatened ego (the
threatened insecure ego) must resort to a constant policing of its
boundaries.
Writing of this ego of late modernity…“It is purchased,Loewald
argues,by the narrowness of its boundaries,which exclude everything
foreign to it,and by the compulsive rigidity with which it must police
those boundaries—that is,by isolation from its unconscious-instinctual
life. Loewald observes that,“in its dominant current”—which includes the
official Freud and many of the ego psychologists of his day—a
pathological form of self formation, namely, the obsessional self,is
elevated into the healthy self. Thus,“psychoanalytic theory has
unwittingly taken over much of the obsessive neurotic’s experience and
conception of reality and has taken it for granted as ‘the objective
reality’”
Joel Whitebook (Ibid)
This is very insightful and I think correct. But however we got here,
this is where we are. The eradication of the unconscious, of archaic
dreams and collective imagination, the disenchantment of the world, and
of the self, has taken place rapidly over the last thirty years or so.
It has made for an ideal human who functions as an informal scientist
observing the world around him. Observing under cover of hyper
rationality and sobriety. The ego-psychology of American mental health
experts has been exported in ever greater degree for thirty years. And
this disenchanted human is one who finds it hard to grasp the ideas of
class and economic coercion. The American psychologist has internalized
the sensibility of American sociologists, and almost as a reflex,
exports American narcissism (American exceptionalism).
Larry Fink, photography.
The American idea of psychological well being is tied in with its
Puritanical heritage. The Ego rejects the unconscious but suffers its
influence anyway, indirectly. The other aspect of rejecting the archaic
mythos is that the policing Ego, now cooperating, really, with the
Super-ego, must police those dangerous spots where the unconscious
surfaces (i.e. art and cultural expression). Whitebook riffs off Loewald
and Castoriadis when he writes...”The greatness of Bach’s music
does not derive solely from its sophisticated and complex contrapuntal
logic. Nor is it only the result of its ability to invoke powerful
primitive affective states. Bach’s greatness requires both these
accomplishments in equal measure.” This is of course true of all good art. And this forms a segue back to T.J. Clark.
As an aside, it is worth noting that Loewald studied with Heidegger.
“I am deeply grateful for what I learned from him [Martin
Heidegger], despite his most hurtful betrayal in the Nazi era, which
alienated me from him permanently.”
Hans Loewald
But I will return to this.
Gustave Caillebotte, 1875
“As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted from community,
family and church to commercialized or privately improvised forms—the
streets, the cafés and resorts—the resulting consciousness of individual
freedom involved more and more an estrangement from older ties; and
those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of
freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, were spiritually
torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous indifferent mass.
By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare in Impressionist art; only
the private spectacle of nature is left. And in neo-Impressionism, which
restores and even monumentalizes the figures, the social group breaks
up into isolated spectators, who do not communicate with each other, or
consists of mechanically repeated dances submitted to a preordained
movement with little spontaneity.”
T.J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life)
The above quote is really Clark summarizing Meyer Shapiro’s arguments
in an essay, he Shapiro wrote, from the 1930s. But it is another
relevant example of cultural shifts, or of how culture shifts and
changes, and of something in early modernism had already anticipated the
21st century estrangement of artistic life. That particular
estrangement and alienation one feels today. And, Shapiro was already
introducing the idea of spectators, as a theoretical subject for
cultural analysis. That spectatorship was an expression of class
tension.
The purpose here is really to both find clues in previous eras,
culturally speaking (though that includes nearly everything else anyway)
and with the effects of a loss of coherency in the experience the
public has of artistic production. (see
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/new-museum-technology-collects-data-on-viewing-habits?utm_content=citylab&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social)
And to try to persevere in a time in which the loss of aesthetic
understanding has reached an absolute threshold — where there is
essentially no longer ‘a’ culture to speak about, something that allows
for a sense of collectivity and meaning in artworks. For the
disappearing radical artist the search, the hunt, is not just for
meaning but for revelation, I think.
“In defining a work of art as a “man-made object demanding to be
experienced aesthetically” we encounter for the first time a basic
difference between the humanities and natural science. The scientist,
dealing as he does with natural phenomena, can at once proceed to
analyze them. The humanist, dealing as he does with human actions and
creations, has to engage in a mental process of a synthetic and
subjective character: he has mentally to re-enact the actions and to
re-create the creations. It is in fact by this process that the real
objects of the humanities come into being. For it is obvious that
historians of philosophy or sculpture are concerned with books and
statues not in so far as these books and sculptures exist materially,but
in so far as they have a meaning.And it is equally obvious that this
meaning can only be apprehended by re-producing, and thereby, quite
literally, “realizing,” the thoughts that are expressed in the books and
the artistic conceptions that manifest themselves in the statues.”
Erwin Panofsky (Meaning in the Visual Arts)
Malcom Liepke
Clark wrote, in a small essay, on DeKooning, and his late paintings,
work done presumably after he was diagnosed with Alzheimers.
“Let me point out how special and novel is the modern obsession
with artists’ careers—with each artist’s life and work seen as a linear
development which we and the artist are supposed to keep in mind as he
or she goes along. All this is the creation of a certain, modern world
of art which emerged in Europe in the late19th century. The very idea of
a “retrospective” exhibition (especially one taking place in the
artist’s own lifetime) is unknown until then.”
T.J.Clark (Painting from Memory: Aging, Dementia, and the Art of Willem de Kooning)
This is a typical Clark-like insight. And this is also worth
pondering in our age of pure exhibitionism. There is something
increasingly cannibalistic about culture today. The retrospective while
the artist is still alive, when you actually think about it, is rather
grotesque. But its just more artificial inflation of reputation (of
sometimes artificial deflation). It is marketing. Coupled to this
marketed art world is the loss of quiet and contemplation. Now, if one
looks at the art post 1989, from the West, and in particular perhaps the
U.S., but not exclusively, one sees a certain repetition that feels
arbitrary. The enormous increase in ADHD and autism, in various other
cognitive issues, whatever value one wants to attach to these diagnoses,
suggests that pollution, antibiotic infused meat, corn syrup, the
horrid commercial wheat used for most bread, have caused irreparable
damage– and then people seem surprised that fertility has dropped, for
both genders– suggests there is something fundamentally wrong with how
people live. Humans cannot even reproduce efficiently anymore. But the
quick marketing explanation is to blame the victims, to make it all
massive but personal failure.
Giotto (detail, Joakim’s Dream)
Cannibalistic art becomes something even more self annihilating in this
era — something that is disturbing because the artist is rarely any
longer drawing on life. It is the art of a death in life. (and Jerry
Saltz and Walter Robinson might end up profoundly prescient in their
coining of the term ‘zombie formalism’, most recently used to describe
Hunter Biden’s paintings). It is the age of the zombie. It may have
become the most overdetermined metaphor in world history. The lockdowns
and masks and the growing hysterical irrationality of government voices
(see Australia) that encourage people to ditch unvaccinated friends, to
not talk to anybody, vaxed or not, and not to talk period, even, are
reaching a pitch of hysteria I, for one, could not have imagined a mere
two years ago. It is as if the pent up irrational has been unleashed,
filters removed, and the age of the fantastical 4th industrial
revolution is really the age of maximum pathology.
I grew up with the very late modernism of Beckett and Pinter, of
Genet and Handke, of Ab Ex certainly, but also of Diebenkorn and
Frankenthaler, of Kiefer and Francis Bacon. And of Bresson and
Fassbinder and Antonioni. And of Cashier critics, of Godard and Ornette
Coleman. And in all these cases there was something of an act of
recuperation taking place. I think I only realized this recently. Nobody
I just listed, all off the top of my head, were innovators. In many
ways they were all looking back. Even Godard. This late modernism
remains, I think anyway, the least understood period of art in the last
two hundred years.
And this new lay scientist spectator public was already reaching, by
the 80s, a new cynicism, but one cross pollinated with both narcissism
and anxiety. This was and still is a public unsure of what they are
meant to be doing in their role as science adjunct; what is the
experiment exactly?
For Ever Mozart (dr. Jean Luc Godard, 1996)
At the beginning of this post I noted that all cultural forensics would be shaded toward U.S. ideology and style.
“After the 1973 war the Arab appeared everywhere as something
more menacing.Cartoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a
gasoline pump turned up consistently. These Arabs, however, were clearly
“Semitic”: their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on
their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic
population) that “Semites” were at the bottom of all “our” troubles,
which in this case was principally a
gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus
from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was
essentially the same. Thus if the Arab occupies space enough for
attention, it is as a negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of
Israel’s and the West’s existence, or in another view of the same thing,
as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Insofar as
this Arab has any history, it is part of the history given him (or taken
from him: the difference is slight) by the Orientalist tradition, and
later, the Zionist tradition. Palestine was seen— by Lamartine and the
early Zionists — as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom; such
inhabitants as it had were supposed to be inconsequential nomads
possessing no real claim on the land and therefore no cultural or
national reality. Thus the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that
dogs the Jew. In that shadow— because Arabs and Jews are Oriental
Semites— can be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner
feels towards the Oriental. For the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has
bifurcated: what we have now is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a
reconstructed cult of the adventurer-pioneer-Orientalist (Burton, Lane,
Renan), and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab
Oriental. Isolated from everything except the past created for him by
Orientalist polemic…”
Edward Said (Orientalism)
The Covid event had intensified (intentionally guided by western
capital) the ‘othering’ mechanisms that fueled mid century fascism.
However threadbare, the new Arab (Jew, Black, etc) is the unvaccinated.
And the ease and enthusiasm that the western bourgeois expresses its
punitive disapproval is not terribly different from the good Germans in
the 1930s. The difference is the unvaccinated can be redeemed by a
simple injection. A simple symbolic act of pseudo science, the spectator
can be welcomed back to (what the state department calls) the
international community. For there is a new globalist facade (it takes a
village) to the schoolmarm scolding of western leaders.
Raja Ravi Varma (Birth of Shakuntala)
The fact that these vaccines (which in fact they aren’t, but rather
gene editing treatments that, in theory, provide the same protection)
are apparently dangerous (the deaths from adverse reactions would in
normal times be high enough for recall) is all baked into the mythology,
to the architecture of sacrifice. The redemptive act must entail risk,
that is the price of inclusion. That said vaccines (sic) are dangerous
for those who early on got the shot (what those crazy kids are calling
the ‘clot-shot’) is entirely beside the point. The ‘othering’, the
scapegoating, this is the convenient structure of social tension that
the ruling class has always taken advantage of, and always with a good
degree of success. Well, not always, but over the last hundred years or
so, and this is a telling point. The racializing of propaganda began
with the colonial era. But it was in the mid 1800s a meme for
buttressing the more significant and foregrounded twin branches of
scientism (Darwin largely) and (overlapping) the natural superiority of
European culture (and here the Church played a not unimportant role).
The colonial engine was of course economic but it was mostly under the
cover of a civilizing mission. This has not changed. White paternalism
is rife in nearly all western governments. Biden calling Cuba a failed
state, for example (check infant mortality and then decide which state
is failed). Calling for an armed intervention in Haiti. There would
never be an intervention for, say, Slovakia. (The intentional
destruction of the former Yugoslavia was for many of the same economic
reasons that drives the threats to invade Haiti or Cuba, but it needed
the moral scaffolding that suggested these darn old former Communist
countries need help to stave off civil war, etc. The apparatchik as a
version of lazy ‘negro’, or diabolical Arab, or cunning nefarious
Asian). As if the poorest country in the hemisphere were not in such
dire poverty precisely because of Western governments. The unspoken
understanding among the white bourgeoisie is that Haitians are
uncivilized. Its all that voodoo and shit. England has the same
relationship toward Jamaica. It did toward (and still does) most of
Africa (see Kenya). In fact the entire continent of Africa is feeling
the squeeze of white saviors from the West. Africa has the resources.
Lars Turnbjork, photography.
Remember above all else the mortality from Covid, and its variants, remains under 1%.
Listen to the Aesthetic Resistance podcasts for more on this https://soundcloud.com/aestheticresistance
If the degrading of culture (and this does not mean there isn’t
terrific, even great work being done in most fields) has been so acute,
this is partly the result of electronic media, of the penetration of
high art (sic) by the the captains of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and
the WEF. The ascension of NGOs, and lobbying, the financialization of
capitalism altogether, has meant that daily life is more colonized by ,
firstly, commodities, but secondly, now, by algorithms. By a form of
constant propaganda that can barely be called propaganda any longer.
This is the new bio politics, often absurdly misunderstood, that fuels a
half dozen cottage industries that are fed by those staring at screens.
The fall of the Soviet Union had deep and unrecognized (until recently,
I think) effects. It allowed a course correction for western capital.
In discussion of modernism, Herbert Read wrote that its character was that of “a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic.”
Herbert Read (Name and Nature of Modernism)
Geometrischer, artist unknown. Late 16 century Germany, collection at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel
Louis Arnorsson Sass (
Madness and modernism : insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought)
But I do not think this is quite right. And I think it’s important to
examine in what way it is ‘not quite right’. The defiance of authority
is quite true, and this is most significant, actually. But then I think
nearly all art is in one way or another defiant of authority. And its
most certainly not, on the whole, anti-traditional. This is the kitsch
version of the avant garde. And this kitsch version has come to color
the sensibilities of nearly all cultural institutions. This is the age
of what my friend Guy Zimmerman and I discussed fifteen years ago (and a
term he coined) ‘placebo art’. It is the age of the bureaucratic
imprint. The auteur of 21st century culture is the bureaucrat and he or
she is narrating the story of his or her own impotence. This bean
counter academic is the bloodless rational man, and this rationality has
accepted that the avant garde was all about shock and scandal.
The truth is that only the most idiotic of kitsch modernist work can
be so described. The more authentic of modernist work, the more serious
let us say, is very much concerned with tradition. And this has enormous
implications, and it implicates Heidegger and his metaphysical
primitivism. For Heidegger and his Black Notebooks lead directly to the
empty anti-humanism of Robert Wilson and Marina Abramovic.( Wilson is,
in one sense, aestheticizing the post Hiroshima landscape). The post ’89
art world, following the course correction of western capital, looked
to appropriate the past, imitate style codes and cues, empty it, and
then distance itself ironically. This even appears in the architecture
of a Zaha Hadid. The past is quoted, but only as cocktail chit chat. The
entire post modern idea is an attempt to diminish historical value
through a diminishing of belief in cultural importance. Snark and
sarcasm are so ubiquitous as to be a preferred mode of discourse. The
post modern world, because of or along with, the loss of narrative
abilities, the loss of rhetorical skill, and a general loss of literacy,
will tend toward a validation of vulgar narcissistic display — and this
accompanies an acceptance of authority, an underhanded embrace of the
status quo.
All the branded dissident artists, from Dylan (and I like much of
Dylan, sort of) to James Taylor or countless performance artists, are
now doing ads for Victoria’s Secret or credit card providers or
whatever. Pepsi and Coke. Taylor and the cloying Jackson Browne want to
play to ONLY vaccinated audiences.
But these are, in the end, generalizations — the salient point is
that 20th century modernism was recuperating something already being
lost. Already fading from memory. What was ‘new’ was that the artwork
was recapturing what had been forgotten. But it was cultural autopsy,
too. Pinter and Beckett were stripping Shakespeare down to the studs.
Fassbinder, with Sirk as his totem, was confronting the populism of
melodrama and dime novels. (and it is interesting that Tarantino is the
reverse Fassbinder in this sense). I think of Fassbinder as the best
exemplar of Benjamin’s arguments in Origins of German Tragic Drama. The world as allegory — as Howard Eiland wrote “Allegorical
perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a
melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the
transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and
bedeviled, and no less susceptible to momentary apotheosis. History as
trauerspiel—as shaped by the base machination of schemers.. { } modern
allegory in its inscription of the abyssal, of ever-increasing,
apparently incomprehensible, layers of depth, experience, and
interpretive questions.” This is the interrogation of authority,
finally, and of class. The end of modernism came, I think, with the end
of communism. And post modernism was the willing capitulation of the
bourgeoisie with the ruling 1% (well, in the 90s that would be ruling
5%). It came via a solipsistic post structuralist and de-politicized
academic curriculum and with the loss of legitimate public intellectuals
and discouse. Just as the Pentagon and State Department learned lessons
from the Vietnam War, so did ruling wealth learn by repurposing Marx in
academia. And the promotion of intellectual as reactionary clown (Zizek
and now Jordan Peterson). For civil rights, replace Malcolm X with Jay Z
and capitalize and brand dissent as soon as it appears.
Edward Kienholz
The fall of the U.S.S.R. also accelerated the schizophrenia of the
western bourgeoisie. The entire structure of Girardian sacrifice had
lost a key element, never mind most of the proletarian planet was
enfeebled and without direction. Without trying to chart anything like a
comprehensive graph or time line, the repression in the slave owning
Puritan stage of the U.S. found its subjective policing voice growing
more remote. The protagonist of American political drama, post WW2, is
always the cop.
Post sixties new age mysticism was the precursor, in one sense, to
the Covid response. Not in the working class so much, but in the white
bourgeoisie. For that new age depoliticizing trend was also an embrace
of authority. Werner Erhard is today reincarnated as Anthony Fauci, or
the various health ministers of Canada or Australia or Denmark. ‘Dont
talk to people, its not the time’ is exactly the EST directive that
doesn’t allow bathroom breaks. The rise of social media was there to
replace parenting, relieving the growing anxiety of that first
generation of screen raised adult children. A reflexive retreat to
infantilism was launched. And Zukerberg et al were there to manufacture
the stuffed animals and teething rings needed. The post modern bent
toward impersonal subjectivity, that sort of lit-crit idea, the
fragmented subject, that was taught at U.S. universities the last thirty
five years, is actually, contrary to what is now accepted wisdom, a
more cultic view of one’s self than even Romanticism. The contemporary
subject is, as I wrote last time, identity politics where there is no
identity. The fragmented or untethered ego has not resulted in less
narcissistic display but more.
“In Alfred Jarry, the turn-of-the-century plavwright who inspired
the theater of the absurd, we find a more annihilating solipsism, the
celebration of an utter self-involvement of the mind: Being, said Jarry,
“consists . . . not in perceiving or being perceived, but in that the
iridescent mental kaleidoscope think “itself and of itself [SE pense].
This subjectivist variant is not the only version of modernist
worldhood, however; in another mode, external reality loses not its
substantiality and otherness but its human resonance or significance,
thus bringing about what Heidegger called the “unworlding of the (human)
world.” One extreme manifestation of this is what has been called the
“white style” or “zero degree of literature”—exemplified by the novelist
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s chosisme (“thingism”), his aspiration to depict a
world “neither meaningful nor absurd, [that] quite simply is,” a world
where “all around us defying our pack of animistic or domesticating
adjectives things are there…without false glamour, without
transparency.”
Louis Arnorsson Sass (Ibid)
Bhupen Khakar
So, ok, this is pretty reductive stuff, but the point is that the
cultural shifts taking place from the 70s onward, and accelerated
greatly after 89 (and changed qualitatively) have been, in the West, the
celebration of white superiority, the celebration of the ‘end of
history’, and the celebration of bourgeois importance and value. The
suburban soccer mom meets
Mad Men, and no matter the increasing
precarity of this class, and no matter if their sense of self worth is
mostly voyeuristic (and gleaned from Oprah) the trend remains toward
default settings of self importance and hatred of those they deem
beneath them. In fact one aspect of this growing post modern stupidity
is an open hatred of the poor. It fuels intensified bigotry and racism.
And this is the subjectivity that refuses to see anything in terms of
class.
As a class, the post 89 ruling wealthy saw themselves as victorious.
Hubris is the allegorical trope for western society the last thirty
years. Jeff Bezos actually *thanked* his Amazon employees for his ‘space
ride’. This is self parody. But the rise of media made wealth, the now
constant immersion of billions of people with their smart phones, has
allowed for the lockdown of entire nations. And more, at least in the
U.S., and certainly among the educated white pseudo middle class, there
is resurfacing the most acute Puritanism (its hard to know the degree of
bad faith in all this, but its likely a significant amount) and an
embrace of the practice of exclusion. It is the *responsible* meme
weaponized. We are doing it for your own good. This reminds of Franco
Moretti’s examination of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (in The Bourgeoisie). Three key words, useful, efficiency, and comfort are highlighted.
Nandalal Bose (Parthasarathi Krishna)
Franco Moretti (
The Bourgeois)
One can see that the comfort of those working from home, in spacious
apartments or houses, are little Crusoes surveying the world of the
uncivilized island around them. And the Central American maid or nanny
who comes by public transport is their own ‘Friday’. The reality of
urban decay is distanced the less you have to actually leave your home.
The unreality of these Crusoes online can be sustained throughout the
lockdown. Propaganda can be handed over to algorithms and over the
course of six months now, the normalizing of curfews and exclusion have
been nearly completed. But that tone, ‘of one justifying himself before a
judge’ is a tone that has continued to be heard in Western discourse.
The adjunct scientist viewing an experiment of which he has no knowledge
also contains the voice of one before a judge or tribunal. It is the
voice found often in Kafka. The public is a spectator, a lay scientist,
uncertain of what is meant to be observed, but feeling the need to make
clear they are watching all the same. Responsibly.
Today the voice of the government, the voice of institutional
authority is one of the grade school teacher, or even kindergarten
teacher. And much of the bourgeois public welcomes this tone. The child
feels safer when limits are provided.
“Waiting for Hitler in Vienna in that winter of 1938 was an old
and desperately ill Sigmund Freud—as well as a hundred and seventy-five
thousand other racial enemies. The Nazis hated Freud with a particular
vehemence. When they burned his books at their outdoor rallies in
Germany in 1933, the presiding officer had shouted out an indictment:
“Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life,” he
cried, “for the nobility of the human soul! I consign to the flames the
writings of Sigmund Freud.” Freud, hearing the news about the book
burning, remarked, “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they
would have burnt me;… ”
Mark Edmundson (Ibid)
It is telling today that there is such a pronounced dislike of Freud,
a near weekly rebutting of Freudian theory and practice. It seems that
it cannot be said enough, for it is repeated endlessly. Freud remains
the ‘other’. He is too closely associated with the archaic forces of the
unconscious, something the new ‘responsible’ bourgeoisie wants to deny.
Gaston Gale
Notwithstanding the enormous distrust of government narratives
regarding the Covid virus, the incessant drumbeat of the official story
is wearing down many, and even the skeptical, at least in the U.S. are
beginning to acquiesce. There is also now the threat of exclusion. The
creation of a new caste system with the unvaccinated as the, literally,
new untouchable, is a powerful coercive strategy. But it is the hubris
of the ruling class that signals their own fall. Because Branson and
Bezos, Musk and Gates, nobody likes these men. I don’t believe people,
in general, are fooled. But there are other forces at work, and the
insistence on following the rules is backed by economic coercion.
“When associates pointed out to Freud, as they often did, that no
nation outside of Germany and Austria was more hospitable to
psychoanalysis than America, Freud’s inevitable reply was that Americans
had no idea what psychoanalysis was actually about. “We are bringing
them the plague,” Freud purportedly said when he and Jung and Ferenczi
disembarked in New York in 1909. “We’re bringing them the plague, and
they don’t even know it.”
Mark Edmundson (Ibid)
To donate to this blog and to the Aesthetic Resistance podcasts, use the paypal button at the top of the page.
Source: John Steppling
