Category: Theory

As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch, yeah
And I said

Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I can’t imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry

Chicago

Taking a break from packing, I was reading a short piece by Latour, On the Difficulty of Being Glocal, this morning [via wood s lot] and was wondering just when it was from. Obviously, it is from ART e FACT volume 1 issue 4. But just when was that published? I had to go back to the home page (several clicks from the original article just to figure out when the thing was first published, let alone written. 2005 is the short answer.

I began to wonder— why is publication date often trivialized on the web as if it just didn’t matter when the original material was written/appropriated/published? This seems to be almost a throwback response. Most photography of the 19th century wasn’t dated either, because the artifact just wasn’t of much importance to history. The internet is certainly not treated as a chronicle, even with the careful demarcation of serial publishing. But I digress.

Glocal is an ugly word. The only pertinent recent usage seems to be from a gallery in Surrey whose blog seems to have died in March. But still, it piqued my interest— as matters of time and space have a tendency to do. The tension between global/local is both a contemporary concern and a historical one. The emergence of documentary photography in the 1930s can be seen as a leveling force against regionalism. I have followed the return to “local” (but not glocal) as a meaningful term, and wondered about those chunks of the melting pot like the American South that are ultimately resistant to being rendered (in all senses of the word). Why is local consciousness in the urban east/west/north good when it is historically seen as the embodiment of evil in the rural south or midwest? Why are these areas infested with “small minded” people, feeding the clich&eacute “think globally act locally.”

Continue reading “Time and History” →

In time, music in particular and culture in general would provide Adorno the perfect vantage point from which to criticize what he saw as the alienation and false consciousness of bourgeois society. This was especially the case once Adorno reached Los Angeles, in the 1940s, where he could observe the radio and film industries first hand.

Yet even Mr. Claussen is embarrassed by Adorno’s ignorant and snobbish dismissal of American popular music, all of which he lumped together as “jazz.” This “seems to be a blind spot in his work,” Mr. Claussen acknowledges; but in fact it is more than that. Adorno’s contempt for jazz and those who listen to it, his belief that popular music is simply the tool of the Culture Industry for colonizing the consciousness of the masses, is suggestive of the arrogant absolutism that characterizes his thought in general.

Because he viewed music as a Hegelian progress from Beethoven to Schoenberg, keeping pace with the inexorable alienation of bourgeois society, Adorno viewed any 20th-century music that was less alienated than Schoenberg’s as a cowardly retreat, a refusal of difficult knowledge. (This applied to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as much as to the Andrews Sisters.) In an analogous way, critical theory attempts to explain all of contemporary history as the inevitable working-out of a historical dialectic that culminates in Nazism. Adorno is upside-down Hegel: instead of trying to prove that history is driven by the cunning of reason, he tries to show that it is marching in lock-step toward mindlessness.

The Stern German

As Raymond Williams has described, it was the impact of industry and democracy in the nineteenth century which gave rise to a conception of culture as something separate from and “above” society. The ideas “culture in opposition” variously expressed by such members of the Victorian intelligentsia as Arnold, Morris, and Ruskin, were formed through their practical criticism of the social realities of their day. By degrees, however, the notion of culture as a repository of ideal values became a means not of criticizing the world, but of evading it. (3)

Victor Burgin, “Modernism in the Work of Art” (1976) from The End of Art Theory (1986)

Hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnold’s views. It gathered force in lC19 and eC20 in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culcha.

. . . It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility. (92-93)

Raymond Williams, Keywords (1976, 1983)

Subbacultcha?

Through the sacrifice of its possible relation to praxis, the cultural concept itself becomes an instance of organization; that which is so provokingly useless in culture is transformed into tolerated negativity or even into something negatively useful—into a lubricant for the system, into something which exists for something else, into untruth, or into goods of the culture industry calculated for the consumer. All this is registered today in the uncomfortable relation between culture and administration. (117)

Theodor Adorno “Culture and Administration” (1978) The Culture Industry (1991)

Jeff Rice suggested that I revisit Roland Barthes’ work. I have, and I find that I really can’t connect with Jeff’s network. I find too much interference in Barthes’ texts.

To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under the pressure of all those who do not speak it, is to proclaim one’s act of choosing, if not necessarily one’s agreement with that choice. Writing here resembles the signature one affixes at the base of a collective proclamation one has not written oneself. So to adopt a mode of writing—or, even better, to make it one’s own—means to save oneself all the preliminaries of a choice and to make it quite clear that one takes for granted the reasons for such a choice. (Writing Degree Zero, 26-27)

In this passage, Barthes is specifically attacking the libratory potential of political writing (as a response to Sartre’s What is Literature). Most significant, I think, is the claim at the end of this particular chapter that “any intellectual mode of writing can only give rise to a para-literature, which no longer dares to speak its name” (28). In a direct sense, this is the discourse of professionals (politicians or scholars alike) that reify a mode of discourse by adopting it. Professional writing training cannot escape a particular “closed sphere of language”—a symbolic system not created by a student writer that they are expected to choose. In this arena, I doubt the utility of “student centered” or “libratory” pedagogies. I think political skepticism fuels much of Barthes’ early writing, and the mistrust of emancipatory schemes always comes back to the nature of language systems themselves.

An emancipatory sign system does not exist, but Barthes attempts to conceive of one in An Empire of Signs:

Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs. (xi)

The perfect system in Barthes’ fictional Japan is an autodestructive (or autodeconstructive) one, not a system that forms professional or political systems:

Continue reading “Symbolic Systems” →

Zugaro: You think, then, there’s no hope at all?

Lowenthal: Here I would agree with Walter Benjamin, whose words at the end of his analysis of Goethe’s Elective Affinities have been quoted a thousand times, namely, that we’re given hope solely for the sake of those who are without hope. This is the source of my irritation, not to say my obstinancy, regarding these postmodernist movements. You simply cannot abandon the critical thoughtfulness of a nay-sayer if you want to remain a yea-sayer. As a human being, you don’t have the right to teach almost systematically that the end of humanity in history has already occurred and that human energies capable of changing what Georg Luk�cs calls the “infamy of the status quo” can no longer be developed. As Ernst Bloch would say, you must remain true to this “utopian spark”; the situation may well call for sorrow, melancholy, and doubt, but never despair.

An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal