Think, Pig!

“The French Revolution began as the result of an overall crisis of society, as we shall see. Among other factors inherent to the crisis of 1789, was the fact that the existing social and political order had become a barrier to the further accumulation of profit.”
Henry Heller (The Bourgeois Revolution in France)

“The question is not how did we get here but what is the “here” at which we have arrived.”
Johanna Drucker (Recognizing Complicity, LARB 2015)

“Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.”
G.W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics)

“Think, pig! (Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.) Think, pig! “
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)

“Only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end: Its death, which now threatens, would be exclusively the triumph of bare existence over the consciousness that has the audacity to resist it.”
Theodor Adorno (Philosophy of New Music)

I have noticed that western society overall, but of course the U.S. more specifically, have collectively reached total amnesia. There are people everywhere to which this doesn’t apply, but overall, as a general truth this is hard to argue with. The culture has forgotten everything. The culture has forgotten that forgetting is even a ‘thing’. The collective, the culture, will eventually lose the word ‘forgetting’. They will lose the word ‘memory’. There are Amazonian tribes with no word to distinguish between right and left. If they absolutely have to differentiate, they say north or east. There are several tribes in Asia that have no number system beyond one, two, three, many. In the West today I suspect society is on the cusp of losing a number of conventions (and words I am sure), probably beginning with areas related to memory.

I noted the other day (on Press TV) that Trump is the second president in a row suffering dementia. Biden just wandered around with a blank expression on his face. (and there is a topic here about politicians and cosmetic surgery). Trump falls asleep even more than the man he called ‘Sleepy Joe’. He is apparently incontinent. He babbles gibberish and, very clearly he can no longer articulate multi syllable words. There are many examples on video of this. He has severe cognitive decline. Two presidents in a row. But then Presidents don’t really have much to do. Clearly other people make decisions. And it should be noted that the ‘spin’ the administration puts on things has become itself a sort of interpretive category. When J.D. Vance tries to tap dance around the cease fire, and he is openly (sort of) admitting this is to buy time to make more bombs, this ‘performance’ is graded by the public. Nobody is even discussing the fact that this information is evidence of duplicity. The performance is graded as reviewers grade movies. And reviewers are sort of consumer advocates for the public. There is very little critical thinking involved. In the case of Vance, his lack of gravitas and his rather remarkable lack of charisma or just generic appeal makes him a perfect vehicle for ‘spin grades’.

But none of this is news. None of this surprises anyone reading this. So what and in what way is history being forgotten?

“My argument is that the engagement of modernism with politics at certain moments tells us something about its coming to terms with the world’s disenchantment in general. Corot, Monet, and Matisse had their own ways of dealing with the same situation. I should say that they recognized the world’s disenchantment in terms (with a sense of what was at stake) that put them alongside Courbet, Manet, and Malevich .- “
T. J. Clark (Farewell to an Idea)

I am going to dig into Clark’s extended essay quite a bit here. I have recently been thinking a lot about the end of modernism, but also its beginning. Clark’s argument is that it begins with David’s Death of Marat in 1793.

“The more one looks at the cult of Marat, the less clear it becomes what kind of phenomenon one is studying. Which history is it part of? Of popular religion or state-formation? { } The cult of Marat exists at the intersection between short-term political contingency and long-term disenchantment of the world. Maybe in its latter guise it often looks like a rear-guard action against the loss of the sacred. But here too its forms were unstable and ambivalent. We know of orators staging the Jesus-Marat comparison in 1793 so as to prove that the priests had captured and neutralized “Jesus the sans-culotte” by pretending he was something more than a man.”
T. J Clark (Ibid)

The cult of Marat. It is an interesting phenomenon and if this is the birth of modernism, then the cultic appropriation of ‘image’ was baked into the entire project from the start. It is tempting to compare the Jim Fitzpatrick photo of Che that became a T shirt fixture (and a tattoo on the arm of Maradona) or several photos of Zapata, or even Warhol’s portraits (notably Marilyn Monroe) but in such comparisons reside fascinating differences from the mythos of David’s hurriedly finished painting of Marat. For one thing, this was a painting about death. It was not really about preserving ‘Marat’ for history. That in a sense is what it became, but that idea was not something David thought about.

“O man beloved of patriots…open your eyes to the light once again and see the sovereign who surrounds you [ouvre encore les yeux a la lumiere et vois le souverain qui t’entoure}.”~* | am reminded of the passage in Walter Benjamin where the characteristic of the work of art in the age before mechanical reproduction is said to be that it looked back at its spectators. Of course this illusion rested “on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man.» It was a quality of the work of art imagined by its users. Art as a practice still bore the marks of its beginnings in magic. Maybe it is true that in the end these kinds of cultic investments in artworks were (or will be) destroyed, as Benjamin has it, by “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly, which is just as fierce as their wish to overcome the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

The contemporary critic (with a few rare exceptions, fewer all the time) tends toward easily digestible ‘meanings’ for art (and culture). That artworks ‘explore’ or ‘investigate’ this or that. You hear it constantly in gallery copy, in particular in trying to explain for the viewer of a particular artist, what it is they are meant to take away from the event. So and so is exploring ideas of gender and contemporary LGBT roles in ….etc etc etc. Whenever you read or hear that an artist is ‘exploring’ anything, just turn away and spare yourself. Rembrandt is looking to explore….. This cannot be finished.. The better the artist the less able are critics or gallerists to talk about him or her.

Here is some gallery copy about a pretty decent artist, who I won’t name…. So and So “” discusses human fragility, vulnerability, and suffering in relation to the fierceness and cruelty of life and nature. Using existing narratives, she discusses universal themes; love versus pain, danger versus protection, and life versus death. Her works are both confronting and comforting, finding solace in their beauty.”

“In standard critical studies of modern art, formal innovations and strategic disruptions are often characterized as “political” interventions into sign systems. These approaches are too literal for Clark, too close to the ideologies that produced them, to satisfy his inquiry. Thus he takes the common discussion of Cubism — as a way to represent a new way of seeing the world — and suggests that, at least in the period of 1912 on which he concentrates his study of Picasso’s monochrome canvases, Cubism was not about representation. It was not about a painting in the service of visual epistemology, but instead, ‘a metaphorical admission of counterfeit’.”
Johanna Drucker (Ibid)

Now, Death of Marat is a remarkable painting, and one (and I am hardly the only one to note this) influenced by Poussin. The fact that David’s painting has graced several rock album covers and crept into commodity culture in other areas as well, speaks to Clark’s correctness in identifying the modernness in this work. There is a lot of empty space firstly, especially in the upper half of the canvas, (see Poussin’s Eucharist) and secondly it was purportedly not quite finished (there is a lot of debate about this). And unfinished is a sign of the modern. It is especially connected to late modernism, but it exists throughout — Wittgenstein to Kafka to La donna della finestra by Rosetti, or Dicken’s Edwin Drood, The Last Tycoon, and on and on. But David painted the Marat with purpose and a good deal of it did not change from the underdrawing. And the vast empty browns, their blankness, are both cold (like Poussin) and somehow warm, too. But it the warmth of nightmares. The warmth of Death. (reminds of Hopper’s Automat, 1927, which I wrote about a few posts back). Above us and behind us is ‘something’. Something both there and not there. You see it in Goya’s The Giant (a personal absolute favorite painting of mine) but in Goya’s minor works too (Majas on a Balcony). You feel it in Shakespeare, too. It is the backdrop to several plays — perhaps culminating in The Tempest. And in the David one feels the world outside this room. That the forces (or gods) of destruction are forming. These forces are there in Genet’s plays, too. Revolution ! The cleansing of society. That such cleansing is not for infantile emotions. Destruction but also liberation. It is in Greek tragedy, certainly, this dialectic of death and renewal. It is in Indian epics, too. Kali meets Goya’s colossus. It is the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk.

“it seems to make Marat much the same substance —the same abstract material— as the empty space above him. The wound is as abstract as the flesh. And the blood coming out of it as impalpable as thread. (Of course the economy here is chilling.) Even these signs of violence would be enough to call the body back to its death throes had its arms and head not fallen into such strict, almost mathematical order. Never have horizontals and verticals been so settled. The laws of gravity have spoken once and for all.”
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

A Euclidean death, and hence this depiction of murder anticipates so much of modernist (Pop) forensics. But Clark is examining art in relation to social reality. And Johanna Drucker, who wrote a flawed but still, at times, decent essay on Clark also makes a rather typical confusion about modernism. First she rightly notes….

“In Clark’s account, modern painting is a play of procedures, not a language game or an activity of sign systems. He argues that modernism’s philosophical moves question the way painting’s means are used in their specificity. Pissarro’s women standing out of the sun enact an anarchist worldview, or flirtation with it, through the painter’s portrayal of labor and rest at the edge of a field. Picasso’s layered (cubist) transparency obviates the referential world. Malevich’s black square performs an act of negation that becomes the sign under which communism’s non-objectivity will be made into a shared consciousness. And Pollock’s paintings “about nothing” contest “bourgeois hegemony in the realm of consciousness.” The construction of outsider-ness, the stance of the avant-garde, was frequently complicit…”
Johanna Drucker (Ibid)

but then, confuses something important…

“If we understand modernism only through those works that despised it, those artists whose output stood in a negative or negating relation to it, then do we provide ourselves with an adequate assessment of what occurred and what role fine art has played in its complicities? What alternative is there to the consensual narratives that propose that the function of aesthetic work is the power and legitimacy of critique? At stake is the question of how to formulate our understanding of the present, and future, of art as a category of cultural activity. To look again at modernism outside the (exclusionary) frames that allow it to be significant only when it stages a protest against modernity may be an unsavory process to those used to the version of that history that privileged the “esoteric” and oppositional. Much of modern art was conceived and practiced very differently, not as an opposition or negation, but instead, as an engagement with the institutions, drives, and forces of modernity. Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Mists (1817–’18), John Martin’s crowd-pleasing spectacles of biblical scenes, Frederic Church’s landscapes, George Bellows’s boxing men, charged with the physicality and virility of an emerging nation, of Charles Sheeler’s River Rouge Plant, Robert Delaunay’s studies of the Eiffel Tower, or the portraits of Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent — the list could go on and on. These are celebratory paintings, not critical, and that needs to be addressed. To understand the political realities of signs, and roles of representations, we have to engage with their various complicities and compromises, alliances with ideologies, not only oppositions to them. “
Johanna Drucker (Ibid)

I think it is worth looking at why this is so wrong because I think this is largely how most academics and a lot of the educated public see art and culture. First, it is not modernism that these artists hate. It is capitalism and a society of brutal inequality and cruelty. Drucker seems to forget exactly what the history of the 20th century entailed. (and this is typical of the L.A. Review of Books, which excises any political consciousness). The artists that Drucker lists as a (sort of) ironic alternative are mostly kitsch (Sheeler isn’t and he is an odd inclusion here). But does she want to add Thomas Kincaid? Eakins isn’t kitsch either, but he is also not quite what she imagines. Sargent is borderline. The point, however, is that modernism was by definition a rejection of the status quo, a rejection of the bourgeois culture of blindness and repression. The work (if we stick to painters) of, say, Otto Dix and George Grosz, you see work critiquing fascism, but more, representing something of the spiritual suffocation of western society as it regressed to barbarity. Even Picasso or Mattisse (who was first identified as a Fauvist) were painting to disturb the conventions of a conformist society. Mattisse studied with Gustav Moreau, of whom he said “He did not set us on the right roads but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency.” Modernism was a rejection of classical (bourgeois) taste and elitism. And the energy of 20th century modernism (which is the bulk of it in a strict sense) was driven by the horrors of the first World War. And with the anti-humanness of mass industrializataion. David Caspar Freidrich was not a modernist. He died in 1840. Neither was Frederic Church. And Sargent was (per John Berger) a stiled Edwardian prude who commodified his subjects and lacked any emotional depth. Sharon Cumming (The Observer) wrote of a relatively recent show of seldom displayed Sargent beach and ocean scenes: “these early paintings only seem to prefigure the shortcomings of Sargent’s worst work: the lack of sincerity, the evasiveness, the faint boredom, the sense that everything is seen, but very little felt.”

Frankly Drucker should know all this. These missing points are exactly where ‘disenchantment’ enters the discussion. And the broken promises of the Enlightenment.

“It is implicit in the material presented so far about Marat’s place in politics. Marat could not be made to embody the revolution because no one agreed about what the revolution was, least of all about whether Marat was its Jesus or its Lucifer. David’s picture — this is what makes it inaugural of modernism – tries to ingest this disagreement, and make it part of a new cult object. “
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

At the top of this post I quote Hegel. And this quote is one that is referenced rather often. And Clark does as well in the essay under consideration. But there are enigmatic aspects to what Hegel is saying. I am not even sure Clark understands quite all that is at stake in this dictum. I have noted before the Bloom idea about anxiety of influence. I hate to use Bloom because was such a jerk about so much stuff. But….but this concept has uses. Modernism came out of the fin de siecle, out of that mass of cultural genius and cross pollination that was Vienna (mostly) toward the end of the 19th century. But the foregrounding for it goes back much further. Maybe into antiquity, really. (Or, as Clark argues, to the painting The Death of Marat.) But Hegel recouped a good deal of antiquity for us. Hegel wrote this sentence in the 1820s. Two hundred years ago. So already the educated bourgeoisie was watching itself. This is what the above quote on Marat as a cult object is actually about.

I want to keep in focus the idea of cult object — and the idea of disenchantment, and both in relation to the modern. If the David painting anticipates much modern graphic design, as well as modern sensibility in its existential remove and restraint. In one sense it anticipates the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) painters of the 20s and 30s. This was not a movement but a group of painters in which critics saw a family resemblance. (Christian Schaad, Rudolf Schlichter, Josef Scharl, Willi Geiger, Carlo Mense, Herbert Ploberger et al). The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub (Mannheimer Kunsthalle) in 1925. The New Objectivity painters were practicing an addition by subtraction. And this was a reaction, mostly, to German Expressionism (pre WW1). But the 20th century was full of movements born of reaction. They wanted a sober realism, but a sobriety in which the deeper form and meaning would surface. They were not doing at all what American realist painters did fifty years later, which was romanticize objectivity.

Remember, too, that Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus in 1919, in Germany, to merge crafts and high art, and in an aesthetic reaction to the ornate over ornamented classical style popular throughout Europe at the end of the previous century (think also Art Nouveau). The Bauhaus also saw addition through subtraction. They were in architecture sanitizing and purifying the ‘idea’ of how we live. And like the New Objectivists the Bauhaus carried within it a sense of sober deep ‘looking’. But also of experimentation. Both these groups were despised by the Nazis. And this reminds one of Trump and MAGA of course. For all the adoration of militarism and power, the MAGA aesthetics are much closer to the ornate over decorated (and gold) Rococo than anything else. And Rococo and adjacent styles are viewed as feminine. National Socialism had a mythology that integrated this feminine frilly decorated curves over the hard edge of Bauhaus or New Objectivity. (I remember Rush Limbaugh’s penthouse was all cherubim and gold leaf).

The other aspect of the Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit was the inner life of both men and cultures. These were born of the same ground as psychoanalysis — which wanted to be seen as cold and scientific, but wasn’t, or rather it was but not in the way imagined. It was the uncanny scientific. And I would argue the Rococo and Nazi myth were terrified of death (and of life unconsciously, and certainly of women and reproduction. Which is interesting because for all the talk of ‘family values’ one gets from the alt right there is a deep masculine insecurity here). In another sense the sober reductions of Bauhaus and New Objectivists signals a kind of silence. Both were products of the first world war.

“No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence?”
Walter Benjamin (Experience and Poverty, 1933)

Benjamin believed the bourgeois home (full of comforting pillows and cushy chairs, table clothes and ornate lampshades, was to trap the inhabitant in melancholy). The work of Bauhaus and New Objectivity was linked to silence or at least quiet. That was the meditative quality. Bauhaus was also about anti bourgeois morality. It was paradoxically hedonistic (much like Black Mountain College later).

In all the works of New Objectivity there are the blank spaces, usually behind and/or above the central figure. The blankness may indicate something, but it is something that feels liminal. It is often dreamlike but silent. David’s Death of Marat is also silent. The noise is elsewhere (and as Shakespeare said ‘there is a world elsewhere’, from his most modern and minimalist play Coriolanus).

Modernism was a rejection of the status quo. It was also an ongoing recuperation of lost experience. It was also deeply inward looking and perhaps most underappreciated is that it was always in constant reaction to what came before. And this takes us back to Clark and Hegel.

“Not being able to make a previous moment of high achievement part of the past — not to lose it and mourn it and, if necessary, revile it — is, for art in modernist circumstances, more or less synonymous with not being able to make art at all. Because ever since Hegel put the basic proposition of modernism into words in the 1820s – that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past”’ — art’s being able to continue has depended on its success in making that dictum specific and punctual. That is to say, on fixing the moment of art’s last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible nonetheless. The “can’t go on, will go on” syndrome. “
T. J. Clark (Ibid)

Beckett was of course a quintessential modernist. Pinter reacted to Beckett and found another purified strain of the silent and of inward terror. Man looking inward but increasingly terrified by what is there. Pinter’s plays are incorporating bourgeois naturalism with Freudian anthropology and with something new about ‘speaking aloud’. Pinter anticipates the voice of AI. The voice of an answering machine (In Kubrick the voice of the HAL computer foreshadows Pinter).

Clark quotes Adorno: “If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie — not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant — we understand Beethoven no better than does the listener who cannot follow his pieces’ purely musical content, the inner history that happens to their themes.”
Theodor Adorno (Sociology of Music)

This was written a half a century ago.

“What remains to be thought about Abstract Expressionism (though the thought haunts everything written on the subject, especially those texts most anxious to repress it) is the painting’s place in a determinate class formation; one which, though long prepared, took on the specific trappings of cultural power in the years after 1945. I said “its place in a determinate class formation,” not in a state apparatus, or a newly improvised system of avant-garde patronage, or a museum/art-world superstructure. Not that the latter are irrelevant. But they cannot be what we mean, fundamentally, when we talk about a certain representational practice inhering in the culture of a class. We mean that the practice somehow participates in that class’s whole construction of a “world.” We are talking of overlap and mutual feeding at the level of representational practice — at the level of symbolic production (ideology). “
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

Artworks have class signatures, in a sense. And this relates to the dramatic rise in surveillance and control technology (and desire) of western society. The evolution of a technology fixated society has been striking, but besides the volume or scale of it, there is the cultural and aesthetic question assigned to digital tech — and from all surveillance tech — from flock cameras to digital implants, and the rise of the Data Center and of organizations like Palentir. In fact the entire Silicon Valley experience is imbued with ideology. This tech didn’t evolve arbitrarily. This is technology born of a fascistic sensibility that was last seen in the 1940s. And one of the problems with all this control technology is that it has class DNA at its core. And I do not mean simply that the ruling class ‘wants’ to control us, that is obvious. But that this tech corresponds to people with shockingly empty lives, it is the product of people who loathe themselves to a perhaps unprecedented degree. This is an aesthetics of vacuity. But that does not do justice to it, from a critical standpoint. What do I mean when I say vacant or empty? When speaking of a psyche this is hard to define. For literally this new ruling class, or maybe better to say this generation of the ruling class that is in power today, has ‘something’ in their head. They can build the technology for one thing. I think it has to do with how emotions and feelings are trapped. And this is why liminal is a popular concept today. Liminal psyches. Peter Thiel or Zuckerberg are liminal psyches. There is something uncanny that occurs when we engage with them or watch others engage. Or when we listen to them. And this liminal quality is there within us, as well, like an infection is in us. We are infected with a nihilistic uncanny emptiness that ‘feels’ like a illness. But this is also the voice of the petty bourgeoisie. And that is because it is the only voice or language left. We are left with the liminal petty bourgeoisie.

Now Clark has a great chapter on Abstract Expressionism and I want to end with this, partly because I admit my love for Abstract Expressionism, but also because that movement has not been recuperated. Ab Ex was the end of modernism. Or at least the end of American modernism.

“Abstract Expressionism is the form of the petty bourgeoisie’s aspiration to aristocracy, at that fateful moment when the bourgeoisie itself no longer so aspires; when the petty bourgeois has to stand in for a hidden — nay, vanished — bourgeois elite. (Of course we are dealing here with two class formations, two fictions or constructions, not two brute sociological entities. We are dealing with forms of representation; which is not to say that the kind of representational doubling described here does not have specific, often brutal, sociological effects. McCarthyism was one of them, in which the bourgeois Frankenstein was for a while really paralysed by its petty-bourgeois Monster.) “
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

Clark is saying that after WW2 the western world was starting to experience the drying up of language. Of a language it had been building on for three hundred years. Certainly building on since the French Revolution. Ab Ex as a movement was both embodying something of a bourgeois aspiration, but also was rejecting it. This is why the titles of so many Ab Ex paintings feel so ridiculous. Trump is a petty bourgeoisie monster. So is Thiel and Stephen Miller and Vance.

There is an aside here worth quoting:

“Gottlieb, you will have noticed, emerges as the great and implacable maestro of Abstract Expressionism. He is Byron to Greenberg’s George Eliot — the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in oils. A Mantovani or a Lawrence Welk. Charlie Parker playing insolent variations on the theme of “I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China” — feeling for a way to retrieve, and make properly unbearable, the pop song’s contempt for the masses it aims to please. “
T. J. Clark (Ibid)

Adolph Gottleib was always one of the several outliers in Ab Ex. And in a sense Gottlieb anticipated design as much as anything. His ambitions were smaller. But that aside, Ab Ex was always primarily made by heterosexual men. Clark notes most of the best writing on Pollock was by homosexual men. Make of that what you will (it is true, however). Ab Ex was an island of heterosexual posturing. Now Clement Greenberg was Ab Ex’s main critical supporter. And he helped define the terms on which people, at the time, spoke about Ab Ex. Greenberg was a staunch Trotskyist. And he loved Pollock even though he called him ‘a goddamned stalinist’. And Clifford Still was a deeply reactionary grumpy old man. Yet it is that very difficult aspect that fuels Still’s work. But when one dissects Pollock today it feels completely correct to see him as a Stalinist. And in and out of mental hospitals for depression and alcoholism. But there was also that Stalinist purity about him, and magnitude. So the point here is really that if modernism ended sometime around the death of Rothko in 1970 (Pollock died nearly twenty years earlier) then its useful to find the ‘other’ modernisms, firstly, and secondly to see if the post scripts are still even breathing. In film (and Clark notes this, too) the history films of Rossellini were profound statements of bourgeois rejection. A Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer are certainly important (and I defend Richter often who now seems to be the object of great anger on the part of the petty bourgeoise taste keepers). Early Fassbinder in film, Antonioni, Bresson, and probably even Godard were all part of the dying gasp of cinema as an art form. This could change and it may change as my friend Guy Zimmerman noted, through internet forms, micro creations of transitory existence. Luc Tuymans and Michael Boormans, might be on any list. But lists are pointless. My favorite living painter is probably the Romanian Mircea Suciu . In literature its far more complicated. Pynchon was probably the end of something. McCarthy, for all his virtues, already feels minor. Handke is still alive and he remains wildly underappreciated. Both in theatre and in prose. But he is 83 now. Heiner Muller and Thomas Bernhard were giants of the postscript to modernism.

“For me it is right that the moment of modernism I begin and end with belongs to Rossellini as much as to Pollock. And that the terms “neo-realist” and “neoexpressionist” apply to it equally.For partly this book has been about modernism’s continual two facedness—its inward-turning and outward-reaching, its purism and opportunism, its centripetal and centrifugal force. I think this doubleness has to do with the fact that art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the verge of emptiness and silence. So that practitioners have continually been forced to recognize how little space, or representational substance, they are given to work with in the all-consuming world of goods.”
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

The liminal again. What space there is exists in an uncanniness that is partly the consequence of digital tech. The class formation of digital tech, of surveillance systems (along with the aesthetic aspect) is intwined with barriers to increased profit (see top quote of Henry Heller on the French Revolution). The digital is getting out of hand, but not in the way imagined by its creators. There are no android overlords, there is no AI with sentience nor will there ever be, and there is no way to ever merge the human brain with digital tech. Nor, actually, do I believe there will ever be total absolute effective surveillance. What is becoming more successful is simply scaring people with the idea of all the above.

“This is why we don’t have a predictive science of chemical or biological systems, not even an idea about how to build one. Quantum teleportation of macroscopic objects would require measuring and codifying a ridiculous number of quantum parameters, even if there were no entanglement and it could be done with separate particles. Since particles are entangled, this idea is a non-starter. Similarly, the idea of “uploading our brain state to a computer” can only make sense to someone who doesn’t understand entanglement. (Perhaps these people imagine that a biological cell can be understood in terms of bulk chemistry, rather than a wave state of 10/-17 entangled molecules.)Most ridiculous is the speculation that we live in a simulation. As I showed above, full simulation of a water molecule is utterly intractable. Only people who don’t understand this can talk about simulation of a planet or a universe.”
Josh Mittledorf (The Limits of Computer Modelling: Science Blog 2021)

In other words, its impossible to actually computer model even a water molecule — unless a lot of tricks and slight of hand are involved.

The recent world cup and its use of VAR is another instance of a scientism that wants not just to control the material world, but to control your mind. Who you gonna believe? Your own stinking eyes or my computer generated animation? The Covid pandemic (sic) was marketed with the slogan ‘trust the science’. And it was an effective slogan because it played on the resentment so prevalent in the West today. The associations with ‘science’ in most people have to do with impartial and objective truth. And if one doesn’t ‘trust’ impartial and objective truth then one is also not to be trusted. But it is more even than that. And this touches on the entire media treatment of ‘conspiracy theories’ and how this perjorative term has gained enormous traction because it implies that the user of the term is objective and tough minded and not prone to disinformation or superstition.

In the midst of growing authoritarian policing of daily life, and (in the case of Trump’s administration) an open dishonesty and cronyism, the public often takes personal psychological refuge in self identifying as a ‘realist’. The paradoxical aspect of this subject position is that these ‘rugged individualists’ — those who trust the science — are also prone to their own brand of magical thinking (see Moon Hoax as the most obvious example). And here social media is very revealing for there is a kind of reinforcing of these curated ‘identities’ through clicks and likes etc. In an ever more isolated and economically insecure world, the internet props up these identity delusions. And this is also gendered. White men feel ever more isolated and without agency in their daily lives (Trump was largely elected on this fact) and hence are drawn to the fantasies of militarism and the ‘tactical cool’ masculine ideal. The ICE raids feature these men running around abusing the most vulnerable in society while dressed in SWAT drag. Cosplaying is now rampant. And in a sense this is what Clark touches on with the petty bourgeois tyrants of McCarthyism. Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn. The rise of this new cosplay fascism is everywhere in the West. Police departments are undertrained and overfunded and encourage the exercising of these personal resentments. It also fuels the anti-immigration lynch mobs.

When the Egyptian football team, and primarily the trainer, were treated with unnecessary roughness at the Dallas airport (after arrival moments before), social media was awash with armchair tough guys (white men) expressing support for the police and themselves then threatening the Egyptian athletes — one wrote ‘your lucky we let you guys into this country at all. Don’t mess with American cops’.

Adorno’s lesser known Philosophy of New Music is actually a brilliant psychoanalytic examination of bourgeois cultural atrophy and the effect of this regression on the individual.

“Bourgeois society’s inability to listen to Schönberg manifests a disintegration of historical consciousness and the surprising reification of a history (tonal progression) which seemed the very opposite of stasis. For Adorno, a dogmatic concretizing of this tonal illusion pre-echoes the same consciousness pop music is a response to, as its development is bound up in both radical and mainstream aesthetics. This is elaborated in the section “Radical Music Is Not Immune,” where — in a style which itself reflects the formal contortions of modern artists like Schönberg who “realize total enlightenment in themselves, regardless of the cunning naïveté of the culture industry” — Adorno asserts that “they also simultaneously make themselves like the internal structure of what they oppose and enter into opposition with their own intentions” “
Bret Schneider (The tragic failure of Adorno’s emancipatory modernism) / Theodor Adorno (Philosophy of New Music)

The individual, ever more alienated and hopeless, become themselves like what they hate — they become the most vulnerable structurally, internally, their inner lives paralysed with resentment and anger. But they do this through the aesthetic medium. Kitsch contains its own form of violence, then.

Adorno adds: “What radical music knows is the untransfigured suffering of men whose powerlessness has so increased that it no longer permits semblance and play.”

One could exchange radical music for modernist art. If Clark is right, The Death of Marat marked the beginning of a long project of emancipation (Adorno’s term), the promise embedded in a young bourgeois society. Schneider, above, is correct that this project failed. This failure is the road to disenchantment. And the David painting is an initial step away from classical sclerosis. And it is appropriate that it is a painting about Death.

“In an Alzheimer clinic, a round of “Happy Birthday” will lift heads off of chests and cause even those lips to move whose voices do not know where to follow. Musical memory is a primordial reflex, often enough—and increasingly so—establishing in the nervous system the Pavlovian other that residually spans self and reflection with the elegiacal cloak of “I still remember…” regardless of whether, beyond that sentiment, much if anything is being remembered. If there is truth to the philosophem that *il faut aimer*, then most of all *il faut aimer la musique.*”
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Introduction to Philosophy of Modern Music)

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