Jacques Barzun once said: “Art and the world are conditions and consequences of each other. Art imitates nature and nature imitates art. The wedded life of art and society is the union we call by the single name of culture.”[1]If we consider that we are now in a culture that excludes culture and knowledge, the marriage of art and society is not doing so well. Of course, this is not new. As Daniel Bell observed back in the 1970s: “the autonomy of culture, achieved in art, now begins to pass over into the arena of life. The post-modernist temper demands that what was previously played out in fantasy and imagination must be acted in life as well. There is no distinction between art and life. Anything permitted in art is permitted in life as well.”[2]
Anything permitted in life is also permitted in art. It becomes increasingly difficult to name what is or is not art today. We urgently need a term equivalent to “aesthetics” to beautify the signs of consumption. We have no inherited word for the play of signs, messages, texts, images, and cartoons, as well as all the objectified classic masterpieces. Deleuze advises us thatsimulacrum is this word. We have become simulacra. We have forsaken moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence. He gives us the tools: his notion that the simulacrum is the alternative mode of representation, and that schizophrenia is the alternative mode of subjectivity. We must “be 'straight’ by day and a 'swinger’ by night.”[3]
We have come to the point where we seethe world is so because I think so and I say so. You think so and say so, and I think so and say so. It is so. Now others, you, and I have overthrown being and representation. I speak and hear myself, and I am affected by the speech I produce. My very presence is the very presence of simulacra. We have become simulacra. I think therefore I am not, but we think therefore we are; we are simulacra. We suppose that we possess freedom, affluence, and democracy, but what we truly possess is the language of the embodied speaking and writing of the inner narrative of self. It is the consumer’s bodily hexis. As Bourdieu states: “Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed.”[4] Our relation to the world is actualized in the dimension of the virtual—or cybernetic—bodily hexis today.
Baudrillard states that the logic of consumption is defined by the manipulation of signs through the banality and repetition of everyday life. The symbolic value of objects and our symbolic relation of inwardness are externalized. The objective finality and function of everyday objects are altered. Objects lost their symbolic meaning and anthropomorphic status by being consumed into a discourse of the totalitarian system of integrating all significations. This recent history of the changing status of objects and their representation also reveals itself in art and literature. “After operating in the whole of traditional art as symbolic, decorative props, objects have ceased in the twentieth century to be indexed to moral and psychological values; they have ceased to live by proxy in the shadow of man and have begun to take on extraordinary importance as autonomous elements in an analysis of space (Cubism, etc.). They have as a result been fragmented, even to the point of abstraction.”[5]Baudrillard continues: “Let us formulate the matter another way: the logic of consumption eliminates the traditional sublime status of artistic representation. There is, strictly, no longer any privileging of the essence or signification of the object over the image. The one is no longer the truth of the other: they coexist in the same physical and logical space, where they also 'operate’ as signs.”[6]
Baudrillard calls this course of movementsimulacrum, an interment of the definition of object and subject, or, more precisely, an annulment of object and subject. This is the locus from which Deleuze offers his salvation: “The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction.” “There is no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all points of view. There is no possible hierarchy, no second, no third. . . .”[7] We have to legitimately nullify art in order to see its legitimacy. We are accustomed to questioning this legitimacy of art, but everybody keeps acting as if it still matters. As Baudrillard impeccably argues: “There is a mutual annulment of art and reality. Before, they used to potentialize each other, now they cancel each other out.”[8] “Modernity was the golden age of the deconstruction of reality into its component parts, a minute analysis starting with Impressionism and followed by Abstraction. It was experimentally open on all aspects of perception, sensibility, the structure of the object, and the dismemberment of forms.”[9] According to Baudrillard, in so doing we are set deeper in the classic duality:
The paradox of Abstraction is that by “liberating” the
object from the constraints of figure to return it to the pure play of form, it
chained the object down to a hidden structure, a stricter, more radical
objectivity than the objectivity of resemblance. It strove to tear off the mask
of resemblance and figure in order to reach the analytical truth of the object.
Under the auspices of Abstraction, we paradoxically moved towards even more
reality, towards an unveiling of the “elementary structures” of objectal- ity,
in other words towards something more real than real.[10]
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) verifies Baudrillard’s message:
That “objective”
element which has been reduced to a minimum must, in the case of abstraction,
be recognized as the most powerfully affective real element.
Thus, finally, we see that if in the case of great realism the real element
appears noticeably large and the abstract noticeably small, and if in the case
of great abstraction this relationship ap- pears to be reversed, then in their
ultimate basis (=goal) these two poles equal one another. Between these two
antipodes can be put an=sign:
Realism=Abstraction
Abstraction=Realism
The greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity.[11]
In the world of the postmodern mutual annulment of object and subject, “the greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity.”A specter is haunting the West—the heroic spirit of modernism—even if we keep acting as if it no longer matters. It was depicted as a timelessly screaming, violent, narcissistic, and unending self-contradictory project that is waning away. Now the specter of the waning of affect is haunting us in the world of postmodernism. We are losing our “emotion,” which used to be “projected out and externalized, as a gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling.” As the American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson writes:
Edward Munch’s paintingThe Scream is, of
course, a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation,
anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic
emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an
embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more,
as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which
seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have
vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the
postmodern. The very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation
within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and
outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often
cathartically, that “emotion” is then projected out and externalized, as
gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of
inward feeling.[12]
Anderson praises modernism as a time of “unrepeatable genius”: the collective movements of Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, with their heroes such as Proust, Eliot, and many others “separated the elective ground of the artist from theterrains vagues beyond.”[13] Jameson’s discussion of van Gogh’s canonical A Pair of Boots (1887) illustrates how the heroic spirit is separated from “the elective ground” in our time. He begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of the work:
“In them,” says Heidegger, “there vibrates the silent
call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic
self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” “This equipment,”
he goes on, “belongs to theearth, and it is protected in
the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh’s painting is the
disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in
truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being,” by way
of the mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and
earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant
woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and
broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth.[14]
Jameson then compares van Gogh’s shoes with Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980):
Andy Warhol’sDiamond Dust Shoes evidently no
longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I
am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this
painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the
turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some
inexplicable natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with
what are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the Freudian and the Marxian
senses (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe,
that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for
perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection
of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn
of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or
the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed
dance hall.[15]
We are cool and no longer able to scream any more. We are stuck in the current knowledge, and we are stuck with fetish objects and dead objects. We are affectless after all. Modernism is waning like a daydream. The modern and the postmodern remain utterly distinct in their meaning with respect to the social function, the economic system, and the sphere of culture in the contemporary world. While the modern is a nostalgic dream haunting us like a specter, the postmodern with its “plagues” is before our own eyes. “Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious,” as Jameson bleakly puts it, “namely, that this whole global, yet American, post- modern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.”[16]
Nevertheless, today’s art, the post-post aesthetic, has taken a new flight. In his brilliant account of postmodern art, the American art critic Donald Kuspit writes:
There is an air of sophisticated ennui to postmodern
art—appropriation art is the prime example—suggesting that art has become
meaningless however much meaning it claims to have. The postart blurring of the
boundary between art and life supposedly remedies the boredom and
meaninglessness of both, for if life is arty it is no longer boring, even if
artiness is boring. Art becomes empty and hollow when it no longer makes life
feel timely and vivid—when it no longer seduces us to life, as Nietzsche
said—and when it no longer makes us the gift of immortality by suggesting it
through its own aesthetic substance.
In short, art these postmodern days seems to have
become another depressing way of passing time rather than of reaching beyond
time, which is what it was for van Gogh. Art is no longer the path to salvation
it was for him, but rather confirms that life is damned because it is
meaningless, which is ultimately why art is meaningless, since it can do
nothing to rescue life from itself. Today’s postart seduces us to death, not
life. Warhol is the ultimate postmodern postartist, for he neither knows nor
cares whether his business art—or is it art business?—is more art than business
or more business than art. This suggests that he neither knows nor cares what
art is, indicating that he doesn’t believe in it—certainly not the way van Gogh
did. More particularly, Warhol doesn’t believe that it has anything to do with
eternity. It can no longer envision a world that is not run like a business,
that is, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing is priceless. The
void left by the absence of faith in art is filled by the presence of money.
Art’s existence comes to depend on it, as though without money to sustain it,
it would collapse into non-art. But Warhol’s work shows that it is possible to
be both art and non-art—it’s the postmodern way of being nothing in particular
while seeming to be everything. If money is only as meaningful as what it buys,
and if what it buys is not meaningful as art—art that is unequivocally art
rather than art whose identity is equivocally split between art and non-art—then
money becomes meaningless. Money can only compromise itself by buying into
something compromised in itself—something as inherently flawed as business art.
If postmodern business art also signals the bankruptcy and meaninglessness of
modern nonbusi- ness art, then it is completely nihilistic.[17]
Are we too smart and critical to be guided by art to the hope for health, peace, and life? Are we seduced instead by art toward death (meaninglessness, neurotic impulse, or schizophrenia)? Today’s art, then, is not only meaningless but also harmful. Likewise, if consumption is only as meaningful as what we consume, and if what we consume does not rescue or free us from being objectified, then consumption is a destruction of life. “But one must say,” Derrida writes, “that if the commodity corrupts (art, philosophy, religion, morality, law, when their works become market values), it is because the becoming-commodity already attested to the value it puts in danger. For example: if a work of art can become a commodity, and if this process seems fated to occur, it is also because the commodity began by putting to work, in one way or another, the principle of an art.”[18]This post-post aesthetic and this post-post consumption are the end of history.
If Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) ended the unrepeatable heroic history of the changing status of objects and their representation with the notion of the “readymade,” then Warhol brought traditional aesthetics to its end, that is: commodity consumption. As Baudrillard notes, “Art is then only an almost magic operation: the object is transferred in its banality into an aesthetics that turns the entire world into a readymade.” He continues: “all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal: a commutation takes place between the two fields of banality and aesthetics, one that truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end.”[19]Today’s aesthetic production is integrated into commodity production. Art is affluence. Affluence is democracy. Democracy is Global-ness. Global-ness is the end of history.
Duchamp freed us from aesthetics and art, but we have wound up having neither objects nor art, since “the banality of art is mixed up with the banality of the real world—Duchamp’s gesture, with the automatic transfer of the object.”[20]It is a good show—very much like a magician turning roses into doves. Everything is readymade today: art, food, culture, politics, and ourselves. In short, life is readymade. Readymade is art. Everything turns into a pure object, says Baudrillard:
Simulacra are no longer simulacra, they have become
materially evident—fetishes, perhaps, both completely depersonalized,
desymbolized and yet at maximum intensity, directly invested as medium—just
like fetish objects, with no aesthetic mediation. That may be where our most
superficial, stereotyped objects recover the power of exorcism, equal to
sacrificial masks. Exactly like masks, which absorb the identity of the actors,
the dancers, the spectators, and which have the function to provoke a sort of
thaumaturgic (traumaturgic?) vertigo.[21]
This resurrection of objects is the foremost religion today. Jeff Koons’s three-foot-tall stainless-steelRabbit sold at Christie’s for $91.1 million in May 2019. It officially became the most expensive work sold by a living artist in history. Koons claims to use materialism to seduce the viewer and to meet the needs of the viewer just as the church does. According to Koons, the church is a great master manipulator of materialism; going to church makes people feel as though they are participating in social mobility and their needs are being met.[22] Kuspit says, “Koons was a stockbroker before he became a postartist, indicating that he knew where the real money was, and knew something about market.”[23] Koons’s personal life is his art and his art is his life; there is no boundary or difference in his reality—the postmodern way of being nothing in particular but of being everything, which has been exalted and bought by the public. The problem is: what the public has bought is the void left by the absence of faith in life, which has been filled by the presence of money. Baudrillard calls it a “conspiracy of art” between the creator and consumer.
There is a
shameful complicity shared by creators and consumers in a silent communion as
they consider strange, inexplicable objects that only refer to themselves and
to the idea of art. The real conspiracy, however, lies in art’s complicity with
itself, its collusion with reality, becoming complicit as the mere return-image
of this Integral Reality. There is no longer any possible difference in art.
Only the integral calculation of reality remains. Art now is only an idea
prostituted in its production. . . .[24]
What could miraculously reassure us about the essence of art today? Art is
simply what is discussed in the art world, in the artistic community that
frantically stares at itself. Even the “creative” act replicates itself to
become nothing more than the sign of its own operation—the true subject of a
painter is no longer what he or she paints but the very fact that he or she
paints. The painter paints the fact that he or she paints. In that way, at
least, the idea of art is saved.
This is only one aspect of the conspiracy.
The other aspect is the viewer who, most of the time, does not understand
anything, and consumes his or her own culture twice removed. The viewer
literally consumes the fact that he or she does not understand it and that it
has no necessity to it other than the cultural imperative of belonging to the
integrated circuit of culture. But culture itself is only an epiphenomenon of
global circulation. . . .[25]
Yes, but here is the point: it is all the more necessary to talk about art now
that there is nothing to say about it. Paradoxically, the movement to
democratize art only reinforced the privilege of the idea of art, culminating
in the banal tautology “art is art.” Everything can supposedly be summed up in
this circular definition. . . .[26]
That was its true democracy, not in allowing everyone access to aesthetic pleasure
but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which each object without
distinction would have its fifteen minutes of fame (especially objects without
distinction). Everyone is equal, everything is great. The upshot came in the
transformation of art and the work itself into an object, without illusion or
transcendence, a purely conceptual acting out, generating deconstructed objects
that deconstruct us in turn.[27]
Now, stuck in between the post-post aesthetic and post-post consumption, how much do we know ourselves? Perhaps not too much. You wonder whether you are wasting your time with such non-sense. However, the real non-sense here is that you do not have anytime to waste in consumer society. Like air or water, as an absolute and inalienable dimension, time is no longer “an a priori, transcendent dimension, which pre-exists its contents.”[28] You no longer have time because time has been taken and exploited by the system of consumption. Time becomes the rarest and most precious commodity in consumer society. It is true of working time, since it is bought and sold. It is truer that “free time itself has to be directly or indirectly purchased before it can be 'consumed’ ” today.[29]Baudrillard writes,
Of most objects, one can still say that they have a
certain use-value, which is in theory dissociable from their exchange-value.
But is this true of time? Where is the use-value that could be defined by some
objective function or specific practice? For this is the exigency which lies at
the bottom of 'free’ time:that we restore to time its use-value, that we
liberate it as an empty dimension to fill it with its individual freedom. Now,
in our system, time can only be 'liberated’ as object, as chronometric capital of
years, hours, days, weeks, to be 'invested’ by each person 'as he pleases’. It
is already, therefore, no longer in fact 'free’, since it is governed in its
chronometry by the total abstraction which is that of the system of
production.[30]
Leisure is no longer everyone’s private property. “The demand underlying leisure is, therefore, an insolubly contradictory and truly desperate one.”[31]Says Baudrillard: “Of leisure we may say that 'When you “have” time, it is no longer free.’ And the contradiction here is not one of the terms, but of substance. This is the tragic paradox of consumption.”[32] According to Baudrillard, we are tethered to “our” time “as Prometheus was tethered to his rock, tethered to the Promethean myth of time as productive force.”[33] In the end, “it is we who have become the excrement of money, it is we who have become the excrement of time.”[34]
Now that we have rambled through these long citations of text, we have only a little idea about what the modern language and knowledge, and philosophy and art, can do to the self, and to you and me in everyday life. We have only a little idea about what kind of self we deserve. The little answer is simple: it is all about the awareness of the self—the modern or the postmodern, whichever suits your feeling at the moment—the same awareness of the self that mankind has gazed upon from the beginning. It is as Foucault says:
The conclusion would be that the political, ethical,
social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the
individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate
us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked
to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal
of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several
centuries.[35]
Our problem is obviously about what we know, not about what we don’t know. The imperative is not to discover what we know, but to refuse what we know; and not to innovate or deconstruct what we know but to unlearn and relearn what we know. This civilizational and cultural horizon is clearly bleak. It is futile to engage the attempt to find a deeper, hidden, universal reason to solve our problem. Whatever the discipline or practice that concerns us is one culturally and practically mediated by a form of actual experience.
Culture, as the
soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its
mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality:
As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-history:
As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding: —this is the
language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes.[36]
Excerpt From: Fuoco B. Fann. “This Self We Deserve.”
References
[1]
Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art, (Princeton and Chichester, UK:
Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 127.
[2] Daniel Bell, quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism,
Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1987), p. 6.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson.
Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991), p. 86.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by
Chris Turner, (London and Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 1998), p. 115.
[6] Ibid., 115.
[7] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles
Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990), p. 269.
[8]Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays.
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Ames Hodges, (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2005), p. 78.
[9] Ibid., 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. Edited by Kenneth
C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 244-245.
[12] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 11-12.
[13] Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, (London and New York: Verso,
2006), p. 93.
[14] Jameson, Postmodernism, 8.
[15] Ibid., 8.
[16] Ibid., 5.
[17] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 159-161.
[18] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, (New York and
London: Routledge Classics, 1994), p. 204.
[19] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 89.
[20] Ibid., 90.
[21] Ibid., 123.
[22] Caldwell, Jeff Koon, 99.
[23] Kuspit, The End Of Art, 83.
[24] Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 89.
[25] Ibid., 91.
[26] Ibid., 91-92.
[27] Ibid., 92.
[28] Ibid., 151.
[29] Ibid., 153.
[30] Ibid., 152.
[31] Ibid., 155.
[32] Ibid., 152.
[33] Ibid., 154
[34] Ibid., 155.
[35] Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 216.
[36] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West; Volume I: Form and Actuality.
Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p.
180.
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