A conservator brush vacuums Konskie III, a Frank Stella
painting in the Glass House collection.

Credit: Courtesy Luca Bonetti

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

---Robert Lowell

As Robert Lowell says in the Skunk Hour, my mind is not right.  There are “things” I want to say, I can see them and try to pull them together.  But I can’t. Maybe it is all the antihistamines I have been taking lately, although I know there are also issues.  There are reasons why I talk to (with) a therapist.

As others have pointed out in my last blog, at least my political despair is obvious.  From Obey:

But here is something I personally find more interesting and more important about our disagreement. Like I said, I don't have a problem with how post-structuralists apply their theories to particular spheres of discourse. It's the general attendant post-structuralist weltanschauung that bothers me. Or in ... um ... English - it's the attitude of deep scepticism concerning any and all frames of reference that adherents of this philosophy tend to adopt. As a general outlook on the world, it strikes me as a philosophy of despair. But it is a comforting form of despair because it removes all seriousness from any inquiry. Everything is an illusion - even the very notion of there being illusions. I'm not saying that is a central conceit of pomo philosophy, it's just the resulting ingrained confident sense you end up with after exercising one's deconstructive arts. It strikes me as a world-negating form of detachment. Some may consider that a zen-like virtue. I find it to be a vice (and its an impression I got from meeting some of the main pomo french philosophers).

And one that I see as infecting your political attitude. If I may say how you come across from my vantage point - you seem less attached to, or confident about, the solidity of the liberal web of beliefs and values (eg. war, torture, economic and social justice) than many, and yet highly attached to, or confident about, the solidity of the current political structure of the country (the only possible progress is to be effected through existing structures and by small increments). I find the latter to be highly unstable - like tectonic plates floating on liquid magma, the solidity is illusory, and change on the surface tends to happen in sudden sharp moves (cf. North Africa). And I see the liberal values not as some kind of utopian ideals, but as realistic, realizable goals in the here and now.

If there is something in that I want to push back on it is the idea that, at least for me, it is not a “comforting despair because it removes all seriousness from any inquiry.”  If anything it heightens the seriousness of inquiry, places the very dynamics of inquiry into a forefront.  If we are believe that the problems into which we inquire are important, then we should be just as serious about the manner in which inquire.  Moreover, if we are talking some socio-political problem, we have to eventually confront the “fact” that not only are those inquiring into problem are humans with all their psychological and linguistic freight, but that the solution will involve humans with all of their psychological and linguistic freight.   

A couple of days ago I was talking with long-time union guy, one who spent a number of years as a negotiator at the collectively bargaining table.  At one point in the conversation regarding the current political situation in this country, he sighed “we were too successful and now too many of our members have become Republicans.”  If the problem is how to bring these particular folks back to the liberal fold, then it means grasping the dynamics of perception and understanding--why does this message and not that message resonate? 

If one delves into those dynamics in the hopes of getting the message out…it is enough to generate a little political despair.  And so I turn again to Herbert Blau from Take Up the Bodies to give a sense of what I mean by these dynamics:

Ideas of depth and surface…have been among the most controversial notions of modern art since the rearguard against perspective pushed reality up front.  It is as if Cezanne were behind the canvass like Sisyphus shoving the rocks toward the picture plane.  From there on, it is all surface.  What you see is what it is, ruling out illusionary depth.  Wanting to see it on the surface, no coverup, it is the aesthetic counterpart of political demysticification.  The same attitude occurs in psychology of behavior when we prefer people who are “up front” and “all there,” although in the theater that is something of a problem as it is not in the strictly graphic arts.  We have all seen an actor who is, as far as we can tell, all there and up front too, though he may not be very much.  Or there may be more to him than appears, but he has no idea as to why he’s there.

The formalist ethos of the sixties and seventies was defined for painting by Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see” – a critical variant of the proposition above, which is always and invariably true.  The problem is the parameters and paradoxes of seeing as related to presence. The thing there is what is there.  But some of what you see is what you want to see.  That is also there. Some of what you see is what you can’t help seeing, despite  what’s there (in one sense), since it’s all there (in another sense).  Thus, there is a patina of perception on the painting that is almost more troublesome than successive layers of unwarranted varnish on Old Master. Restoration is always tricky.  It may be trickier in the mind than in the hand.  In order to exclude subjective laminations from the painting, the artist may be quite willing to accept, like Stella, formalistic and technical laminations—what is there making its points with art history.  As the innovations proliferate, one displacing another, presence is a function of what is no longer present, and the immediate present (what we see?) is subsumed in the continuity of the art world (with its inseparable laminations of criticism and publicity: what we see is what we read), a privileged history if not a washout.  As things turn to words, we have not only the trace of history but the basis of Conceptual Art.

Blau could be as easily talking about the blogosphere and politics.  Those subjective laminations may drive us to despair, the trace of history may frustrate, the infinite patinas of perception generate endless miscommunications and misunderstandings, but we can’t ignore them if we are going to actually achieve something positive and sustainable.

Now, for Quinn’s response from my previous blog.  Rather than try to summarize it or link to it, I offer it in nearly its entirety, in part because I think it has much to offer and everyone should give it a read.  There is little in what he writes with which I would argue.

1. Uncertainty. I completely agree on the need for skepticism or uncertainty about one's own worldview, and especially when it comes to politics. It's one thing to muck up your own life, but quite another to be myopic or unconscious or rigidly ideological when it comes to sorting out joint social problems like war and other life/death decisions. One way I try to do that is my adjusting the level and type of my political commitments - sometimes I work hard and offer ideas and contact people and so on; and other times I critique, or maybe work to challenge a candidate, or create community pressure on them; etc.

2. Vs. Action. The trick with uncertainty, is, of course, to still be able to act. And not just act when the mood hits, or in limited ways - but to be able to commit yourself, full throttle, to the fray. Because many of the single-minded fanatics enter politics with incredible force, or amazing patience. So, whether it's passion or endurance, we of uncertain mind have to be able to match the fanatic - while not copying them.

3. It Blowed Up Real Good. I love reading deconstructions, and agree they've been around for centuries, and exist in all fields, and everyday people do it, etc. Or should I say, 'loved" reading deconstructions. I loved reading people who'd soaked themselves in some institution or artwork or political moment or book or concept, and who would then slice it open in the most extraordinary ways. But the joy in it came from the fact that they had in fact SOAKED themselves in it, lived it, experienced it, felt it, whatever. Take Nietzsche on Protestantism. The Death of God guy spent YEARS actually IN the front pew. So when they would apply their perspectives, and slice it and tear the frame off and reach in and pull out the emotional load and force its inner tensions to blow it up... it was wonderful. And incredibly freeing. I loved was never seeing the nation-state the same way again, or freedom, or wealth, or religion, or tv, etc.

4. But Some Wanted To Blow Up Everything. Everyday. And this was always opposed, in my mind and reading and study, to the "totalists." The "systematizers." The ones who had some grand framework, or fabulous method, or all-seeing eye, and who had to shove everything through that orifice. As a certain German fellow said, "I distrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." And I had a good nose for sniffing out totalizers, precisely because I was one of them. I had that horrific desire to complete every set, to include everything in anything. But... I began to break out of it after a time. The thing was, however, I became more aware of how widespread they were. Easy enough to see them when they walk into a Church. And there were also the academics who did this with structuralism of one form or another. Same thing happened in Marxism, with the structuralist school which thought everything was to be shoved into some grand all-knowing all-absorbing world-spanning life-sucking capitalist machine, which was - once you boiled it down - invincible. But there were many other totalists. There were Marxists and Feminists and people who worshipped John Rawls and analytical philosophers and maybe the worst, the narrow political ideologue and the party hack - I'm New Left, New Right, New Democrat, Neo-Conservative, Liberal, Labour, etc. And I took great joy in tearing them all - the intellectuals and the political types - new ones. Deconstructing, ripping, slicing, whatever I could to make it obvious that their systematizing didn't work.

5. Self-Destruction. Then came the plague of pomo, the profs and the kids who just couldn't stop the self-abuse. Not ever. Worst of all, beyond their totalism, was that their work was lazy. Second-rate. They had immersed themselves in nothing other than their own misery and self-absorption. And since they had nothing in particular to say - because they KNOW anything in particular - they whipped up frothier and frothier theoretical language. Meanwhile, in person, they struck poses and yawned, deconstructed themselves and their own views, fell into intellectual and political comas. Their new worldview was totalist, completely self-referential, politically neutered, and gave them no traction in the real world. They rendered themselves useless.

6. Political Despair. Pretty much everyone commenting here has picked up the same sense. That it led to political despair. And if there's a real-world train hurtling off the tracks, that despair is not useful. And even if someone really into pomo remained motivated, the theory itself wasn't of much help in a practical setting.

7. Back To The Particular. For me, and a couple of dozen friends, we lived in this world, and then.... took a turn. Towards the particular. And the politically practical. This was 1983-86'ish. We were all on the fast track to the tenured top of the ivory tower, and yet somehow decided that all this theory was ending up nowhere, while the world's poltical train was hurtling off a cliff, driven by the mad men and women of the New Right. So, we headed out toward the particular, starting with getting some not-quite-so-far-to-the-right people elected, and thus aimed to halt the advance of the Reagan/Thatcherite/New Right project, and buy some time for people to create and grow the alternatives. Were we uncertain, you bet. Was the task incomplete, absolutely. But would any of us have preferred a world in which the Dems lost in 92 and 96? Probably not. And after that push, I think it's safe to say, we LIKED it. We liked the world of particulars. And so, we got stuck in.

8. Tools. And I find that even now, 25 years on, I don't have much time for pomo or popo theory. The particulars, the case studies, the projects - done well, they're still a joy. Immersing myself in a field is the only way I know how anymore. And then... once waist-deep in it... I get to use the tools that geniuses like Nietzsche and Feyerabend and Bateson and Mary Daly and a batch of others provided. For example, and it sounds funny, but I try to build things that are reversible, for instance. "Reversibility" is a really useful idea, and it builds in uncertainty, a bit of humility. Same as the concept of thresholds - the important thresholds we don't know about with any precision, so best to give them a wide berth. And the dynamics of the change. I spent years of my life immersed in polls, and I can tell you, if you go back over them, the daily wave of polling results and info we hear do NOT translate into a longer or even middle-term outcome. Politics is still more chemistry than mathematics - Bobby Kennedy knew it. Or ratios. I learned that when I'm growing an alternative, it's a big big thing to get from 1% to 10% - and making that trek moves you out of hopelessness. You go from being outweighed 99:1 to 9:1. And people believe you can beat 9:1. So I worked hard on growing things til they had that better ratio - a fighting chance for the future.

And that, if I may be so bold Trope, is where I'd genuinely second Obey's comment….[the second paragraph of Obey’s comment above]

9. Power. It's like what I was saying to you earlier about power. There is an extraordinary over-emphasis in American political discussion on the political institutions as they presently exist. In many cases, it's downright worship - of the constitution or division of powers or bill of rights or whatever. It's like listening to political fundamentalists talk, to be frank. But just to go back to our discussion, I believe that only a fraction of real "power" is found in the nexus of the Governors Office the Senate and the House, or even in the process of voting for them. Sure, these existing structures and their existing practices are important. But they're a long yard from eternal, complete and immutable. For starters, there's power - and an independent right to exist - in the press, the internet, in wealth and property, in spending habits, the environment, NGO's, unions, civic society, church, family, universities, art, culture, film, music, novels, new ways kids relate, Twitter, blogs, cafes, street life, new political campaigns and performances. And this is always and everywhere changing, and often is being changed deliberately, by people. By us. Which means the grand rights and ultimate powers claimed by those in office in no way need to be agreed to in the form or at the level they wish. And even if granted by myself, and others, they are only provisionally given.

Seen in this wider lens, the "power" that the "people" of Wisconsin "handed" to the "Republican Governor" is a fraction of the power in play in Wisconsin.. Seen through the wider lens, Union opposition and runaway Senators become colourful parts in a much wider set of power plays than the narrow lens being forced upon us by a focus purely on methods and tactics and rules within a particular piece of the existing political apparatus. We probably both agree that we are only going to get the political change we need if we reorient this much larger field of powers, if we bring very new methods and techniques to bear on the existing political machinery, if we rethink both our goals our policies and our means, if we resee the whole damned thing. But the hard part is that we have to do this on the fly - we can't take 7 years off for a good long seminar. And we have to make particular our support - at some stage in the process, the booth beckons or the sides form up in the streets. And yet, we have to keep at least one eye on the wider, longer view - and not be devoured by the wisdom of those focussed on the next vote.

10. People. And it's the too-close-to-the-coalface ideologues that are my least favourite part of being here at Dag or at TPM. The voices with their locked in conceptions of the Democratic Party or being liberal or of Obama or how the institutional structure works or how the American people think. For example, apparently, I'm a lefty "progressive," and thus, must have not liked Clinton, and have never had a sniff of power or done any real work, and know nothing about how things "really" work. Their fanaticism is that of the self-proclaimed practical, realistic, political person. What I see are people as swallowed in a single all-absorbing worldview as were the structuralist Marxists, and as are the Fundamentalist Christians.

Because what I know and lived from the era of Bill's win, and what I've since learned during 20+ years since of working with lefty governments in power - somehow it's all washed away, in all its particulars, by these people who have decided they know the only way things can be done. They dominate the Democratic Party, and yet... they really don't like debate. I often agree on the course they're proposing, but you've heard them, and I swear it's ALWAYS the same storyline, framework and worldview - it's always about having to stop the Republicans (as though the thought hadn't crossed anyone's mind!!), but that can ONLY be translated into meaning that we all have to support the latest cabinet appointment (e.g. "sure Robert Gates was a war criminal, but it sends a signal of compromise to the Republicans, and will calm voters worried about national security. And... derp.), or accept why the President can't do anything (there just aren't the votes, and the bully pulpit is overrated, and and and and), or why we need to compromise yet again with the "right" (as though no one had ever gained by fighting on principle, or fighting and losing on the day in order to position oneself for the war), or accept this poll which clearly shows the way Americans are and always have been and always will be (gulp.) Their self-image though, is not of a fanatic or an ideologue, bur rather of a "practical" person, a compromising liberal, a "serious" person, with "realistic" views.

Now this blog originally started out as a response to what Quinn wrote and has since spun out of control.  The point he makes in #9 alone is worthy of a whole series of blogging discourses.  But in the process of developing a response, the issue of the form of blogs (and their comments) emerged as needing to be addressed.  And this brought me back to Blau, which is a continuation of what I quoted of him above:

Robert Lowell, in his Notebooks, speaks of “the mortmain of ephemera” – but his is an old-fashioned psychological voice pondering the heavy burden of things in the undertow of time through the heavier burden of language, from which history (in the unconscious) never seems to recede.  At its most complex and pertinent, the commitment to surface in art comes out of an impatience with the refuge of the Freudian unconscious, compounded by language.  We may, like Cleopatra, have immortal longings in us, but if they’re going to show up in art, they’re going to be hanging out there, exposed, like the lights in the Brechtian theater.

What we’ve learned from exposure of the mechanisms is that the problem of any form is the form itself.  The medium by which we think is the problem of which we think.  The problem with the theater, as I see it, is that there is always somebody there thinking, or a piece of him.  About that, Grotowski’s posture was inarguable: whether the theater is “poor” or not, it always returns to the actor, which complicates the surface as paint doesn’t.  The technology of the visual arts, which increases energy by directing it to a flat plane, is undermined in the theater, which is forever seized upon by receding space.  The actor may think in two dimensions, and may even have a one-dimensional mind, but the corporeality of the body is, to begin with, a merciless skeptic, insisting on perspective, and therefore the illusion of depth.  It refuses to be “reduced” to less than what it is.  The actor, moreover, brings along the recessive freight of the unconscious, like it or not.  Since the actor is his own most irreducible problem, there is always the danger not only of subjectivity but of solipsism.

This last sentence brings up a charge leveled towards those who might wax philosophical too much in topics others are seeking action (see Quinn’s points 1 and 2).  Blau, speaking of his own “ingrown addiction to the self that might be better served in poetry if I were driven to write poetry as I have been driven to do theater”, addresses this topic this way:

The disease of politics comes and goes.  The ideals of consciousness are a sorer temptation.  I’m not sure what place there really is in the theater for solipsism, if not a primary narcissism, that only knows what it means because there can be no meaning outside for itself.  If I had the courage of my convictions, I’d never think of myself.  But since I do, extrapolating back and forth through the burning oil—is it here or is it there?***—I’ve tried to create a theater form that deals with the perceptual dilemma outright….

That other kind of theater may have better motives.  I increasingly believe that if one has the choice, and one does, it’s better to think in terms of purpose, mission, action, task, service to others than in terms of identity, alienation, otherness, division, being-in-itself-for-itself ad nauseam, not values but default of value.  It is a matter of preferring the illusion of objective cause to the self-destruct mechanisms of a vain introversion….One of the values of the work I have been doing is that, by introversion, it teases you out of thought to such a conclusion.  The subjectivity is irredeemable.  The equivocation turns up in the technique, not as a contradiction but as the methodology itself.

(***In order to understand this reference, an earlier part of the book, he is referring to a down period of his life after getting tossed from his position at the Lincoln Center in 1967. 

While theater was moving into the streets, it occurred to me to offer my services to some political action group.  But after years of running the show I was used to being charge, and it would have been hard for me to serve, participatorily, in the lower echelons.  Field work and stamp licking were out, and I didn’t think I could break into the civil rights leadership.  So I wrote letters and read much and dreamed up equivocations, with some remorse of conscience, as the Vietnam War dragged on.  The war on certain days seemed less senseless than other natural disasters in the deranged ecological cycle.  To wit—March 1967—the RAF was bombing a tanker which spilled out near the coast of Cornwall, jeopardizing more than a hundred miles of beach, oyster breeding and bird refuges, as well as the coast of France, where the oil was drifting.  It was one of those catastrophes of floating technology almost more disturbing than the experimental technology of a napalmed village, because there seemed no one to blame.  Of course there were soon rumors that the government had hesitated to order the bombing because of insurance loss. There were pictures of soiled beaches and asphyxiated birds, guillemets, gannets, and ospreys, which were being bathed one by one to remove the oil slick, those which survived.  It was going to take months of convalescence to restore the lubricity for flight.  I thought, looking at the picture of the burning oil, is there an albatross or an actor signaling through the flames?)

A previous therapist once said to me after one of my ramblings: “you take ambivalence to an art form.”  It could have inserted equivocation into the statement just as well.  And there we are back again to despair.  The call of action is there, but can I trust it.

Quinn writes in Point 9:

For starters, there's power - and an independent right to exist - in the press, the internet, in wealth and property, in spending habits, the environment, NGO's, unions, civic society, church, family, universities, art, culture, film, music, novels, new ways kids relate, Twitter, blogs, cafes, street life, new political campaigns and performances.

Let’s think about spending habits.  The power of the consumer.  I was doing a little research on Lowell’s “mortmain of ephemera” (and there is a whole blog in that) and came across the journal ephemera.

They have a call out for submissions for one of their special issues on the politics of consumptions:

The recent explosion in student and popular protests around the world refutes the neoliberal hypothesis of consumption as a matter of human capital machines maximizing their utility from within the confines of an already existing political-economic configuration. Cracks are now appearing in the smile of the self-satisfied ‘happiness machine’ . The market as a-moral proposition no longer holds sway. The consuming subject can no longer happily reconcile itself to its status as consumer and consumer alone. Today, the very act of consumption shows itself as something extra-individual, as something beyond particular interests, as something pertaining to the very nature of the social bond - in short, as something inherently political. Whether and to what extent there might be reason to again consider the possibilities and pitfalls of a politics of consumption is the guiding question which we would like to ask contributors to engage with here.

We say again, of course, in order to acknowledge something potentially retrogressive in raising a call for papers on the basis of just this sort of question. Classical Marxism, after all, had long ago offered at least four bases upon which a critique of consumption might be grounded: an alienated activity in an alienated world, production’s mirror image within labour’s moments of subsistence, a fetishistic endeavour approximating commodity misrecognition, and/or capitalism’s systemic reproduction across ever more dispersed but fundamentally inter-related circuits. Classical Marxism, at least in these reductive senses, invites us to think consumption as something approximating the epiphenomenal. Yes, consumption is an important component within capitalist social relations. But a critique of political economy cannot simply be reduced to a critique of consumption. Yes, consumption matters. But on the question of first and last things, it doesn’t seem to matter quite as much as production does.

This, of course, has not been Marxism’s final word on the matter. Nor can it be. Nor will it be here. As Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1998) famously illustrates, the object of Marx’s Capital, Industrial Capitalism, has itself evolved quite fundamentally since his time. The reality of late capitalism therefore requires a new critique of political economy – one which would be capable of accounting for a largely post-industrialist capitalism wherein the figure of the consumer becomes increasingly important. Fredric Jameson also insists that this need to confront capitalism’s new instantiations, of which consumerism is an undoubtedly central aspect, was the general project which the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, the French ‘post-Marxists’ and the Critical Aestheticians of their day collectively inherited (1984). This ongoing project has hardly been silenced underneath the warp and woof of today’s increasingly virtualised economy – Bauman’s ‘subjectivityfetishism’ (2007), Žižek’s ‘enlightened false-consciousness’ (1989) and Stiegler’s ‘pharmacology of capitalism’ (2010) each confront contemporary consumption as something other than an immaterial mesh of apolitical individualism. Far beyond the epiphenomenal decree shown to it by Paleo-Marxism, in other words, the contemporary critique of consumption is now both alive and well.

Alive and well too, however, we find the non- and anti- Marxist analysis of consumption: post-Marxism in a negative key. Perhaps nowhere is the would-be grave of Marxism danced upon more emphatically than within marketing and consumer research. Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) chief proponents boast of how the ‘stale polemic’ that ‘portrays consumer culture as a domain of ideological indoctrination and consumers as passive dupes of the capitalist culture industry’ has been jettisoned in favour of a more dialogueinfused model (Arnould and Thompson, 2007: 9). Critical Marketing’s spokespeople, for their part, describe their contribution as an ‘eclectic framework of critique which leaves space for many voices other than those of card carrying critical theorists’ (Brownlie et al,1999: 9). Similarly, beyond business and management studies, the (post)-Marxist account of consumption is confronted with the same sort of fatalistic pragmatism. Daniel Miller (2010: 80), for example, complains that research ‘dressed in the guise of critical or radical political endeavour’ is little other than a ‘claimed [italics added] concern with the actually oppressed conditions of our humanity’ whilst Binkley and Littler’s (2008: 520) introduction to contemporary anti-consumerist sentiment bemoans the ‘chest-thumping denunciations of the ‘culture industry’... one of the left’s favourite intellectual parlour games’. The critique of the critique of consumption, it seems, offers just as great a hurdle to the critique of consumption as does the unreflective affirmation of consumption.

Whether a critique of consumption, therefore, and whether such a critique might pertain to a politics, or not: such is the sort of questioning we invite contributors to engage with and respond towards here, again. On the one hand, submissions might produce an account of the limits and possibilities for a critique of consumption today by drawing upon conceptual and/or empirical resources. On the other hand, submissions might also want to address and assess the various ways in which the critique of consumption has been presented, represented and misrepresented, particularly within non- and anti-Marxist writings. In all cases, potential contributors are encouraged to contact the editors as early as possible for an initial discussion of their ideas on how to respond to this call for papers.

So…something to think about as wander about (and consume) as poor passing facts.