[having read to p. 86]
The "new spirit" of capitalism is the set of arguments made, at a given time (it's a periodizing concept), for the value of capitalism over and above the justification internal to it (i.e. its ontology): to invest capital in order to make more capital. Assumed is the fact that financial gain alone is not enough to motivate people to invest in companies as thoroughly as they need to invest to produce the labor that they company needs produced. But this is not just an ideological concept in the sense of a veil over the real. It describes the real, lived conditions of people's lives, both of the capitalists and the wage workers.
B and C are concerned with two eras and the changes btw them: the 60's and the 90's. The triangle of concepts their book is located within is: capitalism, spirit of capitalism, critique. Critique is internal to and an engine of the spirit of capitalism. It drives the move from one spirit to another. In that sense, capitalism always internalizes critique. The critique that drove the spirit of capitalism in the 60s was a critique of "familial capitalism," capitalism wherein promotions and value generally at companies was driven capriciously, nepotistically. As a effect of this critique, capitalism was re-organized around a more "accountable" set of goals and objectives, which could be known, and counted on. Companies thus came to look more transparent, internal value more fair. Business seemed more meritocratic, so managers [their main source of data is management lit in France] could invest more, personally, in the job.
In the 90s, the critique of hierarchy continued, now pursued all the way to the critique of large companies, bureaucracies and inflexibility. Touted now was the networked company, who focused on a core business and contracted the rest out. Who was organized around flexible teams and projects. In this system, control was internalized (self-control) and externalized (the client becomes the boss). The control of direct management was also replaced by the control of company "vision" and "core values," with which one is supposed to identify, and which thereby becomes an instrument of self-control. This is true at the level of factory workers, who (e.g. in Toyota, held up as a model) become responsible for day to day production demands, and the "health" of the line. On average, everyone needs more education and is said to be more autonomous.
When critics talk about capitalism as the enemy of, say, avant garde art, what part of capitalism do they mean? And is art world capitalism (galleries) organized like the capitalism operated and modeled by Toyota? What period of capitalism do they mean? Are they talking about the changes to capitalism or its constants (exploitation, capital re-investment, homogenization)?
If the problem that Beacon faces is incorporation by the institutions of capitalism, and the goal it seeks is critique of it, what part threatens to incorporate it? Or, in a rosier model, what part does it critique?
Showing posts with label critique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critique. Show all posts
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Rate of Change v. Direction of Change (Slowing v. Stopping)
Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e. in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which may well depend upon us [Polanyi, Karl: Origins of Our Time, p. 44-5].
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Critique v. Complaint
What is the difference between "critique" in Boltanski's and Chiapello's terms (marks the difference between a desireable and an actual state of affairs, p. 27) and "complaint" in Berlant's?
Monday, June 9, 2008
What Will Happen Next (CAW 6.9.08)
[In attendance: Manol G, Anna L, Christa R, E. Capper, Christina ? (visiting DOVA scholar), Stephanie B, Lisa Z, Daniel (MAPH), Darby E, Matthew JJ, Ian B]
(Christa) What about the avant garde? Why don't you mention them? Do they need to be mentioned? Maybe it's more exciting to leave that formulation out of it?
This strikes me as useful because it's so closely related to what I had in mind by defining the field of my project, or the object of my attack, as "politicizing art history." That framing and the AG are not synonymous, but they are clearly related, depending on how specifically one defines the AG (on the most general end, it could be something like "politicizing art;" on the other, closer to P. Burger, it could be art that takes the goal of its politics to be the interruption of the autonomy of art).
I'm not sure its an egregious omission (I was already self-conscious about focusing too much on Buchloh; there is some usefulness to ignoring their work, if the goal is to make some space outside of or around it). But conversations around the AG has monopolized the politic conversation around art, to the extent that Ranciere develops an elaborate theory whose point is to overturn that story of modernism, to set the clock back further into the 19th c, to prioritize realism, to evacuate the false efficacy of the distinction between art and life. At the very least, re-reading in this area is going to be essential for the next draft (H. Foster, more Buchloh, A. Fraser, P. Burger; see also Crimp's refusal to deal with the AG).
In that spirit, I re-read H. Foster's "Whose afraid of the neo-avant garde?" this morning. It's an attempt to recuperate P. Burger's theory of the AG from its simplistic, and disastrous temporality. Burger defines the AG by its efforts to resist the assumed autonomy of art. In that, the project was always going to fail, but it was a heroic failure. Foster's concern is with his dismissal of the neo-AG (c. 1970) as a dismal repetition of the AG, a failed attempt to repeat the gestures of the original AG. Farce following tragedy. Foster wants to clear space for a better, more hopeful model of repetition, and a model of critique that can understand a return as something more than a failed recuperation attempt. Where he arrives is a traumatic model of history, where the "historical AG" (as he calls it) produces a trauma in the Real that subsequent artists and AGs are forced to work through again, to expose as traumatic or repair. So the temporality in his terms is a return that happens from the future; the neo-AG returns to work through the historical AG, to push it further or make it right or just reveal its traumatic structure.
The temporality Foster takes issue with is one that sees the present as a failed version of the past. He wants a temporality that allows for a more efficacious present, one that has the power to deal with the past, to work it through, improve on it, not repeat it.
This is not what I call a retrospective temporality, which returns to the past in order to freeze it in place, to "copyright" it, mark it as failed, reveal the ongoing victory of the Culture Industry. Although Foster employs this temporality when he makes a distinction btw an early and a late neo-AG, the early (e.g. Rauchenberg) being a failure and the late (Buren and of course Broodthaers) being a successful institutional critique. Why, if his thought is to empower a temporality of return, to let the present re-work the past for its own ends, bother relegating a moment in the past to failure? Mightn't that moment simply contain a trauma that Foster himself can't work through yet? By what standard does it fail? I think another problem here is an incompatibility between Foster's model of critique and the mode of temporality he tries to elaborate here. Critique for him still contains the possibility of total failure, where failure is something like Buchloh's model: a work that, in its myopia, its narcissism, its uncritical love of culture or money or industry or institution or pop anything, makes things worse, which usually amounts to failing to see the conditions of its own capitalist enmeshment. Thus, the work that Foster calls failed doesn't fail formally, it fails because it fails to successfully critique the institutions of art. Maybe the problem, then, is not critique itself, and certainly not negativity itself (this has been hanging me up for a long time), but the concept of failure. Maybe Foster and Buchloh's conception of failure is too totalizing, too generalizing, and too beholden to a particular model of the Culture Industry as THE only worthwhile object of aesthetic critique. This would be related to a problem of restricted, restrictive temporality (failure is related to a work failing to achieve what the future defines as the most incisive AG tactic of attacking the CI and the institutions of art; e.g. Rauchenberg fails according to standards set by Buren and Broodthaers; this happens in Buchloh as well), but not reducible to it entirely.
(Matthew and Darby) Your discussion of Buchloh seems right on, but your discussion of On Kawara seems not to have taken on the implications of your own argument, i.e. seems not to be benefiting from the more agile structure of temporality you advocate. Matthew went on to say that maybe the problem is that I just don't have the vocabulary to apply my argument to artworks yet, and maybe the problem is that the artworks I choose are too canonical. Darby differs here slightly in that he wouldn't reject the canonical out of hand, but does advocate a more careful working through of Kawara's formal aesthetic tactics. A more specific, careful address to the art. They both agreed that my space-clearing gesture would be stronger if I spent some time with the conventional reception of artists like Kawara and Darboven, discuss how their work has become reducible to the discourses about them (Matthew says "absolutely equivalent"), and as such, their work has become indissociable from a broader argument about historical modernism.
(Darby) In discussing On Kawara, think about the role of leisure vis. work (reading the newspaper); also think about the newspaper in its role as evidence (this painting actually did happen here; even sometimes when it did not; e.g. he often started a painting in one city, but finished it in another).
(Emily) Also might think about the different fonts he uses.
(Lisa and Christa) What is my own privilege in looking at On Kawara? Does my reading of temporality rely on a certain citing that is extra-insitutional, e.g. knowing the he often doesn't finish a painting in a day? And if so, what does this say about the "ordinary" experience of seeing an On Kawara?
(General) There was still some question about whether or not I had stated my goals clearly enough, forcefully enough, especially vis. copyright law. There seemed to be some consensus that I still hadn't come right out and said that Buchloh seems to work the same way as copyright law does.
I don't know what that means, given that I DO come right out and say that.
(Christa) What about the avant garde? Why don't you mention them? Do they need to be mentioned? Maybe it's more exciting to leave that formulation out of it?
This strikes me as useful because it's so closely related to what I had in mind by defining the field of my project, or the object of my attack, as "politicizing art history." That framing and the AG are not synonymous, but they are clearly related, depending on how specifically one defines the AG (on the most general end, it could be something like "politicizing art;" on the other, closer to P. Burger, it could be art that takes the goal of its politics to be the interruption of the autonomy of art).
I'm not sure its an egregious omission (I was already self-conscious about focusing too much on Buchloh; there is some usefulness to ignoring their work, if the goal is to make some space outside of or around it). But conversations around the AG has monopolized the politic conversation around art, to the extent that Ranciere develops an elaborate theory whose point is to overturn that story of modernism, to set the clock back further into the 19th c, to prioritize realism, to evacuate the false efficacy of the distinction between art and life. At the very least, re-reading in this area is going to be essential for the next draft (H. Foster, more Buchloh, A. Fraser, P. Burger; see also Crimp's refusal to deal with the AG).
In that spirit, I re-read H. Foster's "Whose afraid of the neo-avant garde?" this morning. It's an attempt to recuperate P. Burger's theory of the AG from its simplistic, and disastrous temporality. Burger defines the AG by its efforts to resist the assumed autonomy of art. In that, the project was always going to fail, but it was a heroic failure. Foster's concern is with his dismissal of the neo-AG (c. 1970) as a dismal repetition of the AG, a failed attempt to repeat the gestures of the original AG. Farce following tragedy. Foster wants to clear space for a better, more hopeful model of repetition, and a model of critique that can understand a return as something more than a failed recuperation attempt. Where he arrives is a traumatic model of history, where the "historical AG" (as he calls it) produces a trauma in the Real that subsequent artists and AGs are forced to work through again, to expose as traumatic or repair. So the temporality in his terms is a return that happens from the future; the neo-AG returns to work through the historical AG, to push it further or make it right or just reveal its traumatic structure.
The temporality Foster takes issue with is one that sees the present as a failed version of the past. He wants a temporality that allows for a more efficacious present, one that has the power to deal with the past, to work it through, improve on it, not repeat it.
This is not what I call a retrospective temporality, which returns to the past in order to freeze it in place, to "copyright" it, mark it as failed, reveal the ongoing victory of the Culture Industry. Although Foster employs this temporality when he makes a distinction btw an early and a late neo-AG, the early (e.g. Rauchenberg) being a failure and the late (Buren and of course Broodthaers) being a successful institutional critique. Why, if his thought is to empower a temporality of return, to let the present re-work the past for its own ends, bother relegating a moment in the past to failure? Mightn't that moment simply contain a trauma that Foster himself can't work through yet? By what standard does it fail? I think another problem here is an incompatibility between Foster's model of critique and the mode of temporality he tries to elaborate here. Critique for him still contains the possibility of total failure, where failure is something like Buchloh's model: a work that, in its myopia, its narcissism, its uncritical love of culture or money or industry or institution or pop anything, makes things worse, which usually amounts to failing to see the conditions of its own capitalist enmeshment. Thus, the work that Foster calls failed doesn't fail formally, it fails because it fails to successfully critique the institutions of art. Maybe the problem, then, is not critique itself, and certainly not negativity itself (this has been hanging me up for a long time), but the concept of failure. Maybe Foster and Buchloh's conception of failure is too totalizing, too generalizing, and too beholden to a particular model of the Culture Industry as THE only worthwhile object of aesthetic critique. This would be related to a problem of restricted, restrictive temporality (failure is related to a work failing to achieve what the future defines as the most incisive AG tactic of attacking the CI and the institutions of art; e.g. Rauchenberg fails according to standards set by Buren and Broodthaers; this happens in Buchloh as well), but not reducible to it entirely.
(Matthew and Darby) Your discussion of Buchloh seems right on, but your discussion of On Kawara seems not to have taken on the implications of your own argument, i.e. seems not to be benefiting from the more agile structure of temporality you advocate. Matthew went on to say that maybe the problem is that I just don't have the vocabulary to apply my argument to artworks yet, and maybe the problem is that the artworks I choose are too canonical. Darby differs here slightly in that he wouldn't reject the canonical out of hand, but does advocate a more careful working through of Kawara's formal aesthetic tactics. A more specific, careful address to the art. They both agreed that my space-clearing gesture would be stronger if I spent some time with the conventional reception of artists like Kawara and Darboven, discuss how their work has become reducible to the discourses about them (Matthew says "absolutely equivalent"), and as such, their work has become indissociable from a broader argument about historical modernism.
(Darby) In discussing On Kawara, think about the role of leisure vis. work (reading the newspaper); also think about the newspaper in its role as evidence (this painting actually did happen here; even sometimes when it did not; e.g. he often started a painting in one city, but finished it in another).
(Emily) Also might think about the different fonts he uses.
(Lisa and Christa) What is my own privilege in looking at On Kawara? Does my reading of temporality rely on a certain citing that is extra-insitutional, e.g. knowing the he often doesn't finish a painting in a day? And if so, what does this say about the "ordinary" experience of seeing an On Kawara?
(General) There was still some question about whether or not I had stated my goals clearly enough, forcefully enough, especially vis. copyright law. There seemed to be some consensus that I still hadn't come right out and said that Buchloh seems to work the same way as copyright law does.
I don't know what that means, given that I DO come right out and say that.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Laughter (after talking with Stephanie B.)
Why start with laughter and not with comedy, or humor, as genres which produce laughter?
Laughter is a bodily response.
It is public (even if someone is alone, it sounds it registers somewhere, maybe imperceptibly, in the social).
Laughter can be ambivalent, maybe always is. It has many motivations, and a range of effects. There is sick laughter, laughter that makes you sick. And laughter that keeps us from being sick, laughter as a defense or a deflection. There is joyful involuntary laughter. Lots of laughter is involuntary, it starts in the body and emerges before editing can stop it (sometimes). There is laughter as avoidance (not involuntary). We laugh because we are uncomfortable. This is a tic, another kind of body-behavior.
Because laughter is a comment, it can be political; it is maybe always political, if we dilate the meaning of political to include critical interactions with others.
Laughter is a comment, a mode of critique, because it reacts to a provocation. The reaction it registers expresses identification or dis-, anger or lightness, compliance or resistance (one can not laugh at a joke, even a funny one). You can hurt someone's feelings with a laugh, or with the withholding of a laugh. Laughter is also public, which means that it is a reverberation through a situation—it can't not be a comment. it is a Lyotardian phrase. It can be more or less legible (e.g. one can laugh and someone in the room might not know what the laughter is about). It bounces off others, at least their hearing. When it does, it changes the sense of the scene, the feel and texture of that place. It makes it a different place. This is about laughter's liveness. Which means that it also bounces off people's hearts, their own laughter and politics. Laughter alone can start a room laughing (there is a formalism of laughter; e.g. the sound of it, the bounce, the movement of the stomach (up and down), how silly it sounds when repeated, when divorced from its provocation).
I don't want to deal with a genre; I want to deal with an encounter. Laughter is an encounter. A response to one and it forces one, another one, or amplifies the same.
I don't want to deal with a structure of intention, where the analytic categories of encounter that fall out involve getting it or not, liking it or not, seeing it or not.... I want to deal with structures of impact. They don't need to be dramatic; laughter isn't always dramatic. Laughter can cut drama, de-fuse tension. Laughter isn't dramatic because its comment, its effects, it provocations don't always last. The sound of laughter fades (but it is awkward to stop laughing...why? Does it want to have a history? Does it want to proceed into something cognate, something equally or more intense? Does laughter want to produce more laughter, is that our inclination? Is it awkward to acknowledge in public that laughter dies, that it yields to more bored locutions? Is the cessation of laughter an acknowledgement that intensities require collaborative work to get to them, requires bodies working together to produce the intensity of a scene that escalates to laughter? To stop means that participants have to start again, and that it takes time and work to get there. We might not get there. Laughter is confirmation that the situation is as fun as people wanted it to be; laughter is confirmation of the success of some social situations. It's working. People don't want to stop laughing. But laughter is also tiring; faces get tired. But something about the affect of amusement, or mirth, gets taxed, or is taxing of something else.).
Structure of impact, or structures of encounter. Something happens, then adjustments. People laugh with you or do not. They might ask what you're laughing at, wanting to participate. They may ask what you're laughing at, not wanting to participate but to kill the laughter at the root. Laughter mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. It registers the presence of something you know with some detourning of that something (Bergson says this, I think; maybe Baudelaire too; satire presupposes repetition/familiarity; superiority suggests the process of making something familiar so as to dominate it). Laughter is the adjustment, the process of adjusting, to the unfamiliarity aspect of something that had been familiar.
Laughter is an adjustment. This is also why it is critical and/or a comment. This is also why it's political.
Adjustments can be like coping, but coping might involve getting numb to a bad situation, or making gestures toward moving something, changing something. A situation can be adjusted or one can adjust oneself. Laughter might lead in either direction. Adorno's fear is that, in the culture industry, where laughter itself is coded for, marketed for, studied, it can only lead to adjustment as numbing.
If an adjustment is something that can operate on the self or operate on the social, then it will be responsive to historical shifts in the operations of power on the self. The disciplinary self makes adjustments by looking inward, by constructing a sense of self that can be adjusted, by accepting responsibility for the impacts of the social on the self, by accepting that the only thing that can really be changed with any sort of reliability is the self. The biopolitical self...it's unclear actually. How much does one experience biopolitical being? Or is it not a structure of experience? If one did experience it, incorporate it, where would adjustments be made? it's not like people don't believe in self-help anymore; it's that governmentality has shifted its ways of conceptualizing people, selfhood-as-population-life. ???
An adjustment: this is the sense in which FGT's spills might register laughter as a mode of critical response to minimalist sculpture. It adjusts that sculpture's relation to a situation, to the movement of bodies, to a space/place, to the nonplace of galleries, to consumption, to sexuality (sucking), to participation. FGT's spills laugh at Carl Andre, at Serra. Meaning not that they mock them, necessarily. Rather, they adjust them and adjust to them. At their most grandiose, they might also help them adjust to a new political situation: not '68 but AIDS. Laughter then would be a specific affective modality of appropriation. It would also have a relation to re-enactment.
Laughter is a bodily response.
It is public (even if someone is alone, it sounds it registers somewhere, maybe imperceptibly, in the social).
Laughter can be ambivalent, maybe always is. It has many motivations, and a range of effects. There is sick laughter, laughter that makes you sick. And laughter that keeps us from being sick, laughter as a defense or a deflection. There is joyful involuntary laughter. Lots of laughter is involuntary, it starts in the body and emerges before editing can stop it (sometimes). There is laughter as avoidance (not involuntary). We laugh because we are uncomfortable. This is a tic, another kind of body-behavior.
Because laughter is a comment, it can be political; it is maybe always political, if we dilate the meaning of political to include critical interactions with others.
Laughter is a comment, a mode of critique, because it reacts to a provocation. The reaction it registers expresses identification or dis-, anger or lightness, compliance or resistance (one can not laugh at a joke, even a funny one). You can hurt someone's feelings with a laugh, or with the withholding of a laugh. Laughter is also public, which means that it is a reverberation through a situation—it can't not be a comment. it is a Lyotardian phrase. It can be more or less legible (e.g. one can laugh and someone in the room might not know what the laughter is about). It bounces off others, at least their hearing. When it does, it changes the sense of the scene, the feel and texture of that place. It makes it a different place. This is about laughter's liveness. Which means that it also bounces off people's hearts, their own laughter and politics. Laughter alone can start a room laughing (there is a formalism of laughter; e.g. the sound of it, the bounce, the movement of the stomach (up and down), how silly it sounds when repeated, when divorced from its provocation).
I don't want to deal with a genre; I want to deal with an encounter. Laughter is an encounter. A response to one and it forces one, another one, or amplifies the same.
I don't want to deal with a structure of intention, where the analytic categories of encounter that fall out involve getting it or not, liking it or not, seeing it or not.... I want to deal with structures of impact. They don't need to be dramatic; laughter isn't always dramatic. Laughter can cut drama, de-fuse tension. Laughter isn't dramatic because its comment, its effects, it provocations don't always last. The sound of laughter fades (but it is awkward to stop laughing...why? Does it want to have a history? Does it want to proceed into something cognate, something equally or more intense? Does laughter want to produce more laughter, is that our inclination? Is it awkward to acknowledge in public that laughter dies, that it yields to more bored locutions? Is the cessation of laughter an acknowledgement that intensities require collaborative work to get to them, requires bodies working together to produce the intensity of a scene that escalates to laughter? To stop means that participants have to start again, and that it takes time and work to get there. We might not get there. Laughter is confirmation that the situation is as fun as people wanted it to be; laughter is confirmation of the success of some social situations. It's working. People don't want to stop laughing. But laughter is also tiring; faces get tired. But something about the affect of amusement, or mirth, gets taxed, or is taxing of something else.).
Structure of impact, or structures of encounter. Something happens, then adjustments. People laugh with you or do not. They might ask what you're laughing at, wanting to participate. They may ask what you're laughing at, not wanting to participate but to kill the laughter at the root. Laughter mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. It registers the presence of something you know with some detourning of that something (Bergson says this, I think; maybe Baudelaire too; satire presupposes repetition/familiarity; superiority suggests the process of making something familiar so as to dominate it). Laughter is the adjustment, the process of adjusting, to the unfamiliarity aspect of something that had been familiar.
Laughter is an adjustment. This is also why it is critical and/or a comment. This is also why it's political.
Adjustments can be like coping, but coping might involve getting numb to a bad situation, or making gestures toward moving something, changing something. A situation can be adjusted or one can adjust oneself. Laughter might lead in either direction. Adorno's fear is that, in the culture industry, where laughter itself is coded for, marketed for, studied, it can only lead to adjustment as numbing.
If an adjustment is something that can operate on the self or operate on the social, then it will be responsive to historical shifts in the operations of power on the self. The disciplinary self makes adjustments by looking inward, by constructing a sense of self that can be adjusted, by accepting responsibility for the impacts of the social on the self, by accepting that the only thing that can really be changed with any sort of reliability is the self. The biopolitical self...it's unclear actually. How much does one experience biopolitical being? Or is it not a structure of experience? If one did experience it, incorporate it, where would adjustments be made? it's not like people don't believe in self-help anymore; it's that governmentality has shifted its ways of conceptualizing people, selfhood-as-population-life. ???
An adjustment: this is the sense in which FGT's spills might register laughter as a mode of critical response to minimalist sculpture. It adjusts that sculpture's relation to a situation, to the movement of bodies, to a space/place, to the nonplace of galleries, to consumption, to sexuality (sucking), to participation. FGT's spills laugh at Carl Andre, at Serra. Meaning not that they mock them, necessarily. Rather, they adjust them and adjust to them. At their most grandiose, they might also help them adjust to a new political situation: not '68 but AIDS. Laughter then would be a specific affective modality of appropriation. It would also have a relation to re-enactment.
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