just arrived from NY, includes a text by Biljana Ciric on “Searching for Tomorrow’s Alternative China, Vietnam and Cambodia”.

On the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), David Hume (1711–1776) and Edmund Burke (1729–1797):

What art is not able to offer, in that ideological reading of it known as the aesthetic, is a paradigm of more general social significance – an image of self-referentiality which in an audacious move seizes upon the very functionlessness of artistic practice and transforms it to a vision of the highest good. As a form of value grounded entirely in itself, without practical rhyme or reason, the aesthetic is at once eloquent testimony to the obscure origins and enigmatic nature of value in a society which would seem everywhere to deny it, and a utopian glimpse of an alternative to this sorry condition. For what the work of art imitates in its very pointlessness, in the constant movement by which it conjures itself up from its own inscrutable depths, is nothing less than human existence itself, which (scandalously for the rationalists and Utilitarians) requires no rationale beyond its own self-delight. For this Romantic doctrine, the art work is most rich in political implications where it is most gloriously futile.1

On Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805):

The aesthetic is a kind of creative impasse, a nirvanic suspension of all determinacy and desire overflowing with entirely unspecific contents. Since it nullifies the limits of sensation along with its compulsiveness, it becomes a kind of sublime infinity of possibilities. In the aesthetic state, ‘man is Nought, if we are thinking of any particular result rather than of the totality of his powers, and considering the absence of any specific determination’2; but this negativity is thereby everything, a pure boundless being which eludes all specificity. Taken as a whole, the aesthetic condition is supremely positive; yet it is also sheer emptiness, a deep and dazzling darkness in which all determinations are grey, an infinity of nothingness. The wretched social condition which Schiller mourns – the fragmentation of human faculties in the division of labour, the specialization and reifying of capacities, the mechanizing and dissociating of human powers – must be redeemed by a condition which is, precisely, nothing in particular. (108)

1. Eagleton, Terry (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, p.65. All subsequent references to this text will be given parenthetically after quotations.
2. Schiller, Friedrich (1967) On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford, p.146.

It’s about a little note I saw as I was flicking through the book. On the very last page, at the end of the index, in some very unassuming, italicised text, it says “Index compiled by Meg Davies (Society of Indexers).”

Wow. There’s a Society of Indexers? And they get to put their names on their work? Now that’s fascinating (to me, at least). I looked them up. The UK branch can found at www.indexers.org.uk, but there are many groups around the world, including a Mr. Qin Banglian in China. They describe their role as “exist[ing] to promote indexing, the quality of indexes and the profession of indexing.”

A lot of books don’t need indexes, but when they do, I’m glad there’s a group of people devoted to maintaining the standards of textual referencing.

Module systems do not occur in China alone; comparable phenomena exist in other cultures. However, the Chinese started working with module systems early in their history and developed them to a remarkably advanced level. They used modules in their language, literature, philosophy, and social organizations, as well as in their arts. Indeed, the devising of module systems seems to conform to a distinctly Chinese pattern of thought.1

While I was in the UK I took the opportunity to pick up some new books, one of which is
Ten Thousand Things, by Lothar Ledderose. I hope to gain some insight into the art from this part of the world from this book, but the statement above troubles me. This setting up of “the Chinese” immediately enforces the relation of “otherness” between the author and the subject. Any utterance is liable to create this relationship, between author and subject, between knowledge and practice, between “now” and “then,” but it seems to me that in this case this relation is not a helpful one.

This book covers a spans thousands of years, a span which is itself intimately linked to Western history:

In roughly chronological sequence, the chapters cover a wide time span. The first case study deals with ritual bronze vessels of antiquity, particularly of the twelfth century B.C. Chapters 6 and 8, respectively, concern and encycolopedia of over one hundred million characters printed with movable type, and a series of bamboo paintings, both dating to the eighteenth century A.D.2

So who are these “Chinese” that the author sets up (or co-opts), that have maintained unique characteristics, deserving of a single name, over thousands of years? That’s many dynasties’ worth of people, with many groups coming and going in the history of the country, a country which has itself been geographically fluid.

Much of this relationship perhaps can be put down to the writer’s understanding of what is pragmatic in the face of his position: he reveals with these positioning statements that he writes for a Western audience.

I don’t deny that this categorisation can be useful and helpful, but what can we do when it becomes problematic? Is it a matter of explicitly positioning all our statements within their context (a potentially infinite task)? There can no absolute form to follow for this, no answer.

I’m perhaps making a small, pedantic point here, about a feature of the text that I have unnecessarily latched onto right at the start of reading this book. I know I will learn much about the objects it describes, I am just wary of how it will present the “whos” and the “whats” involved.

1. Ledderose, Lothar (2000). Introduction. In: Ten Thousand Things: module and mass production in Chinese art (The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1998). Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.2.
2. ibid., p.1.

In aesthetic theory, ‘commitment’ should be distinguished from ‘tendency’. Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions – like earlier propagandist plays against syphilis, duels, abortion laws or borstals – but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Sartre its task is to awaken the free choice of the agent which makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator. But what gives commitment its aesthetic advantage over tendentiousness also renders the content to which the artist commits himself inherently ambiguous. In Sartre the notion of choice – originally a Kierkegaardian category – is heir to the Christian doctrine ‘He who is not with me is against me’, but now voided of any concrete theological content. What remains is merely the abstract authority of a choice enjoined, with no regard for the fact that the very possibility of choosing depends on what can be chosen. The archetypal situation always cited by Sartre to demonstrate the irreducibility of freedom merely underlines this. Within a predetermined reality, freedom becomes an empty claim: Herbert Marcuse has exposed the absurdity of the philosophical theorem that it is always possible inwardly either to accept or to reject martyrdom. Yet this is precisely what Sartre’s dramatic situations are designed to demonstrate. But his plays are nevertheless bad models of his own existentialism, because they display in their respect for truth the whole administered universe which his philosophy ignores: the lesson we learn from them is one of unfreedom. Sartre’s theatre of ideas sabotages the aims of his categories. This is not a specific shortcoming of his plays. It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads. In fact, as soon as committed works of art do instigate decisions at their own level, the decisions themselves become interchangeable. Because of this ambiguity, Sartre has with great candour confessed that he expects no real changes in the world from literature – a scepticism which reflects the historical mutations both of society and of the practical function of literature since the days of Voltaire. The principle of commitment thus slides towards the proclivities of the author, in keeping with the extreme subjectivism of Sartre’s philosophy, which for all its materialist undertones, still echoes German speculative idealism. In his literary theory the work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose.

Adorno, Theodor (1965). Commitment. In Noten zur Literature III. Frankfurt: Suhrkhamp Verlag 1965. Translation reprinted in Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics, translated by Francis McDonagh. London: Verso 2007. pp.180–181.

Paintings and sculptures, Schapiro pointed out, were ‘the last hand-made personal objects’ within a social order dominated by the division of labour. In a world in which the life of most individuals was subordinate to unsatisfying practical activity, ‘the object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneous or intense feeling’. Abstract art met this need best, because it refused ‘communication’ in a world in which communcation had been utterly instrumentalised and reduced to a notion of the most efficient stimulus to produce a given response. More than any other art, it corresponded to ‘the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that has become increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state’. Although it had no specific political message, abstract painting was the ‘domain of culture in which contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality [of our culture] is most obvious and often becomes tragic’.1,2

1. HEMINGWAY, Andrew (2006), ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’ in HEMINGWAY, Andrew ed., Marxism and Art History: From William Morris to the New Left, London: Pluto Press. p.142
2. Quotes taken from SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1957), ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, in SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1978), Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: Braziller. pp.217–8, 222–3, 224.

There were a couple of things which interested me that I’d like to write about. First I wanted to take a quick look at the last text in the book: Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers (Barthes, 1971, pp. 190–215), in which he lays out the distinct roles that these take in relation to the social production and activity of the Text.

I have to admit this text confused me a little, with its serial nature, its plethora of discrete sections. I found it difficult to grasp an overall meaning or direction to the piece (more on that later).

Barthes speakes here of an entity named the ‘writer,’ which he determines as sitting apart in some way from the other two entities mentioned, the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘teacher’ who are both distinguished by the fact that they speak. And the latter two are also joined through a “fundamental tie between teaching and speech,” traced back to Rhetoric. He feels this sequence of entities warrants further analysis because of a political crisis in teaching at that time (the article was published in 1971 and makes reference to the revolutionary atmosphere amongst the post-’68 student body), Lacanian analysis of (empty) speech, and the development of an “obvious” “opposition between speech and writing.” (p. 190)

To be clear, the writer is understood not as “a social value” (p. 193) but as a practice, and is contrasted to the teacher/speaker as one whose message cannot be summarized, this being “a condition the writer shares with the madman, the chatterbox and the mathematician but which precisely writing . . . has as its task to specify.” (p. 194)

Writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible (a word that can be understood in the sense it has when applied to a child). (p. 190)

Speech is presented as being irreversable, in contrast to writing: “it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not monumental writing.” (p. 190) To be understood the spoken word must be clear and reductive of meaning, it must adhere to the “Law present in every act of speech” (p. 191) for its intelligibility. This adherance to the Law presents the speaker as Authority, with all the hierarchization implicit in the term, in Barthes’ examples specifically that between the teacher and the student (body).

Speech as such remains caught in this position of creating it’s own hierarchy by its own nature. The speaker finds that the act of speaking in itself actively subverts any value it might have as a revolutionary act.

Instead Barthes proposes writing as value, presenting this value as being “the materialist field par excellance” (p. 213) Materialism for Barthes is one of “the two great epistemes of modernity,” and he asks, and perhaps this is the main thrust of this essay, how can materialism, “the economy of relations of production,” and Freudian dialectics, “the economy of the subject,” be made to intersect? Inevitably this leads to the question: “what is the relation between class determination and the unconscious?” (p. 212)

He proposes that the answer is by language, by discourse. As I understand it, he is then saying that even if the proletariat lacks a language or a discourse, it is still through the unconscious of the speech of the bourgeois or the intellectual, as the Other of their discourses, that they are represented. I’m really not sure if I understand that correctly though, it’s a very confusing passage for me.

Barthes provides the following (perhaps) by way of an explanation, proposing a “mass gesture” available in writing alone. The final sentence seems to reflect the idea of the “explosion of meaning” which Barthes mentions in other essays and which has parallels with Deleuze, I think:

Though issuing from Marxism and psychoanalysis, the theory of writing tries to displace – without breaking with – that place of origin: on the one hand, it rejects the temptation of the signified, that is the deafness to language, to the excessive return of its effects; on the other, it is opposed to speech in that it is not transferrential and outplays – admittedly partially, in extremely narrow, particularist social limits even – the traps of ‘dialogue.’ There is in writing the beginnings of a mass gesture: against all discourses (modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols, social symbolics), writing alone today, even if still in the form of luxury, makes of language something atopical, without place. It is this dispersion, this unsituation, which is materialist.

I also think there may be some connection between this and Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, where it has become the writer’s responsibility to produce the conditions for the production of other writers amongst the proletariat. Benjamin’s text, although post-Freud, is pre-Lacan (it was originally published in 1934) and perhaps inevitably lacks a specific address to the unconscious which is central for Barthes:

What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 1934)

end

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers, as a whole, seems to lack consistency. The strategy of breaking it up into discrete chunks, while a typical stylistic trait of Barthes’, has the tendency to lead to a juddering of the arguments presented. Unlike, say, Foucault, rather than presenting a clear, continuous (unitary?) theory, one point leading to another by a deductive, logical process, Barthes presents the stages of his argument as so many anecdotes which come across almost as extended aphorisms, leading to a feeling of disjunction in the reading.

This is the point, I would assume. One could say his writing is attempting to exemplify the theory it expounds – this “dispersion,” this “unsituation” of writing.

• BARTHES, Roland (1971). Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers. First published as ‘Ecrivains, intellectuels, professeurs’, Tel Quel 47, Autumn 1971. Transl. Stephen Heath. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. pp. 190–215.
• BENJAMIN, Walter (1934). The Author as Producer. Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, 27 April 1934. In FRASCINA, Francis and HARRISON, Charles (eds.). Modern Art and Modernism. A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge, 1982.

Baudrillard was the first philosopher that I got really excited about. While I was doing my BA in Fine Art I was attracted by his concept of the precession of simulacra and it’s consequences. Leaving aside his theory, the book ‘Simulations’ has held a special place on my bookshelf ever since.

Books, for me, are not just about their content, their words and the knowledge that can be gained form those words.

They are much more about their potential.

I love buying books. But I am well aware that I may never read all of them – I expect it would be impossible to do so. However, to see them all together makes me feel encouraged, I could possibly read them all. I am genuinely interested in the author’s works, otherwise I would not buy the books, but it’s enough perhaps to own the book, not to actually read it.

Hence it’s the effect of the book’s structure to create the space for potential. The physical make-up, the parts of the text – all treated as objects holding meaning beyond their meaning.

Each book is precious as an object, but—at a certain level—it is also equivalent and replaceable by every other book.

The Bourdieu/Darbel book is one which we’ve been reading in relation to the Framing Art course, looking at museums and their relations with their audiences. The Love of Art is a report on a series of what were essentially market research studies of the visitors to various museums in France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Greece during 1964–5. They examined the demographic profiles of the visitors to the various targeted sites and their histories in relation to that museum, and to museums and art in general, as well as their perceived needs from the institution, and impressions of it.

Friendship is a collection of essays by Blanchot, a critic and philosopher whose writing cropped up in our readings around the Museums and Photography session for the same course. In particular with reference to André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. An essay in this collection of Blanchot’s criticism, entitled The Museum, Art, and Time, discusses Malraux’s writings on the museumification of art. I’ve yet to read this essay, but isn’t that the joy of collecting books? the potentialities that they offer for future reading and the sheer impossibility of ever completing them all? Potentialities, by Giorgio Agamben – another book I bought recently and have yet to read.