File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_2002/avant-garde.0201, message 17


Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:10:55 -0500
From: saul ostrow <so5-AT-nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: an ominous silence: let's chew on this




Bill take a deep breath and let me know what you  think of this:
9/11 and the Cultural Revolution

 Among the many casualties of 9/11, the date of the attack on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center, respectively symbols of the United
State's military and economic might many artists^Ò lost their faith in
the value of what they were doing.  In a shocked state, they asked
themselves how in the face of such horror could they continue to engage
in what they could only now imagine to be the self-indulgent expression
of the minutiae of their ordinary lives.  Hadn't the making of art
become just another narcissistic activity?  What did it matter what they
thought to be of theoretical or cultural importance?  What sense did it
make to worry over an abstract painting's ability to have meaning or to
want to make transparent the mass media's control over our sense of
self?  How could any of this matter in the face of our renewed sense of
mortality and vulnerability? These artists, young and old, questioned
their commitment and desire to produce, to nurture and succor the hope
that they once found in their work.  Now this seemed nothing more than a
sign of their impotence. Art, socially engaged or as a sign of personal
expression could not matter the way it once did.  Among many artists
there is sense that Art at least as they had known and desired it was
just an illusion,. That rather than a form of engagement. it is just
another way to withdraw from the world.

This doubt is not new, it feeds on an uncertainty that was endemic to
Modernism, and is a principle condition of post-Modernism. A half
century ago, in the face of the horror that were WW2, the Holocaust and
the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with its innumerable dead,
combatants and civilians alike Theodor Adorno theorized that it was no
longer possible for us to produce poetry.  One reason he gives is that
art had revealed itself to be  little more than a facade behind which
the barbarian inside hides.  The ideal of making sense of the
non-sensical had become an impoverished enterprise. Culture had revealed
itself to be a thin veneer, something only affordable at times when we
were not struggling for our own survival or oppressing some "other" who
we  thought might be threaten that existence.

During the 1960s and 70s, in the face of much pessimism and existential
doubt there was a burst of modernist optimism that art and artist could
have effect.  Abandoning the last semblance of traditional form and
content they sought to re-assert bodily presence.  Instead within the
age of information conceptual art with its emphasis on language and
anecdote turned into Modernism's last hurrah.  By the mid-80s, art in
form and content had been brought to the edge of its dissolution and in
this condition sought to reconnect itself socially. The post-Modern
message arrived, announcing that there was nothing left to look forward
to but the slick promise of commodification and an abject dystopia. This
shattering blow to the modernist belief system drove "us" in-ward
seeking refuge in the idea that the personal was political and we could
change the world if we were willing to change ourselves.  And now,  911
had even robbed us of this.

Yet, I do not believe that 911 actually marks a significant shift, a
qualitative change in our social, political or cultural situation. The
type of stateless wars that gave rise to this act have been fought
before under other names. Seemingly, today's Holy crusades in the name
of god or democracy,  state sponsored  or as an act of those who find
them stateless are not very different those of the past.  Terror against
civilian populations have long been an aspect of modern war ? wasn't
General Sherman^Òs burning of Atlanta during the American War Between the
States, a terrorist attack on a civilian population.  Even, the fact
that 911 unfolded in real time as the world looked on is just a
quantitative shift from the days of Viet Nam when we witnessed the
napalming of villagers who could not be distinguished from the enemy.,

If in the larger scheme of things, if  911 is significant it is because
it signals the late arrival of "1984."  After all, the global alliance
against terrorism, promises to be like the endless war against waged by
Big Brother, in that it is also an assemblage of shifting alliance made
up of old  friends and recent enemies.  And as in  Orwell^Òs vision the
new "enemy" is the old allies who have decided to go it alone.  So,
while 911 is being heralded as a turning point, a radical rupture
ushering in a new and uncertain era of nation building, community
building and pragmatic alliances, it also makes the possibility of the
20th century's nightmare vision of permanent war and repression a
reality.  Consequently, if we set aside our immediate emotional
reactions to 911, and step back, we can view this event in the context
of the on going struggle by corporate capital for cultural and economic
hegemony within the first world and over its second and third world
partners and clients. Subsequently, on the cultural front Western
society seeks a new humanist culture informed by identity politics to
advance its global strategy. So, there is a growing tendency to see the
artist as a potential service worker, art as a service industry and the
museum and foundations as its administrative arm, its clients will be
the communities of the disenfranchised.

In order to reduce artists^Ò suspicions concerning both institutions and
corporations, the world of private and public foundations, corporations
and government agencies as part of a strategy to recruit artists to
their model of art as an educative tool, have since the 1990s shown a
willingness to fund those artists who seek a constructive social role.
Meanwhile, the support to individuals whose work do not address the
public realm in a "constructive manner" have been cut.  As such, the
spontaneous responses to 911 described in my opening paragraph, as well
as the emotional success of those works and memorials produced in the
early days of this event have increased the cultural communities
vulnerability to the proposition of, once again. making themselves
socially useful,

The promise of ending the artist^Òs isolation by supplying them with
status, community, audience and effect, has an appeal, especially in
this post-Modern era in which mass culture's has the technical ability
to transform anything and everything into a sign or a simulacra. As
such, through co-optation we have become uncertain as to what to
oppose.  The aspiration on the part of artists to be socially and
politically useful is sustained by the paradigm that art is good for
everyone and everyone should have equal access to it.  This I imagine
will be re-enforced by an increased emphasis on the  work of those
artists whose projects engage those communities effected by this 911,
or  address the need of the nation to heal. The "success" of these  turn
will in turn re-enforced the notion that art and artists are a catalyst
for social "transformation." The question, that will be left unasked is;
what is being transformed into what?

What this scheme depends upon is Western society's vision of art (and
culture) as a privileged area of production from which Bourgeois
ideological hegemony may be challenged by its own ideals of progress and
individual freedom. Set in place by socialist and the liberals who saw
culture and education as great levelers of class difference and
therefore this principle was considered it a significant aspect of the
pursuit of the democratic ideal of egalitarianism. Throughout the 19th
and 20th century there were numerous efforts to develop a culture that
would unite workers and give expression to their life experience.
Affirmation for this approach to class struggle in the 19th century was
to be found in the bourgeoisie's success in having created the
conditions by which to rest political power from the aristocracy and
landed gentry by dominating the means of cultural representation and
dissemination. As such Art was viewed not a source of aesthetic
pleasure, but a form of interface between materially and conceptually
differing sectarian and secular categories. Interestingly, in the 1960^Òs
the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities envisioning art as a
mode of communication (rather than expression) defined museums as an
educational institutions (rather than ones of scholarship.)

But such patterns of change and re-definition also function within the
our notion that art is a means of transcendence through self-awareness.
This formulation which has feed Western culture's desire to critically
cleanse its thinking, is itself a product of 18th century philosophy's
insistence that Judeo-Christian beliefs play themselves out in the
secular culture. Within the changing social and political environments
of the 19th century, this vision evolved into a view that arts' social
object was Consciousness and indirectly Conscience.  So, if art &
culture were to be the new secular religion, then the artists and
intellectuals were the heroes and villains of this epic struggle for
awareness, emancipation, and self-determination.  This role spurred
artists on to challenging the social relevance of their own practices
and their limitations. In this manner they sought to establish in a
concrete way a quantifiable function and a determined utility for art.
The effect of this on art was that it made art a suitable testing ground
for the idealized practices meant to reconcile society's social and
cultural contradictions.

The record of these struggles against the false consciousness produced
by delusional or arcane systems of belief thought to limit personal
freedom and expression became an important component of the history of
art and culture. With the advent of the Modern era, artists set to work
to de-sublimate those 'aesthetic' and institutionalized tendency that
promoted class defined standards and values. The supposed means by which
this was to be gained was the pushing of the institutional and formal
limits of all available media, the promotion of internationalism and
radical thought. Interestingly, these were  often approached from quite
different political perspectives (most notably -- there are more than a
few fascists who subscribe to this formulae.)

What produces the common ground for these forces is that their critique
of Capital and their vision of the future was (and perhaps still is)
rooted in the same Romantic humanistic view of the new individual who
was to be true to themselves. In this context all were to democratically
partake, rejoice and seek fulfillment in the general culture. It should
not go unstated that this enculturation was also one of the most
effective tools (along with elementary education) that the new bourgeois
classes had at its disposal to recast the world in its own image. Either
in its entrepreneurial or corporate form the Bourgeoisie has
consistently sought greater accessibility, of form and content, within
the realm of cultural discourse so as to bind the middle classes more
closely to it as it did in the 19th century. With the advent of mass
media, they increasingly felt that indoctrination was necessary and that
they could exploit the general populations antagonism to critical
culture.

 Though Modernist avant-garde  tradition seemingly set itself in
opposition the bourgeoisie's order by attacking their audience for their
boorishness-ness Andreas Huysenn has pointed that this supposed radical
cultural politics failed to  expose its own complicity in advancing the
bourgeois cause. It was the bourgeoisie's mock resistance to new
cultural practices and modes of expression that created an impetus for
artists to seek the means by which they could  practically integrate new
ideas into the general cultural  economy. Consequently, the demand for
the 'democratization' of culture from both ends of the intellectual
spectrum created an illusionary veneer of opposition politics.  The fact
was that within this 'us and them" model, the bourgeois values of
individualism and progress were being implemented. . As this process
integrated new forms and content into the cultural sphere, it maintained
its dynamic, and concealed the avant - garde^Òs duplicity.

By the late 1970s - early 80s, given the failure of the idealism of the
1960s, the notion of politics had begun to shift from the realm of
morals, ethics and power to the domain of the psychological, i.e.,
identity and culture.  This was in shift was represented the influence
of  consciousness raising, which had become a  significant aspect of the
feminist struggle for political and economic power. The effect of this
was that social problems were transformed into psychological ones.  As
such the radical subjectivism that this gave rise sought has come to be
understand as empowering an individual or group by reducing all issues
to that of  point of view ? that is faith in ones beliefs.  This view
gave rise to a confusion between the idea of subjectivity ? the
construction of ones identity or sense of self and with the idea of
subjectivism, in which someone is their own authority. . Issues that
once might have been envision as arising from common interest, or the
common good now necessitate the ad hoc building  of coalitions given
each individual is the sole arbiter of their own world..

By creating the illusion that the contradiction that exist between the
individual and society can be resolved by means of an aesthetic means,
such a stance dissolves the bourgeois category of politics into the
realm of cultural resistance. This results in a substitution of
aesthetic value for political and ethical value, divorcing us from the
possibility of encoding values in any  systematic way into the realm of
representation. In other words all becomes style and fashion premised on
the view that representation is no longer the product of a hypothetical
real but a real that is reducible to its representation. As such the
form that this type of cultural politics takes does not concern the
control of the means of the production but only that of representation.
The type of self empowerment that developed from such a situation
results in an increased sense of isolation and powerlessness as one is
moved further and further from the source of any type of power, even
over ones own opinions because one is now responsible once again for
their own destiny. This of course gives further credence to the
discourse of the victim which has substantially taken root in, if not
dominates the whole of the Western psyche. In the light of 911 the final
product of this process has come to be the manner in which we are kept
mindful of the fact our desires, awareness and subjectivity are merely a
construct subject to manipulation.

Outside of feminism, the emergence of the logic of identity politics can
be traced to Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser Herbert Marcuse and Raymond
Williams application of Freud's concept of the unconscious in their
examination of the role ideology played in everyday life.  By the late
50s, each had formulated their own conceptions of the role ideology
plays in our daily lives. Their concepts of culture (as the realm of
ideology) were less rigid and mechanical than the classic Marxist
formulation in which culture was a superstructure arising from the means
of production.  In general, they came to view culture as a
semi-autonomous environment only in the final instance determined by
economic relations. The ideological power of cultural indoctrination
came to be evident in the newly emerging realms of mass media and
advertising.

On the part of the non-sectarian left it came to be believed that this
adjustment to the Marxist conception of the relation between culture and
ideology held out the possibility that the contested ground of both
critical and common cultural production and consumption would come to
play a significant role in the politics that regulates the distribution
of societal power. In other words, culture was not only a reflection of
the forces of production, but as a significant and contested arena of
social formation a weapon in the class struggle. The feeling was that
cultural differences based on class differences created in the working
classes a sense of inferiority. For intellectuals and activist alike,
the task that lay ahead was to formulate a strategy that would bring to
an end bourgeois ideology's hegemonic determination of cultural values,
standards and criteria. The determination was that a horizontal
conception of culture rather than a hierarchical one would "level the
playing field. In reordering culture along horizontal lines they sought
to end the pitting of hi and mass culture against one another by
establishing the validity and intercourse of each in a spectral manner.

Within the topography of a horizontal culture all value would be
relative while ideals and ideology are disdained in the name of personal
freedom and subjectivism. In this way the iron hold of ideology and
false consciousness was transformed from a form of coercion and
persuasion into one of individual empowerment. So, if this paradigmatic
change was to work, we are obliged to remain aware that any adherence to
this new de-stabilizing vision of reality will continue to manifest the
same contradictions and problems. Yet, within the ghettoes of
post-modern culture and political correctness we can see the continued
appropriation of Benjamin, Adorno, Lyotard, Foucault^Òs, etc, cautionary
tales meant to foil instrumentality and functionalism of global
corporate culture. In this context they are now interpreted as
demonstrating the inevitability of its advance.  As such the demands for
multi-culturalism, interdisciplinary practices and fluidity that
horizontally was meant to advance have given rise no to an
anti-bourgeois heterogeneity, but a bourgeois notion of homogeneity and
functionality. The lesson we should have learned is that there is a
danger in the blind adherence to those practices that persisted to
promise change.

A consequence of the adoption of a horizontal model of culture has been
that today, in the image world generated by mass media, as the
distinction between the artificial and the actual blurs artists and
intellectual much art strives to entertain their audiences by
constructing aesthetic worlds in which one loses one's grasp of the
border between the fictions of everyday life and its actualities rather
than proposing new functional relationships that confront and challenge
this conception of the world,. They use the undifferentiated debris of
contemporary popular culture to fill the gap between the past, present
and future that exists in their audience's lives. On the level of
quality or desirability as presently formulated there is no basis upon
which to privilege one offering over the other. All that differentiates
one cultural practice from another on the sociological level is its
location ? other wise within the horizontal mode all cultural practices,
common or critical must serve comparable functions. Even if from the
academic point of view, each practice may be recognized as having its
own critical program and criteria for discernmen t? obviously these
practices do not assign value in a similar manner.

Corporations, foundations and cultural institutions adoption of the
notion of horizontal culture by allows them in the end to exploit the
educative aspects of critical culture as well as its spectacular and
fetishistic qualities, while commodifiying it. Culture's autonomy and
discourses are undermined in the name of making the cultural field more
accessible or useful and therefore more democratic by propagandizing
against the folly of arts pretensions,. .  In this manner art/ culture's
value becomes a social supplement rather than the space of a disruptive
virtuality.  This is done with the intent of bringing cultural
production into line with the idea that the cultural sphere can become
market / consumer driven. In this scenario the criticality of the
cultural field turns in on itself and becomes little more than a
harmless political critique of its own impotence or that of capitals
encroachment into all areas of public and private life.  The irony of
this is that if art comes to be converted into nothing more than
intellectual entertainment, capital would in turn loose  one of its most
value and important areas of research and development.

So amidst such a negative argument, what might we say to those artists
and their audience who doubt the utility of what they do in the light of
this history and the events now euphemistically referred to as 911.
Well, I Imagine that the cultural response that 911 rather than
following the course that has at this point become the accepted model of
a utilitarian and functionalist art,  demands a self reflective
acknowledgment that via a process of evaluation, devaluation and
re-evaluation an independent culture plays a significant role within the
political sphere.  I propose that the art value, function and utility
lies in its ability to give representation to the form and content of an
ever evolving collective thought. Therefor this conception of the
redemption of art and its imperfect and compromised criticality is
premised on the view that it is impossible for mass culture to produce
new descriptions of reality that are even momentarily truer than those
of their predecessors.

 Mass culture has no self-reflective mechanism or franchise by which to
respond to the social and political structures of the reality that it
gives representation.  By abandoning critical culture, seeming we
abandon our ability  to use art as a form of aesthetic resistance to the
present tendency toward disembodying experiences and anesthetizing the
spectacle of political power. Art is one of the means available to us to
propose the diverse, indeterminate and temporal values that would return
to us an embodied sense of our individual and collective identity.  Of
course this would require on our part an abandonment of the reactive /
defensive positions and vernacular understanding of culture and self
that we have come to take comfort in ? but after all hasn't 911 already
done this for us?.




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