Art comes, as I’ve said, from dissatisfaction and conflict, so how does it end up promoting what it critiques? Put another way, how does capitalism repurpose and weaponise artefacts which are profoundly at odds with its ideology?
By historicising these, then incorporating them into the system of “educational metrics”, coupled with the idea that developed over the course of the 19th century, that the artist doesn’t live in the “real world” inhabited by ‘us’, Art ability to cause change and raise issues has been neutralised (in the West – the Soviet bloc had a rather different attitude. Artists were imprisoned, executed, for their critiques). Art has been reduced, for the vast majority of the population, to a series of “celebrity individuals”, cult figures and disconnected mavericks, all of whom occupy the rarefied atmosphere of “the Art World”. Print media has, for years, sneered at artefacts such as the bricks in the Tate, the white canvas slashed by a carpet knife, the shark in formaldehyde…the urinal by Duchamp. They make a determined effort to ignore the meanings of these works, focusing instead on their monetary value. They attack those who interpret Shakespeare for the contemporary age because, in the “English-speaking world” (do we just include countries where English is the first language, or do we count the colonies too?), Shakespeare is the ultimate, fetishised writer, more than a writer, a touchstone of “British genius”…
Shakespeare, we are told in school, “catches the truth of human nature” in his language and, therefore, his plays. His characters represent what people are ‘like’. This is a fait accompli, for what 13/14 year old knows what people are like? Yet once the pattern is in place, once we’re given those points of comparison, we make them. Of course, the most insidious aspect of Shakespeare is the failure of change: disorder may occur but, by the end of each play, it is restored with little altered except the rulers’ names. The plays instruct us that: action, rather than thought, is the key to ‘success’ – Hamlet and Richard II; that the upper classes are fitted to rule; that hierarchy is a virtue, and we should know our place. It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare is still, in 2024, seen as a necessity in ‘education’.
Shakespeare is the obvious example, but what of other artists? Their works are seen as historical artefacts, their meanings employed in the service of “Well, people have always thought like this. Human nature doesn’t change. You have to make your own, individual life.” What’s the message of, say, Eliza Heywood’s Betsy Thoughtless (a work, incidentally, that had to be ‘rescued’ from obscurity) in regard to the position of women? From a capitalist perspective, the novel ‘tells’ us that women have always had these problems with patriarchy because that’s just the way things are. No heed is paid to how profoundly depressing it is to read this novel in 2024, 300+ years after publication, and see little, if any change. Much the same can be said of all the 19th century authors. They have been assimilated into the capitalist project of “proving human nature”. Simultaneously, the artist is told to stick to art – political commentary, social conscience, indicates that X is not a ‘real’ artist. Thus, the artist is subjected to claims of inhabiting the ‘unreal’, yet any attempt to be political is met with derision because they “don’t live in the same world as the rest of us.”
In film, an artist like Eisenstein is now studied in terms of form and technique rather than critique. Godard and Resnais are obscure, of passing interest on the way to Hollywood. All three are ‘taught’ as being of historical interest as ‘Arthouse’ or ‘Alternative’, posited as as displaying a ‘lack’ when compared to mainstream film. someone who becomes fascinated by them is immediately marginalised. The timeline marches on, its existence acting as a neutralising factor. Artefacts are compared, ‘influences’ discovered, connections made; all of which lead to the power of specific protests – the thing that made the artist create in the first place – being diluted.
A central problem here is the way that Art, Philosophy, Sociology and Politics were fragmented into different ‘subjects’ in the early twentieth century. Literature, for example, is studied as a self-contained “body of evidence”, complete in itself, with a distinct and separate timeline. This is something, I have to admit, that I’ve never been able to accept – I’ve always found literature to be entwined with the political, the psychological, the sociological, the philosophical. We can say the same for the other ‘subjects’ that I have just listed: surely to consider philosophical concepts and ideas without considering the necessary and sufficient conditions that existed at the moment of their production means that one has missed the point? This, of course, leads into a sociological consideration, a psychological consideration and so on. To claim that we can somehow separate ‘out’ such consideration from one another is indicative of the ways in which capitalism colonised the university in the 1920s. In order to produce a saleable ‘product’, knowledge was reduced to its component parts BUT, in order to facilitate the metrics, it was denied that these parts could come together in a coherent whole.
Philosophy is particularly bad at historicising which is surprising, given that it claims to be the ultimate ‘subject’ – an idea taken from Aristotle: apparently, the aim of man (because this is what he says in Greek, and this is how it has always been translated) is contemplation. However, even a passing acquaintance with Greek history situates this remark in a society that endorsed slavery and enshrined the inferiority of women…which rather changes it. Much the same with Kant. Are we to believe that his ideas sprang fully armed from his own head? There is a timeline in philosophy, but this focuses exclusively on prior philosophers (all of whom were, apparently, men). It’s worth noting Wittgenstein here, a man who did not study philosophy, but produced two of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century, effectively shifting the entire focus from epistemology – what can we know? – to how we talk about what we think we know, the philosophy of language. The ‘slogan’ of Wittgenstein’s second book, Philosophical Investigations, is “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use”, (re)asserting context.
Yet even Wittgenstein cannot escape metrics. I’ve answered exam questions, written essays, on what Wittgenstein ‘means’, what his position is compared to Ayer or Russell. What occurred to me then, as now, is “Should this be asking what material conditions caused Wittgenstein to write this? How does it apply to society now?”
What I’m getting at here is capitalism’s central ‘trick’: if in doubt, keep fragmenting the object (and the subject), then deny connectivity. Thus, there are more ‘products’, and fragmentation becomes a powerful way of controlling thought, therefore, controlling the human person. This is nowhere more obvious than the worship of “the individual” in our society.
In the post-WWII world, the concept of “the individual” became an ideological weapon in the war against communism (as the Americans saw it). This concept was associated with Western notions of ‘freedom’ (as Badiou says in The Communist Hypothesis this revolves around the ‘freedom’ to own property, to become rich, which is, apparently, “…the guarantee of all other freedoms.”) yet, at one and the same time as individuality is stressed, there is an equivalent fetishisation of ‘community’ – even though this was, infamously, disputed by Margaret Thatcher in an address to the General Synod of the Church of Scotland, “There is no such thing as community; there are collections of individuals”. Despite this, ‘community’ is still posited as something one should aspire to, even though this is unachievable in capitalist society. The idea of community is bemoaned as something lost, fallen victim to modernity. The ‘breakdown’ of community mirrors that of the family, both devices of fragmentation (perfect patterns) that create a tension within “the individual” who is encouraged to aspire to something forever beyond their reach…mainly because it does not exist. The television models, through soap operas, sitcoms and advertisements, represent these fictional entities that, while using dramatic fragmentation as a device, hold out a ‘hope’ that if these characters could only do X, Y or Z, everyone would be reconciled. This is part of their attraction: the spectator/reader is drawn into constructing imaginary ways to ‘solve’ these on-screen problems. The ‘solutions’ are always represented as necessitating changes in individual psychology, rather than in the socio-political environment. The ‘blame’ is placed squarely on the individual and their ‘failings’. Television drama never asks the obvious question: What has caused this person to become like this, to behave in these ways? If this type of question is even approached, in steps the next culprit: the family…to which the obvious retort is “What caused this family to become like this, to behave in these ways?”; which question leads us back to “the individual”. A vicious circularity that absolves environment from culpability.
What we also tend to see here, in terms of the final move in this pattern, is the introduction of ‘evil’. Thus, psychology and the motivation of the thief or the abuser is explained: they are ‘evil’. That is to say, they are not “like us”, their values are different to ours (if they can be said to have values). The use of this term usually, to me anyway, indicates either a failure of thought, or a refusal to think, to take an easy way out. It is, to me, a dismissive term that when interrogated has very little meaning; it indicates a refusal to understand on the part of the user (N.B. to understand is not to condone). What is it to use the term ‘evil’, other than a fragmentation of thought and of understanding.
Fragmentation plays a central role in our society. We are encouraged to divide our lives into ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘family time’ and ‘me time’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ – all kinds of binary oppositions. What would happen if we were able to take note of Marx’ dictum that work is the greatest expression of who you are? A suggestion that money should not be the main motivator of what we do, it should be satisfaction – a holistic approach, impossible in a society that insists on the fragmentation of ‘tasks’.
Even those professions that used to enable satisfaction are now being brought under control, using a spurious notion of ‘unity’ and ‘transparency’. That, however, is the next entry…
Murmurs from the Forest 