The Republican presidential candidates' rhetoric reminds me of Frederick Dolan's insights in his Allegories of America, where he represents American politics as "entirely given over to phantasms and simulacra but whose actors are driven by the need to reduce the interpretive ambiguity of their world to the reassuring forms of a metaphysical allegory."
It also recalls Bonnie Honig's dry comment in her brilliant book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics: "The perpetuity of contest is not easy to celebrate."
No wonder I'm finding it easier these days to read political theory, novels, poetry, and art criticism: all grist for the mental mill -- to quote Pierre Rosanvallon in Democracy Past and Future, literature and poetry open us up the the presence of the world by the devices of language; art surveys the ambiguity and clears the silence of language; it remains open to the contradictions of the world and never allows concepts to exhaust the density of the real.
Now back to figuring out Nadia Urbinati's concept of representativity.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Aesthetic judgment and moral judgment
Anyway, the sheer pleasure I take in art is only part of its fascination for me. I am also intrigued by the connections between aesthetic judgment, or taste, and moral and political judgment (for me these latter two are closely aligned: like John Dewey, I divide up judgments into private and public ones, and the latter are political). Hannah Arendt makes a move that never ceases to shock me, first because it's so radical as a way to think about Kantian thought, but second because it's so familiar: it's a classical move. (I want to specify "Roman," because the automatic connection might appear to be a Greek one, since "to kalon" means "good, noble, beautiful"; I do think it is a move associated more profoundly with Roman than Greek concerns, but that's a separate point, so I'll go with "classical.")
Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by." Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."
How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment? Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality. You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist. And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community." It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves. So with moral judgment. The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along. They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members). When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.
The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all). This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos." The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about. It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino. Am I better? No. More thoughtful? Yes. More open to the lived experience of the world? Yes. Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same? Yes. More attuned to injustice? Well...perhaps.
Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended). Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia. But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company." The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.
Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by." Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."
How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment? Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality. You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist. And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community." It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves. So with moral judgment. The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along. They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members). When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.
The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all). This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos." The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about. It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino. Am I better? No. More thoughtful? Yes. More open to the lived experience of the world? Yes. Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same? Yes. More attuned to injustice? Well...perhaps.
Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended). Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia. But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company." The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.
Art, taste, pleasure
I've mentioned my interest in aesthetic judgment before. Part of it arises from pure pleasure in looking at art. I've met perhaps ten people in as many years who tell me that they just don't understand art, or they don't like it (one of them, as I will never forget, in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, steps away from Titians and a Bronzino that take your breath away). It's difficult to know what to say to these people, except "why?" but to that question I've rarely got a good answer. The man in the Pitti was depressingly typical in his struggle to reply. "It's boring," he stammered, "I feel like there's too much to know...really, the paintings all look the same."
As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts. Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music. The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end. But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring." So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.
As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts. Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music. The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end. But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring." So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Art criticism and its surprising delights
One of my deep if unsecret vices is reading art history and art criticism, especially of a philosophical bent -- Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Yve-Alain Bois, Arthur Danto, Timothy Clark. It's a true vice, because what fascinates me about it has just enough of a connection to my professional interests that I can all too easily convince myself that a day spent reading this stuff is essentially a day spent working.
The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done. This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights. They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.
Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance. The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else. Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark). The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia. They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."
Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island. More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place). I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.
Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it. If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing. These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation. It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.
from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)
eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente
di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?
(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn. But I, with the knowing heart
of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)
The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done. This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights. They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.
Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance. The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else. Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark). The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia. They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."
Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island. More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place). I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.
Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it. If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing. These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation. It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.
from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)
eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente
di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?
(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn. But I, with the knowing heart
of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)
Friday, March 2, 2012
Erotic panegyric
Statius is a Roman poet who wrote several fascinating panegyrics of the Roman emperor Domitian. The one I know best opens a collection of poems called Silvae, occasional pieces Statius wrote for patrons and friends. Dedicated to praising an enormous new equestrian sculpture of the emperor, it sews references to the statue's enormous, almost monstrous, size together with admiring commentary on the gentle grace of Domitian's expression and gesture. The effect is sensual, slightly comical, and (for a poem about an autocrat) oddly humanizing.
I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most.
Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.
You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.
Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.
I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most.
Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.
You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.
Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sallust's appeal
The Roman historian Sallust never ceases to fascinate. His tale of the north African king Jugurtha, who makes war against Rome in the late second century BCE, the Bellum Jugurthinum, constantly strays from its own narrative line and undercuts the oppositions it sets up at the start. He cuts off thoughts before they are fully articulated, jumps forward and backward in time, and makes a show out of silencing himself ("Now I return to my story," he says more than once).
Contrast Sallust to Walter Benjamin’s ideal storyteller, who has the ability to recount the whole life, not only of another, but of himself: he is the man who, letting his life “be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story,” becomes a sage for the multitudes. But Sallust, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Syme, is “cut short” both in his brief careers as politician and writer and in his choice of a startlingly choppy style.
Perhaps the strangest story in the BJ is the digression prompted by Sallust's reference to the town of Lepcis, which finds itself caught between Rome and Numidia. "Now that we've reached this region, it seems not unworthy to recall the outstanding, amazing deed of two Carthaginians," he says by way of bare introduction.
Once upon a time, back before the last Punic War, the powerful states of Carthage and Cyrene disagreed over the exact location of the boundary between them, which lay on a totally featureless sandy plain. After a long struggle on land and sea, the two city-states finally agree to a settlement. Each will send out envoys from their capitals, and the border will be established on the spot where the two groups meet. Two Carthaginians and two Cyrenians are chosen and the date of their simultaneous departure is set. The Carthaginians make excellent time, but the Cyrenians are delayed, whether by laziness or sandstorms, Sallust says, is impossible to say. When they finally meet well into Cyrenian-claimed territory, the Cyrenians (terrified of returning home to explain their failure) accuse the Carthaginians of cheating by leaving their capital early. Preferring to bargain rather than go home and start the war all over again (or maybe they're suffering from guilty consciences?), the two Carthaginians demand a new agreement, so long as it's fair ("tantum modo aequam"). The cunning Greeks -- Sallust suddenly starts referring to them at this point as "Graeci" rather than "Cyrenenses" -- devise an awful choice: either the border will be set on the spot where they met, but the two Carthaginians will be buried alive there; or the Carthaginians will allow the Cyrenians to advance the line as far as they wish, with the same capital condition applying to them. The Carthaginians accept these terms as fair, and they are buried alive (79.2-10). The city of Carthage sets up altars in their memory on the spot. And that is it. Nunc ad rem redeo, Sallust says: "now I return to my story."
What's the point of this story that literally comes out of nowhere, geographically as well as narratologically? It exposes the mortal investment men make in political conflict; it turns conflict into a game of sorts, where virtue contends with cunning; it asks us to balance the value of lived life against eternal memory and civic greatness. It is typically Sallustian.
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