Posts Tagged ‘Karl Marx’

Sep
16
2011

The Frankfurt School, Part Two

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY, PART TWO

It was the fate of the Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung,  to be in the wrong place doing the right thing.  The members of the School, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herman Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, et al., had the intellectual ability to understand that traditional Marxism was no longer adequate as an analytic tool for contemporary society and had the uncanny ability to see into the future. The swerve away from traditional Marxist demands for a social revolution refocused their collective attention on the the psychological interaction between culture and the individual.  At the end of the Great War, the German people had an unprecedented opportunity to free themselves from oppression.  The working classes could have seized power and a genuine social revolution could have taken place.  But the lower classes had proved to be passive and let the chance to direct their own destinies pass them by.  The newly formed Institut asked why?  The answer, the scholars believed, could be found, not in the theories of Karl Marx but in the theories of Sigmund Freud.

The accomplishments of the  Institut für Sozialforschung in the decade between 1923 and 1933 were extraordinary.  The Frankfurt School combined a new academic discipline, sociology, with traditional Marxist economics, with Freudian theory into an interdisciplinary discourse about modern society.  The School rejected the old Marxist notion that the “secret” machine of history was economics and that the dialectical clash was between the classes.  Although the scholars directed attention to the young Hegelian Marx, they also rejected absolutism or “identity thinking.”  The School rejected the fetishism of any one particular “engine” of society and rejected the idea that any one aspect of the superstructure could be separated from the larger whole. The philosophers, who came from many different academic backgrounds, understood that culture could not be separated from society and that social conditions had to be examined by combining theory and praxis, or theory with empirical data.

The first major study of society undertaken by the Frankfurt School was supervised by Erich Fromm, examined the German working class, employing empirical data interpreted from a psychoanalytic, was never published.  By the time it was completed, this important body of work revealed a disconcerting truth that the working classes were receptive to the fascist message of the Nazis.  It is on the unsettling note of this unpublished study that the Frankfurt School spent its last days in Germany.  Frankfurt was a city with a new university and other free thinking intellectual institutions where Jews could exist in an unusually open society, relatively free of anti-Semitism.  It was easy for the scholars who were mostly Jewish to be blind to the ugly forces that were gathering against them.

That said, despite their denials of anti-Semitism or of the significance of their Jewish identity, the members were not helpless in the face of danger.  The funds of the Institut, generously supported by the Weil family, father Hermann and son Felix, were transferred to Holland by 1933 and the School moved to Geneva just before Hitler came into power.  On the very day of his ascendency to the ruler of Germany, Hitler’s minions seized the home shared by Horkheimer and Pollock.  A few months later the School’s library was seized.  For the next twenty years the Frankfurt School would be on the move. With this move to New York, the School was confronted with a new and alien culture that was young and had little tradition of scholarly speculative thinking.  But New York was the only available haven and most of the scholars of the Frankfurt School became American citizens and most of the European scholars who followed them to the United States became Americanized.

Driven to New York by the wrath of Adolf Hitler, like so many émigrés, the members of the Frankfurt School reconvened in New York city, under the protective affiliation with Columbia University.  It should be stressed that the scholars were still searching for a way to study society, its culture, and its people by combining theoretical insights from several academic areas with empirical research.  It should also be stressed that the Frankfurt School was a research institute which brought together speculative insights or hypothetical thinking with a gathering of factual data.  The research was propelled by changing times, modernity.  Modern life in the twentieth century required a new means of understanding and a new mode of analysis, but the century was evolving so drastically that it was difficult to grasp the changes.  In a single decade, Germany had gone from a nation stunned by a shocking military defeat, from a nation crippled by a world wide Depression, to a country under the thrall of a man who put its inhabitants under a hypnotic spell.

Just how evil the enchantment was, the scholars could not imagine, but they understood that an entire population was allowing itself to be led by an individual who was hostile to freedom of thought.  When the members of the Frankfurt School began to gather in New York in the 1930s, the members began to redirect its study of modern society in general and in particular the nature of the personality that responded so supinely to authority.  However, with a change in venue came a change in scene and a change in methodology.  American scholarship tended to be pragmatic and practical, and, as a result, its research tended towards empiricism.  The members of the Frankfurt School were aware that however sophisticated and enlightened their philosophy, their mode of empirical operation was “primitive.”  Although it is often thought that the transplanted Institut was isolated from American intellectuals, there was enough interaction to change the working methods of the Frankfurt scholars and to change the ideas of American intellectuals.

The most important book on the subject of the Institut in America is the recently published The Frankfurt School in Exile by Thomas Wheatland of 2009.  In contrast to the focus on the New York experience, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, written thirty years earlier,  provides an excellent description of the philosophy and theories of the school in general. The move to New York changed the Institut from a group of scholars who still spoke in Marxist terminology to scholars who spoke in more neutralized terms.  The Frankfurt School moved to Critical Theory, a critical analysis of society through a variety of methods.  It was in New York that the school logically completed its earlier studies of the compliant mentality of the working class in Germany.  These studies were also a study of fascism and eventually anti-Semitism, the seminal topics of the unsettled era.

From the beginning, the Frankfurt School insisted on maintaining German as it language of publication, as a way of preserving what was left of German intellectualism untainted by Nazi thought and ideology. Certainly such a decision resulted in a separation of Critical Theory from an audience of English readers, but it was an important philosophical position on the part of a group of Jewish scholars hunted from their homeland.  Fromm’s The German Workers Under the Weimar Republic was finally published as Escape From Freedom  in 1942. Although Fromm, who had been in New York since 1932, eventually broke with the Institut, the idea of the questionnaires used in his study was carried over into the School’s American study, Studien über Autorität Familie.  This five year study was typical of the collaborative nature of the Frankfurt School in that the work was based upon three essays by Horkheimer and Marcuse and Fromm who speculated on the meaning of the empirical results.

In contrast to the study of the working class, the study of authority centered on the bourgeois family and the leadership of the father as well as the working class family.  In late capitalism, the authority of the father had been undermined when the ultimate unquestionable authority of the patriarchal system by the state itself.  Thus the authority of the father became increasingly as “irrational” or based on assertion rather than fact.  Women, for whatever reason, had not taken advantage of the freedoms offered to them and submitted, like the children, to irrational authority.  The ultimate authorities were the corporations and the government but the intimate authority within the family was the father whose demand for obedience created a regressive personality with a weak ego.  In Freudian terms, the “superego” of institutions were too remote to be effective, leaving the individual at the mercy of arbitrary emotional authority, anxious of its powers.

The father’s demands created an individual who was masochistic and passive and susceptible to appellations from other paternal father figures demanding obedience.  The study examined this new personality type, described as sado-mascohistic,  to draw its outlines. The Studien über Autorität Familie was based upon work done with German families but avoided the component of anti-Semitism that haunted Nazi ideology.  It was time for the Institut to  study fascism and America was a safe place to undertake this class.  Franz Neumann led the way with is groundbreaking work, Behemoth. The Study and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a monumental study of the Nazis rise to power.  Neumann exemplified the split that was forming in the Frankfurt School.  He was more conventionally Marxist in his approach to the rise of fascism and based Hitler’s success on economic conditions and the splintering of class interests by the Nazi form of “socialism.”  Fascism was essentially corporate capitalism founded upon the kind of authority that undercut the clash of social groups and replaced social struggles with nationalist unity.  Neumann’s orthodox Marxism which posited the economy as the engine of the Nazis would always be part of the explanation for how Hitler came to power, but he ignored an element that Horkheimer and other members of the School considered to be of great importance: mass media.

Mass media introduced a new element not fully covered by a Marxist analysis, psychoanalysis, or the mentality of the group.  What was the best way to study a society increasingly manipulated by technology? The economic conditions of Germany were used by the Nazis to bring back an older form of authority, the father figure, Der Führer, to whom all eyes turned.  For Neumann, who had been arrested before he was able to leave Germany, Nazi authority, based upon terror and coercion and propaganda, mirrored the violence of capitalist bosses against labor. For Horkheimer, Nazi authority was based upon the unprecedented role of mass media, used and manipulated by Goebbels and his control of propaganda in a way which assaulted the psychology of the population.

Neither scholar could see where the removal of a rational institution and its replacement by an irrational authority would lead until after the Second World War.  By the end of 1945, it became clear that the members of the Institut für Sozialforschung were “survivors,” beneficiaries of their foresight in leaving Germany at the first indication of danger. Some would never return to Germany but the next chapter of the Frankfurt School would take place in the capital of mass media, Los Angeles, California, where Horkheimer and Adorno would study “The Culture Industry.”

The Next Post will be “The Frankfurt School, Part Three.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Sep
09
2011

The Frankfurt School, Part One

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND CRITICAL THEORY

PART ONE

“A categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind; to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1966                                                                                                          

While Karl Marx did not seem to foresee the importance of commodities in restraining the social revolution he predicted, the early decades of the twentieth century opened well for Marxism.  If one defines” Marxism” as the political manifestations of his theories the surely the Russian Revolution was the culmination of his predictions.  The lower classes rose up against their oppressors and the former Empire became one nation, under Communism.  The Great War accelerate the revolt against hereditary powers and broke up the aging empires, freeing a number of new nations to make their own destiny—choosing between communism or democracy—in acts of what Woodrow Wilson called “self-determination.”  The choice was not clear-cut.  Democracy, to people used to autocratic rule, was tempting but dangerous, and old habits of dependence and obedience often resulted in the replacement of one ruler for another.   As would be seen in the new Soviet Union, the high hopes for a Communist utopia were quickly dashed by the resumption of a totalitarian rule under Lenin and then Stalin.

Like Russia, Germany had a long history of powerful rulers and when the Great War ended in the nation’s defeat, the people had no experience of democracy.  After the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, socialism seemed like a middle ground for a nation unaccustomed to self-rule and in need of state administration. The replacement for a militaristic regime was a coalition government, the Weimar Republic. Early on, there were struggles to establish some kind of Communist rule, as in the Soviet Union, but the left-wing revolutionaries were assassinated.  The dream that Karl Marx had of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” had run aground as the forces of socialism and fascism struggled for power.  The working class had less interest in social change than the intellectuals, who were dedicated activists.  One can assume that in Germany there had been enough change: a war had been lost, a Kaiser had been deposed, a nation had to be rebuilt, and many of the restraints of centuries of political oppression and bourgeois repression were lifted.   No one wanted another social disruption.  There were other diversions afoot.

Berlin became the site of an outbreak of widespread social indulgence and experimentation in once-forbidden pleasures against the backdrop of a corrupt and ineffectual government that struggled to manage a modern nation in a modern world.  Crippled by war reparations and haunted by the traumas of the War, the German people appeared to have little taste for more social disruption.  It is against this backdrop of the promise and the failure of a revolution that would liberate the working classes that the famed Frankfurt School was launched.  Disillusioned by the failure of left wing concerns to have any resonance, Felix Weil, the son of a wealthy German industrialist, Hermann Weil, received the funding from his father to found an institute to study contemporary society.

Weil brought together an event called the First Marxist Work Week in the summer of 1922 in Thuringia.  This “week” was attended by Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Richard Sorge, Friederich Pollock, Karl August Wittfogel, Bela Fogarasi, Konstantin Zetkin, and so on. The stimulating success of the gathering of intellectuals inspired Weil to establish a permanent institute.  The chosen site was Frankfurt.  Frankfurt was an island of intellectualism during the 1920s, due in no small part to the recent establishment of the University in 1914.  With a loose affiliation with the University, the Institut für Sozialforschung was founded in 1923.   The first director was Kurt Albert Gerlach but he died, then for a brief period the Institut was directed by Carl Grünberg, an Austrian Marxist who edited the first European journal of labor and socialist history.  Under Carl Grünberg, the Institut was led by a traditional orthodox Marxist, whose old fashioned “vulgar” Marxism was not shared by his colleagues.  Conventional Marxism would not be the direction of the group of scholars who gathered in Frankfurt.

After Grünberg had a stroke, he was forced to resign and from 1931 on the Institute was directed by Max Horkheimer.  Under Horkheimer, the Institut took a different direction, away from orthodox or “vulgar” Marxism and towards a new understanding of society—a sociology of the modernist culture.   If one term characterizes the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, it would be “assimilated Jew” from a privileged upper middle class intellectual background. This description comes up over and over in the writings on the School, from Martin Jay to Zoltán Tar to Thomas Wheatland, and the ambivalent social position of being “assimilated Jews” would seal the fate of the Institut and its members.  Max Horkheimer and his associate, Frederick Pollock, were joined by Leo Lowenthal, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Hermann Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Erich Fromm, all of whom were Jewish (Adorno was half-Jewish).  Indeed, Jews were very assimilated in Germany and that nation was where the most Christian-Jewish intermarriages took place in Europe.  Although there were signs of intolerance and anti-Semitism in Germany, the scholars of the Institut insisted that there was no “Jewish question.”  Because of a cultural heritage they though little of, these scholars would be forced to leave Germany and live in exile for over a decade.  Working in New York and Los Angeles, the members of the Frankfurt School would forge a new form of neo-Marxism, Critical Theory.  Most of these émigrés would never return to Germany, the nation that had persecuted them.  They would remain in their adopted country, the United States of America.

Although there was interest in the Weil family of understanding prejudice, when it was founded, the main goal of the School was more broad.  Sociology was a relatively new academic discipline and was, at that time, mostly based upon empirical research.  The only means of examining society from a theoretical perspective was Marxism.  The question was now, which Marxism?  The older and now discredited Marxism which reduced society to a “mode of production?”  Or a new approach to the ideas of Karl Marx, based upon his early works?  The Institut returned to the young Marx in his more Hegelian position, in other words, the scholars revisited dialectical materialism.  The goal was to develop a theory that would allow the appropriate kind of study for this new modern society.  Modernism, as it existed after the Great War, was out of the intellectual reach of traditional Marxist thinking.  What these intellectuals would retain from Marx is the concept of “critique,” which means to analyze and to study social conditions from the inside.  Thus the Frankfurt School began to develop Critical Theory, a means whereby contemporary society in post-war Germany could be examined through a combination of empirical research linked to a theoretical hypothesis, a new combination—Hegelian-Marxism.

From the beginning, the Frankfurt School maintained its independence from any and all institutions, the University of Frankfurt and later Columbia University.  In a politically unstable era, the Institut wisely decided to take a non-political position.  Even though the scholars maintained neutrality, as individuals they were politically committed to change.  The School was able to avoid local controversies by articulating a unique methodology.  Although in its early years, the members accepted the traditional Marxist, base-superstucture mode of analysis from traditional Marxism, later, after 1930, the notion of the base was jettisoned and the scholars concentrated on the superstructure or culture.  In addition to returning to the beginnings of Marxist thinking, the Institut employed another innovative element as the basis of its studies, Freudian theory, or psychoanalysis.  Society has its own psychology and different groups in society have their own particular mindsets.  People was moved by their social and economic conditions, but they are also moved by the ways in which they think which are based in the individual and his or her psyche.

Sigmund Freud, just coming into wide acceptance, in the 1920s, considered the family to be the basis of a person’s psyche which formed certain reactions to childhood training.  The psychic forces constructed by the parents would then play themselves out in the social arena.  The members of the Frankfurt School adapted Freudian theories to their studies of contemporary society.  The result of this new methodology was an integration or fusion among various disciplines, philosophy, sociology, psychology to form an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the current political situation in Germany.  The uniqueness of the Frankfurt School is this mixture of a multiplicity of approaches to understanding the individual within the group.  As time went on, it became more and more clear that the “individual” or “subject” was a “convenient fiction,” and that people are constructed by their environments and by instrumental societies.  The Frankfurt School studied a sociology of knowledge or a materialist theory of society which was buttressed by empirical research in order to achieve a synthetic view of culture. All knowledge and all thinking was conditioned by concrete historical situations.  There was, therefore, no fetishization of the individual who could not be transcendent, nor of culture itself, because it could never be autonomous.

For these philosophers in this changed society,  Marxism was no longer the philosophy of social revolution. But why not?  Why had the German working class not taken advantage of the opportunity to forge a strong alliance that would impact government policies?  One of the most important studies undertaken by the Institut was an examination of the German working class, supervised by Erich Fromm.  In order to determine the social consciousness of the laborers, Fromm used questionnaires in which the answers were taken down verbatim.  Horkheimer analyzed the answers through keywords and the conclusion of the study was that the working class was not only passive, rather than revolutionary, but also receptive to the message of the new rising political force, fascism.  For a variety of reasons, the Institut chose not to publish the depressing findings.   But what they learned from their research was precinct and predictive of things to come.  Although Fromm would drift away from Freud and the Institut  when it moved to America, this study was the first of similar studies of social attitudes and their root causes that would come from the Frankfurt School.

Once Hitler was elected in 1933, the Institut für Sozialforschung was in a precarious position, and Horkheimer was not blind to the rising tide of fascism and its dangers to a group of left-thinking Jews.  The funds of the Institut were transferred to a bank in Holland and the Frankfurt School prepared to decamp.  The Nazis closed down the Institut as quickly and as ruthlessly as they had shuttered the Bauhaus.   Indeed, by the time Herman Marcuse joined the School in 1932, he was assigned to its new outpost, Geneva.  The School also opened branches in Paris and London and in these cities, the preferred form of publication, the Zeitschrift, or short essay, rather than long book, could continue.  When the Nazis came to power, most of the members were already on the move, leaving behind a magnifcant 60,000 volume library to be seized by the fascists.  Horkheimer was among the first faculty of the University of Frankfurt to be dismissed because he was Jewish, and he left for Geneva.  Adorno went to London, and Walter Benjamin, who was loosely associated with the Institut, went to Paris.  Those who stayed behind, such as Wittfogel, were simply thrown in a concentration camp.

In Germany, fascism had taken over the revolutionary position once held by Marxism.  The Frankfurt School now had new goals.  First the Institut had to save itself. Switzerland could not be a permanent home, as Horkheimer already sensed the coming sympathies for fascism in that neutral nation.  Second, the Institut had to preserve German culture and remove German intellectual heritage and contemporary intellectual thinking to a site where it could not be tainted by Nazi philosophy.  This self-imposed mission was deeply important to the members of the Institut.  The Nazis were already appropriating German culture for their own ends and in the process was polluting the history of German intellectual and artistic culture, from Nietzsche to Wagner.  It was important to continue an uninterrupted strain of German thinking and the only place to do this was in New York City.  Opportunities in London were limited and the intellectuals in Paris were decidedly unwelcoming to German scholars, so the Institut moved towards another alliance with another institution, Columbia University.

Over time, all the members of the Frankfurt School gathered together in New York.  In continuing their determination to carry on German culture, the Institut members decided to write and publish in German.  During the early years of Nazi rule, the School worked to rescue and fund European scholars on the run.  Although some two hundred intellectuals were indebted to the well-funded School, Horkheimer and Adorno were unable to save their close associate, Walter Benjamin who simply did not want to emigrate to New York.  Benjamin was finally persuaded to leave France after the Nazi takeover and made his way to the Spanish border.  Once in Spain, he had passage to New York, thanks to the Institut.  Unfortunately, in a now famous tragic tale, the border between France and Spain was closed on that day at that point and Benjamin, in despair, committed suicide.  The members of the Institut were horrified and devastated.  In contrast, Wittfogel was freed and found his way to the safety of America.

The now-common term “critical theory” actually stems from the work done by the Frankfurt School in these post-Weimar years.  It is customary to think of Critical Theory as an analysis of authority and a study of power and how totalitarian forces manipulate society, but this was a relatively new position for the  School.  In America, the scholars shifted their foci.  While in Germany, the Frankfurt School had concentrated on interdisciplinary studies attempting to understand the German working class.  As the impact of fascism upon society became more apparent, it was clear that there were psychoanalytical aspects to the acceptance of Hitler by the Germans.  In American the studies of the Institut led to an investigation into the “authoritarian personality,” or the kind of mind-set that would accept a totalitarian leader.  The studies began, not in politics, but with the bourgeois family and how the passive acceptance of leadership had led to Hitler.

When Horkheimer managed to relocated the Institut to Columbia University in New York, the social and political theories of the School was impacted by the pragmatism and empirical methods of American scholars.  It is America that the scholars began to shift their attention from the failures of communism and the willingness of the working class to follow fascism to the growing importance of technological communication in shaping social responses. Mass media and mass spectacle had come of age, and the power of art forms could be used for good or for evil.  The scholars of the Frankfurt School were among the first to understand the importance of mass media and national culture.  They were among the first to sound the alarm and among the first to delineate the consequences of new communication technologies upon culture and society.

But the critique of a culture shaped by technology was also a critique of the Enlightenment.  Indeed, it can be said that the Frankfurt School initiates the study of the consequences of the Enlightenment through the critique of philosophy by philosophy.  The ideas of the Enlightenment had been working themselves out for two centuries, but, until the Frankfurt School, Reason and Rational Thinking as  concepts  had not been examined in terms of their social  consequences.  Certainly, Nietzsche had railed against the kind of reason that resulted in nihilism, but, unlike the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, he did not have the vantage point of observing the unintended consequences of “Enlightenment,” such as the Holocaust.  Totalitarian governments and “authoritarian” personalities and blinded obedience were seen as direct consequences of reason gone wrong.

The effects of totalitarian thinking became one of the primary concerns of  the Frankfurt School.  The Frankfurt School shifted Marxism into the Twentieth Century by observing contemporary culture, its ideologies and how these belief systems impacted society through this new technological world of mass communication.  The Frankfurt School and its associates were be hard hit by the increasing oppression of fascism and were dislocated during the Second World War.  As intellectuals, they were in grave danger; as Jews their lives were in peril.  Some went into exile, some survived, some did not.  Those that lived survived to continue their roles as defenders of Marxism as a mode of critique that revealed the true intentions of ideology, laying the groundwork for what would eventually be called “post” or “neo” Marxism.

The next post on The Frankfurt School, Part Two, will examine the work of the Institut in America.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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Jul
08
2011

The Surrealist Object

SURREALISM AND ITS OBJECTS

ART BECOMES FETISH

Surrealism was initially practiced in written form as textual production, as a means of freeing the literary mind from “writerly” conventions.  Just as Sigmund Freud took dictation, so to speak, writing down what his patients told him, the Surrealists would write down the contents of their minds.  If only they could awaken that deep level where the subconscious thoughts dwelled. At first, Surrealists resisted the visual in favor of language. Pierre Naville, who aspired to leadership with André Breton, said bluntly,

“Masters, master-crooks, smear your canvases.  Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting. Neither the mark of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture, nor the image retracing the form of the dream…”

Naville, who edited the first three issues of La Revolution Surrealiste with Benjamin Peret, was eventually purged from the Surrealist group in 1933.  With Breton firmly in charge of the journal and of the membership, Surrealism welcomed the visual artists to the ranks, usually by a kind of verbal anointing by the Pope.  He gave the nod to such retrospective “Surrealists,” like de Chirico or selected the reluctant Magritte and included the surprised Kahlo.  After Breton issued what turned out to be the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 he added his essay, Le Surrealism et la peinture in 1926, to his growing collection of writings on this new art movement.  In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton wrote of the importance of the dream,

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” He continued, “It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.”

It is here within the surreal fusion between dream and reality that the Surrealist object evolved.  Certainly there is a connection between the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist object, but Duchamp was always concerned with the discourse on the nature of art.  Surrealism had other ideas about the object.  On the occasion of the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris in 1937, Breton wrote an essay on “The Crisis of the Object.”  The installation provocatively showed Surrealist objects and so-called mathematical objects from the Institut Poincaré in glass cabinets, like ethnographic or more precisely, scientific specimens.  Photographs of the exhitit show that “primitive” masks, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack and Why not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy were encased along with Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Object and Oppenheim’s Luncheon in Fur.

Breton understood that the object had been in a state of  “crisis” from, as he stated, about 1830 when scientific studies and poetic and artistic experimentations began to develop along parallel courses.  On one hand, science studies objects as material things, and on the other hand, the arts manipulated objects for aesthetic purposes.  Braque and Picasso actually dissolved the object into its own logical infinitude, thus making clear how acute the crisis had become.  Surrealism, in contrast to many of the other avant-garde art movements, was not abstract; instead, Surrealism was a return to the concrete.  Breton, a keen student of the French poetic tradition, was aware of the dream of Rimbaud to return to a kind of primitivistic or primal vision that would be free of conventions and the challenge was to link the untutored vision with the imagination.

Surrealist theory sought to re-enchant the universe and thought that the crisis of the object could be overcome if the thing in all its strangeness could be seen as if anew.  The strategy was not to make Surreal objects for the sake of shocking the middle class public but to make objects “surreal” by dépayesment or estrangement.  The goal was not so much the choice but the hunt and the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, which would defamilarize it.  Once the object was stranded outside of its normal place, it could be seen without the veil of cultural conventions.  L’Objet Insolite’ is different from Breton’s dream object, which emerged out of the subconscious and must be created.  In his book, Nadja, Breton wandered the side streets of Paris, a city, which, to him was a city haunted with strange never-before seen objects.  Wandering with Giacometti, he would haunt the marché aux puces or flea markets, hoping for an encounter with the “Marvelous” which would assuage Breton’s taste for the bizarre.

The Surrealist object was closely related to Freud’s concept of the “fetish.”  The ordinary object becomes a fetish because we project our desire upon it, because we look at it and look again until we cannot stop looking.  The selection of this object, like any Dada object, is random.  And like the Surrealist object, the choice is not as significant as the meaning the human psychology gives to it.  The fetish is always a substitute for something else and always has a sexual content, is always a substation for sexual satisfaction.  Although not explicitly mentioned, Marx’s commodity fetish not only predates Freud’s sexual fetish but also shares the same cognitive mechanism.

For Marx, the commodity becomes a fetish when it can be exchanged for something else, or acquires a monetary value through its symbolic meaning, which is the “something else” outside and beyond the object itself.  In other words, certain objects become commodities because we, the consumer, are willing and able to invest something of emotional selves into the object.  Marx was intrigued at how such fetishized objects are exchanged when a concept we translate as “value” becomes monetized.  Marx and Freud agreed that whether symbolic commodity or sexual substitution, the fetishized object is never itself and is always the “symptom” for something else. That projection of subconscious desire for an absent entity is what characterizes the Surrealist object.  The definition of the object is never a scientific or an objective or a conventional meaning.  The symbolic value (meaning) is always personal and subjective to the possessor.

While Breton, the writer and poet, may have played the role of the flâneur searching for the unexpected, visual artists created their own poetic objects and imposed them upon modern art, in competition with traditional sculpture—the Readymade, and with Picasso’s logical assemblages were new conceptual constructions.  The Readymades were about language and were frequently visual-verbal puns, such as Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (play on French Window).  Picasso’s constructions were physical manifestations of intellectual concepts, such as The Guitar.  Surrealism approaches objects in an entirely different manner, irrational rather than rational, poetic rather than intellectual.  Duchamp and Picasso play with what is, but the Surrealists evoke the unnamable unspoken.

The fetishization of an otherwise ordinary thing led to a cult of objects without aesthetic or artistic intentions.  These Surrealist objects fell into many categories.  The Surrealist found object could be a flea market find, an object that had survived long after the knowledge of its use was lost and it had become strange to itself and others. In contrast, the natural object was just that—natural, such as a stone, while the “interpreted” found object was useful utensil converted into bizarre object, such as Man Ray’s Cadeau. Ray’s simple iron was studded with tacks, points out, giving the triangular flat bottom the menacing look of the dreaded “vagina dentate.”  And the useful iron becomes useless and strange.

The readymade or the modern mass produced object dragged from context and becomes thing of the mind.  The Surrealist assemblage, such as those created by Joan Miró, who stacked up disparate objects, from a fish to a bowler hat, functioned like a cadaver exquise, forcing the viewer to re-imagine the possible meanings. The incorporated object can be in Max Ernst’s Two Children Frightened by a Nightengale where a hyperreal painting sprouts wooden parts, a miniature gate and a painted knob.  The phantom object is merely suggested by a gesture of the hands—a feint seen in Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (1934).

Perhaps the most familiar Surrealist object and the most famous object of desire is the Dream object invented by Meret Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur (1934). Humble and familiar, the dream object is given sumptuous appearance by caprice or desire.  Oppenheim appropriated a simple set of crockery made for café au lait, meaning that the object is not fine china or dainty high-class specimens of fine porcelain.  Large in scale, as is necessary for café au lait, the cup, saucer and spoon sprout the fur of the rabbit, an equally humble animal.  Not only have the crockery set become useless, it has become sexually suggestive.  Oppenheim created a disjuncture between tea and fur and the hairy object metamorphosized into a metaphor, “fur for lunch.”  For Freud, fur and velvet had sexual connotations, claiming that “the sight of pubic hair” triggered desire, based on the longing to see “the female member.”   This male fixation is based on the visual, which is given a position or primacy and this fixation becomes a fetish.

There are many other categories for the Surrealist object, such as the box, seen in the work of Joseph Cornell, the  optical machine creating an optical illusion, such as Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, the  poème-objet, made by Breton himself.  Writing on the occasion of the exhibition of Surrealist objects, Breton stated,

“The objects that form part of the Surrealist exhibition of May 1936 are of a kind calculated primarily to raise the interdict resulting from the stultifying proliferation of those objects that impinge on our senses every day and attempt to pursue us that anything might exist independently of these mundane objects must be illusionary…”

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Jun
11
2010

Marxism, Art and the Artist

Marxism, Art and the Artist

In his anthology, Marxism and Art, Maynard Solomon recounted that although both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were interested in the literary arts early in their respective careers, they both were distracted by philosophy.  As a result, “There is no ‘original’ Marxist aesthetics for later Marxists to apply.  The history of Marxist aesthetics has been the history of the unfolding of the possible application of Marxist ideas and categories to art and to the theory of art.”  The same can be said of art history, which has also applied the Marxist idea of a critique of the social and economic system by utilizing a Marxist analysis of a work of art to show the workings of the mode of production upon the artist.  In contrast to the fragments written by both men, what is more interesting is how the ideas of Marx could be used in relation to art.

According to Karl Marx, art is part of the superstructure and is inescapably determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  Capitalism produces commodities, each one of which is a “fetish,” or an object with abstract value.  Fetishism is the projection of human nature and of human desires projected upon an external object.  If one accepts the proposition that all art is commodified, (and art must be a commodity in a capitalist society), then certain consequences logically follow.  All artists are cultural producers, laboring in a capitalist system for the benefits of the market.  All art made within this system is a commodity to be bought and sold as objects of desire upon which human feelings are projected. The work of art in a capitalist society must be a consumer object and therefore must also be an object of desire, a fetish.

The ideology of the market, a place where commodities are bought and sold, is a lived experience in the consciousness of every artist. The mind of the artist is imprinted with History and cannot escape his or her own time. Marxism would   oppose the thesis of a transcendent avant-garde that projects to the future and detaches itself from society.  From a Marxist point of view, art is always about society and the artist is always a part of the culture, art is never independent or absolute. Because the artist has been abandoned by God, modern art can only be ironic in the sense suggested by Friedrich Schiller. In the contemporary era, modern art can exhibit only human alienation.  With nothing left to symbolize, symbolism gives way to allegory.  The use of symbols directly communicates meaning, but allegory is an indirect cluster or collection of meanings.  As a result of the break down of the union of humans with a sense of spirituality, modern art is always indirect and referential because modern art is tied to capitalist ideology, which is merely bourgeois thought, an illusion that conceals the facts of construction of beliefs.

In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde Art and Kitsch,” the American art writer, Clement Greenberg, proposed that socialism would provide the freedom the avant-garde artist needs, because the capitalist system rewards the artist for responding to the demands of society, which is under the influence of ideology.  The ruling classes produce an ideology in its own self-interest but put the ideology forward in a way to make ideology seem “real.”  We refer to this operation of reification as the naturalizing effects.  Far from being “natural,” what ideology constructs, whether beliefs or art, is cultural. Through the mechanisms of ideology, that which is cultural becomes natural.

Social relations are presumed to be “natural,” and, hence, people do not recognize or even realize that the ways they interact are “cultural.” Ideology remains unseen.  A work of visual culture expresses the prevailing ideology, not just in terms of what a work of art expresses but also what the work of art does not say. Art bears an imprint of the history of its own time and is not timeless and transcendent.  Far from being free or independent, the avant-garde artist is reconstructed, from a Marxist perspective, is an intellectual servant in the pay of the system.  As Marx remarked,

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.  It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-laborers…(intellectuals) live only as long as they find work, and…find work only as long as their labor increases capital.  These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market…”

Far from being a rebel, the artist is a cultural worker without a “halo.”  The artist who does not recognize the workings of ideology is complicit with an oppressive system.  From a socialist perspective, what is the role of the informed and aware artist?  According to Auguste Comte, art rises from the study of nature and should facilitate the contemplation of moral values.  The position of Comte, that art is the ideal representation of reality, is essentially the academic perspective that prevailed in his era.  Writing decades later, Proudhon suggested a more specific role for the artist in Du principe de l’art of 1865.  Realism and naturalism had overtaken Romanticism in the 1860s and Proudhon saw art as having a social role, which should subordinate art to political and social ends.  What distinguishes Proudhon’s position is that these “ends” were those of a critique of society and its unjust practices.

In acting as a critic of his or her own time, the artist becomes a prophet for humanity who must condemn current society and who can foresee a better future.  From a socialist standpoint, the artist is a servant of society who has the moral role to reveal the workings of ideology by pointing to the truth.  While it is not correct to state that all Realist artists and writers were socialists, it is correct to say that the mission of the Realists in France and England was to show contemporary life.  Revelations of the realities of modern times would often be considered political by the forces that functioned best when these “truths” were kept veiled by ideology.

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Jun
04
2010

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

Marx, Engels, and Capitalism

As philosophers who inherited the goals of the Enlightenment, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the main theme was freedom, freedom to become a full human being, creating oneself through free choices.  They attributed a high value to the human personality and believed that making a life was distinct from making a thing.  The concern for the alienated human under capitalism can be found in a number of remarks made by Marx and Engels:

“..devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things..”

“Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…”

”…the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object…”

“…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…”

By the Nineteenth Century, the economic and social conditions that created what Walter Benjamin would call “high capitalism” were the result of numerous factors that converged over several centuries. World markets emerged and production and consumption became international and cosmopolitan. Local industries collapsed under the stress of factory goods and imports.  The result was that capitalism or capital was concentrated in a few hands due to centralized production.  These centers of production attracted workers and the uprooted poor poured into cities and cities, such as London, grew astronomically overnight.

The globalization of the Nineteenth Century was halted by the incessant wars of the Twentieth Century, and it is only in the past decade that we have returned to the levels of globalization that Marx witnessed.  During the Nineteenth Century, national states arose and accumulated great power over the people, but state power was undermined by capital’s international scope.  The fortunes of the nation state, as Adam Smith predicted, became entangled with capitalism, which was in the position of making or breaking the stability of the state through finances.

Power shifted from a small privileged class that presided over land, but did not produce products to the middle class, which based its power upon the kind of wealth that could grow exponentially. The bourgeoisie was first ruling class based, not upon ancestors, but on what they actually did which was to produce, but production had the tendency to outstrip demand or need.  In order to make sure that adequate demand for commodities continued, the bourgeoisie economy had to be based on competition for the new or novel product. The producers were forced to innovate, and, in order to compete, the means of production must constantly be revolutionized and the objects produced must constantly change.  As Marx commented,

“The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together…”

“The bourgeois society has resolved all personal honor and dignity into exchange-value; and in place of all the freedoms that men have fought for, it has put one unprincipled freedom—free trade…”

Therefore the lives of ordinary people are controlled by the ruling class, which has vested interests invested in the capitalist system.  This class is in change and uses economic chaos and social crisis to its own advantage, seeing and seeking lucrative opportunities for further profits.  Capitalism is thus characterized as needing a permanent revolution, or a yearning for change. The “revolution” is not, of course, a political, social, or economic one, for real change threatens the status quo of the dominant class.  Instead, the impulse for “revolution” and “change” is transferred or displaced towards commodities.  Capitalism forces individual self-development but only in restrictive and distorted ways, because everything bourgeois society builds will only to be torn down.  In perhaps his most famous and often quoted remark, Marx perceptively described the conditions of capitalism:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face…the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men…”

According to Marx, the middle class is most violently destructive ruling class in history.  The   bourgeois class does not efface old structures but absorbs them and incorporates them into the market and new life becomes the new commodity to be consumed.  Capitalism manages to co-opt and absorb all challenges to its authority.  Marx pondered the impact of this new social condition upon human beings and commented,

“The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life.. Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness…”

Human consciousness alters with every change in conditions of material existence in social relations or social life. Even society’s moral and ethical standards determined by monetary considerations.  Is it moral to appropriate the labor of others?  Is it ethical to exploit the desperation of human beings?  Why does labor allow such exploitation?  Under capitalism, dissimulation will silence these questions and will not allow the answers to be heard, thus, solidifying the “false consciousness” of ideology. The social mind is malleable to the forces of social persuasion, responding to the needs of the dominant class to further their position.

To reify the power relations already in place, the forces of legitimation work ceaselessly.  The elements of the superstructure are called into play to legitimate the status quo or the “natural,” whether the functions of the superstructure are education or the law or art.  Art and Law are commodities and the cultural workers produce in the name of the power relations with which they are complicit.  The artist, along with other intellectuals and poets, has lost his/her halo and has become a wage-laborer.  The artist is but a producer of ideas into material works of art, which are a form of perception or consciousness formed by capitalism.

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May
21
2010

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution.  Marx re-wrote Schiller’s psychological alienation, as the estrangement of workers in industrial capitalist society from the products of their labor.  Capitalism is based upon money and money is abstract.  If money is abstract, then value is abstract.  Barter for goods and services ceases to exist and is replaced by exchange of money and thus the value of both labor and goods become arbitrary.  Once the worker is alienated from the product produced then the value of his or her labor is rendered arbitrary.  According to Marx,

“…devaluation of human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things…” and “…labor does not only create goods’ it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…” therefore  “…his labor becomes an object…”

Marx’s concept of alienation was worked out in his 1844 essay, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” which set up a triad of alienation: the state is an alienated form of social life, social life is an alienation of labor, and the wage laborer is alienated from the product of his/her labor.  The cause of the alienation of the worker is the unfortunate discovery of surplus value.  As Marx’s writing partner, Friedrich Engels, stated,  “…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…” Surplus values pocketed by the owner as profit.  What the owner refers to, as “profit” is also, according to Marxist theory, the fundamental incompatibility between mode of production and mode of appropriation.  When the worker was in control of his/her own product, all such “surplus value”, or “profit” accrued directly and only to him/her.

But, as Marx pointed out, surplus labor creates surplus value,  and surplus labor allows exploitation.  Surplus labor is the result of two major factors: an increase in population and the development and use of labor saving machinery increases profits for the owner of the mode of production.  Although the initial capital investment in the machinery was substantial, this investment was finite, compared to ongoing or infinite costs of hiring extra workers.

Under capitalism, the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.  The worker is alienated from the product because his/her actions are performed in relation to the desires of the capitalist.  The laborer becomes a “tool” for the owner and is robbed of “humanity” or of the potential for human development.  Working in a state of “illiteracy”, the wage laborer is trained in one operation and cannot participate in the benefits and achievement of society that is progressing…but only for the middle class.  The products are objects of desire, which the laborer must labor to purchase in a viscous circle of desire and debt and powerlessness.  All workers are competitors with each other because their choice is between work and starvation.  Thus all workers are alienated from each other.

These are the facts of productive life, the fundamental factors that influence the ways in which all other aspects of all human affairs will develop. The question is why are the workers complicit with a system that enslaves them?  The answer is that their consciousness has been determined by the economic system.  Ideology or the belief system put forward by the ruling classes teaches the laborers to work on employer’s premises and on employer’s terms.

Ideology is a powerful mixture of truth and lies.  Capitalism requires capital or money to invest in a business.  A laboring family may take generations to accumulate the capital necessary to become bourgeoisie. A person from the working class encounters a system that is monopolistic and works to eliminate or bar competitors. The workers are made to believe that their alternative is no job and no wages, and they are made to hope that some day their condition will improve if they are cooperative.

The laborers believe the dreams of success and wealth that capitalism keeps alive and count on the positive effects of social mobility.  The owners of the mode of production, after all, were once lower class people who were rewarded for their hard work.  Surely, the worker thinks, me and my family will also receive the benefits of capitalism.  Laborers labor on, not realizing that fortunes are made within a network of privileges, invisible to the workers, and not upon merit.  Because the workers are in the thrall of an ideology of social and economic improvement, the owners of the mode of production are able to buy labor cheaply and sell goods dearly.

But Marx predicted that the consciousness of the workers will be “raised” and they will see past the veil of ideology, or “false consciousness,” and the proletariat will become aware of itself.  The workers will rise up against the owners and the two classes, the thesis, and the anti-thesis will clash.  The destiny of the proletariat is the truth of dialectical materialism and destruction of capitalism.  The class revolution is inevitable when “false consciousness” is dispelled and proletariat recognizes the exploitation and recaptures its own labor from the masters and institutes a classless society that Marx called the “Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s dialectical model of change is the revolution and the destruction of one class by another.  According to this model, violence and conflict between classes are fundamental.

Although he understood that the economic system determined human consciousness, Marx could not predict is how deeply ideology was embedded in society.  The lower classes continued to reinforce the needs and the dominance of the upper classes who proved to be adept at misleading the workers through misinformation and gaining their cooperation to work against their own interests.  The consciousness of the lower classes was structured to obey the dominant class and no amount of information could release or “raise” the consciousness of the exploited class.  Those who attempted to advise the workers of the “truth” were rejected as elitist oppressors and the familiar and real owners of the mode of production were embraced and defended.  Labor unions could easily be co-opted by management be entangling the worker with the fate and profit of a company.  The poor would reject the very social policies designed to aid them, preferring the known and the familiar, no matter how badly they were treated.

For Marx, ideas and theories are epiphenomena or byproducts of economic forces, which are the real determinants of change.  Marx stated that “Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness…” and that “…man makes religion, religion does no make man…” Although these statements sound idealist, they are actually materialist.  Yes, Marx understood and accepted that the mind constructs reality, and he asserted that social relations are bound up in material production, which become forms of perception or particular ways of seeing the world related to dominant way of seeing or social mentality.  Marx remarked,

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises on a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness…”

The ideology of the age is the product of concrete social relations, in other words, materialism.  Actual lived class relations are experienced, legitimized and become perpetuated.  The dialectical method accommodates itself to fundamental changes of reality due to constant change, resulting from oppositional forces. Marx was opposed to the formalism of Kant who sought the transcendental.  According to Marx, it is life that determines consciousness and the resulting consciousness is understood as “natural.” This unseen set of beliefs is unrealized or so accepted the ideology is invisible.  The lower classes are trained to believe in an ideology of inferiority, which is internalized and forces them to accept their lower status in society.   They are poor because they “deserve” to be poor.  The poor are poor, not because the system is designed to work against success for the many, but because they lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival.  Ideology is the ultimate form of alienation because the workers will work against themselves.

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May
14
2010

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Today it is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss Karl Marx because of his apparently “failed” theory of an inevitable revolution in which the lower classes, realizing their exploitation, would rebel against those who owned the means of production.  Witnessing the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said, “Marx was wrong.”   This rather anachronistic judgment fails to take into account that Marx was not an economist but a philosopher and that he could not see into a future in which capitalism would create a dazzling world of commodities that would tempt the working class to become consumers, buying into the very system that enslaved them.

In many ways, Hegel established a way of analyzing the past and set up a method by which Nineteenth Century historians could work.  Karl Marx adapted Hegel’s idea of the dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis into what he called “dialectical materialism.” Instead of appealing to ideas, Marx appealed to historical forces, a theory of history or a theory of things.  In contrast to Hegel’s “absolute” synthesis of categories, Marx was critical of “ideas,” which are empty and produce ideology.  Like Hegel, Marx claimed scientific precision for his philosophy with history as measurable record of clear progress. History, for Hegel, consisted of opposing forces: thesis and anti-thesis that over time would evolve into a synthesis that would, in its turn, become the new thesis.  Through these colliding forces, new stages would be reached and progress would occur. Marx was deeply concerned with social process/progress.  As a materialist, Marx’s ideas were phenomenological and not transcendental but he gave a great deal of attention to Hegel’s philosophy of history.  As Marx commented,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when men seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…”

Marx was also aware of the ideas of Kant and knew that Kant’s Copernican Revolution needed to be taken into account.  Kant, Hegel, and Marx were Determinists, that is, they all created philosophical systems that had a high explanatory value—each system could answer all the questions.  The difference in the thinking of these philosophers rested upon what forces determined their particular structure.  For Kant, the a priori workings of the human mind determined his system of knowledge, for Hegel it was the dialectic, and for Marx, it was the economic system.  Marx asserted that people are not free to choose social relations but are constrained by material reality, which is determined by economic production.

The key to Marx’s system is dialectical materialism, and his dialectic was the class system created by the capitalist system.  The creation of a privileged upper moneyed class and a dispossessed underclass resulted in a clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  The basis of society or the skeleton of society is economics.  Marx created a social model that distinguished between base and superstructure.  The base is the mode of production, which in Marx’s time is capitalism; and the superstructure can be defined as the social structures produced by human consciousness.  The superstructure is the laws and politics that define the form of social consciousness.  Consisting of education, cultural customs, political and legal practices, the superstructure both produces and reinforces an ideology, which functions to legitimate the power of the ruling class.

Human consciousness is determined by the mode of production or the economic system.  According to Marx, material relations between things are part of universal laws of history.  Marx wrote of the fatal evolution of capitalism, which is characterized by the domination of the bourgeoisie or middle class society who owns the mode of production and its necessary exploitation of the lower classes who produce the wealth.  The Bourgeoisie created a new social class, the urban poor, or the proletariat, that was collected into urban centers and concentrated in masses that could be exploited by the new system.  In contrast to the previous system, feudalism, value-in-exchange, capitalism is an abstract system, based upon an abstract concept called “money” and is not attached to the external qualities of things. Feudalism was a system based upon barter and upon a system of responsibilities.  Thing was exchanged for thing, obligation was exchanged for obligation.  A peasant could exchange a cow for a pig and give a portion of the harvest to the feudal lord who, in turn would protect the peasant who took care of the land he owned.

Within capitalism, a thing, an object is priced abstractly on the open market and will be sold according to what “the market will bear,” or according to what people will pay for it.  The end “value” of the object on the market has no relation to what those who own the means of producing the thing pay the workers for their labor.  Human  “labor” is embedded in goods and becomes abstracted.  In capitalism, the worker is alienated from the object and the difference between what s/he is paid and what the object sells for creates “surplus value,” which is appropriated by owner of capital who has exploited the laborer’s lack of alternatives. The excessive supply of labor drives wages down.  The minimum cost of making the product is covered by the laborer in a few hours, while the surplus or excess “value” goes to the employers.  According to Engels, “The appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker….”

When the surplus value, created by the worker, is appropriated by the owner of capital, a dialectic is created between “labor and management,” and management’s exploitation of the helpless laborers leads to a class struggle.  The competition among the capitalists functions according to the law of capital accumulation or the concentration of wealth in a few hands.  The capitalist impulse is towards monopoly control of production, such as seen currently in the business model of Microsoft. The end result is that capital becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, and unemployment grows as production becomes more technologically efficient. The result is overproduction and a crisis, such as seen in the American automotive industry.

The crisis of overproduction is resolved by opening new markets, which become new centers of production.  The old markets are limited in ability to absorb goods, which increases stress on the producers who must sell commodities.  Theoretically, the consumer needs only one television set but to resolve the stress a new and false need must be created, such as a television set for every member of the family.  The problem of overproduction is solved by manufactured desires that engender new demands for the new commodities, which are absorbed into the community. Marx and Engels stated,

“…the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them all the relations of society…constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones…”

Marx and Engels wrote a theory of social causation or historical determinism and understood history to be a history of class struggles with every epoch having a prevailing mode of economic production and exchange.  The human being and human consciousness and social organization necessarily followed from this basis of political and intellectual history.

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May
07
2010

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy

The post-Revolutionary philosophers of the early Nineteenth Century were prescient in foreseeing the social problems of the Industrial Age.  By mid-century, the philosophical emphasis had shifted from social reform to epistemological reform of philosophy itself, shifting philosophy away from idealism to materialism. New philosophers began to base their ideas upon empirical ideas and objective reasoning borrowed from science.  Even Hegel, one of the last of the idealist philosophers, stated that, “Philosophy must assume a regular structure as teachable as geometry,” and he wanted philosophy to be based upon a “definite methodical procedure.”

Auguste Comte was a disciple of Saint-Simon who shifted from Utopian thinking about society to a scientific study of society.   As the founder of “sociology,” Comte rationalized the study of human behavior by using scientific methodology.  People and their actions could be examined, facts could be gathered, hypothesis could be formed, and theories could be put forward and tested.  The goal was to study society as it was and not to imagine society, as it should be.  The importance of the Positivism of Comte is that the philosopher stressed actual observation and careful study of society.  In contrast to Comte’s more scientific approach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was more political in his critique of society in his What is Property? (1840) and The Philosophy of Poverty (1846).   Rather than putting forward utopian ideals, Proudhon anticipated Marx by examining society and expressing outrage (“Property is theft.”) at the growing class stratification, as the industrialist class enjoyed runaway wealth and the lower classes enjoyed endless repetitive labor.  Like Saint-Simon, Proudhon imagined the disappearance of the state, but he wanted to substitute the authority of the state with the direct participation of the people who would decide their own affairs.

Although Proudhon sounded a bit less totalitarian than Hegel who believed that the nation and the state were one and the same and morally superseded the community, he, too, was an authoritarian.  Women, he believed, should be submissive to men and take care of them, and while, serving men, women should also should have children and nurture them as well.  He was typical of men of his age in his ideas about women and the use of authority.  Proudhon, as a non-too-successful professional publisher and writer, also had strong opinions about accumulated wealth.  He equated slavery with murder and property with robbery.  As Proudhon stated in What is Property? “..property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded or rather usurped in the name of superior talent or service, in inequality and extortion…”

Most socialists (and anarchists) defined socialism as direct government achieved through suffrage.  Putting aside the fact that women and people of color could not vote, suffrage had its problems, because the mass of people were not well-educated or informed, they would not know how to vote for their own interests.  Proudhon preferred to create a form of government that would create an equilibrium between freedom of the people and the role of the government.  Arrested during the Revolution of 1848, sent into exile to Belgium during the Second Empire, Proudhon took the idea of equilibrium and applied it to war, advocating force to bring about equilibrium among nations, much to the dismay of his admirers.  “Reforms always,” he stated, “Utopias never,” announcing pragmatism and positivism.  A prolific letter writer and self-publisher of his many works, Proudhon was a native of Besançon, in Franche-Comté, the territory of Gustave Courbet.  Sometimes writing as an art critic, Proudhon published his ideas about Courbet’s paintings of a region that was very familiar to him.   Proudhon is perhaps better known for his association with Courbet than for his philosophical ideas today, because he was overshadowed by his one-time colleague, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx brushed Proudhon aside as a “bourgeois socialist” who would not advocate revolution.  It is difficult today to ascertain Proudhon’s knowledge of German philosophy.   Hegel had yet to be translated into French, however, Victor Cousin was teaching about Kant, for example, at the Sorbonne, and, from Proudhon’s own words, it would seem Cousin would have been his source of German thought.  However, the main difference between Kant, Hegel and Marx and the socialists was that the Germans created structured models for their philosophical thought and the socialists were less systematic.

The social philosophers were futurist; they looked forward, envisioning a better life.  They were less idealist than materialist in that they dealt with real social problems in a relatively practical fashion.  Hegel and Marx, in contrast, were determinists.  The future they posited was determined by the triadic forces of the dialectic.  It was Marx, who dominates the discussion of social theory and philosophy today with his application of the Hegelian dialectic to economics, to the “secret engine” of culture. As Marx stated,

“…New relations in production, superior to the former ones, never come into being before their material reason for existence has developed in the womb of old society.  Humanity puts to itself only the riddles that it can solve, for on looking closely at the matter, one will find that the riddle is put only when the material conditions of its solution already exists…”

Although Karl Marx 1818 – 1883) wrote often with Frederic Engels, (1820 –95) it is Marx who is the better-known philosopher.  Together Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, 1846 and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1846.  On his own, Marx wrote Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, Wage-Labor and Capital, (usually referred to as Das Capital) 1849, The Eighteenth Brumarie of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Grundrisse, 1857-88, Wages, Price and Profit, 1865, The Civil War in France, 1871, and Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.  Although Marx would live in bourgeois comfort in suburban London, his place of exile, and spent his days writing in seat G7 in the British Museum Library, he wrote movingly on the plight of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.  By the time Marx was forced out of his native Prussia for his revolutionary ideas, industry and capitalism had been the basis of modern society for over one hundred years and its consequences were plain to see.

Vast new wealth had been accumulated by the new commercial class, and an abyss of poverty subjugated the lower classes.  Like many observers of his time, Marx foresaw a pending social and economic revolution—for human misery can be contained only so long.  As a German national living in England, Marx would have witnessed the activities of Reformists, politicians and writers, such as Charles Dickens, and philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham.  The British thinkers repeatedly warned of the consequences of the environmental and social horrors that had descended upon the so-called “advanced” industrial nations.

Kant and Hegel are considered idealists, reaching towards some kind of absolute or universal.  Marx, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing materialist: for him, reality was grounded in existence, knowledge was the result of reality, and therefore the mind could never be independent of history.  If the mind constructed reality, then the constructions must always be changing, along with history.  If this was the case, then consciousness could never be absolute or universal and must be subjected to changing conditions.  For Marx, these conditions were capitalism, the greatest social change since the breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudalism, and the middle class, the first new class since the beginning of human history.  Capitalism had created a society based upon the abstraction of money, labor, goods, value, and, ultimately—human beings.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Mar
26
2010

Schiller: Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”

“Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, published in the journal, Die Horen, seems to pit Göethe, the naïve poet, against Schiller, the sentimental poet.  The essay is an early and influential effort to sort out types of artists, as makers and as psychologies.  Naïve and Sentimental” refers to both poets and to poetry, not to themes, subject matter, or content, and are seen by Schiller as opposites, somewhat like Kant’s antinomies—a way of organizing the world in terms of contrasts.  It is here that the famous “compare and contrast” methodology of art historical discourse begins, for Schiller’s comparative pairing of poets will be copied by the early Twentieth Century art historian, Aby Warburg, who was also fascinated by psychological themes.  That being said, Schiller’s ultimate purpose goes beyond his purpose of understanding two kinds of genius and two means of artistic creation.  He analyzes modes of perception, ways of being, and ways of living in the world, ways of relating and responding, not only to nature itself but also to one’s own inner nature, to the structure of one’s own mind.

In establishing between psychological types, Schiller paved the way for later thinkers, such as Freud and Jung, Nietzsche and Dilthey, and James, as the originator of the notion of psychological types.  But Schiller’s aesthetic is also a moral philosophy.  It was an examination of the human being and the human condition in a world that is so modern it had yet to be defined, discussed or understood.  Schiller’s predecessor in grappling with the new place of nature in the newly industrialized society would be René Descartes who advocated a turning away from the artificiality of French society to the simplicity of nature to rediscover the “natural” human being, free of civilization and its “discontents”, as Freud would express it later.  Schiller leads the way to the Nineteenth Century and to Modernism, for his world is far more “civilized” than that of Rousseau.  Both philosophers (who would influence Freud on this point) understood civilization to be necessary and inevitable and unavoidable, the result of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, but the social system has built a wall of rules, regulations, and conventions that is entirely artificial.  Trapped in the social system, blindly following its customs and mores, we are alienated from nature and the natural.  We have lost our sense of oneness, our feelings of harmony with our world.  Worse yet, we are alienated from ourselves, divided within our own minds, disconnected from the totality of our own being.

Responding to a system that purports to be “rational”, we struggle with our irrational side, repressing it until we are alienated not only from it but also from a part of our selves.  Thus we, as humans in the modern world, are alienated from nature itself, which is neither rational nor irrational.  Nature simply exists in a state of pure being which we, in our divided state, can no longer comprehend or connect with.  In our alienated condition—alienated from ourselves and from our fellow human beings—we can only respond to nature through the distorting filters of civilization.  Our varying modes of perception—“Naïve“ or “Sentimental”—can never encounter nature, the pure state of being.  Such unity must wait until we reach our own natural state of harmony within ourselves and our natural environment.

Like Rousseau, Schiller does not present “Natural Man” as a lost state but a goal we must aim for.  This goal cannot be reached in an individual’s lifetime but can be achieved only through successive generations, which must struggle to regain wholeness, harmony, and unity, both internally, within the individual, and externally, with nature.  This modern concept of the alienated human being seeking a lost unity would be of great consequence to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century thought. The author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, writing somewhat later than Schiller, warned that we have become estranged and alienated from ourselves and from nature. As the allegory of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster shows, we have become deluded into playing God through the misuse of technology.  G. W. F. Hegel will write of “thesis”, “antithesis”, and “synthesis”, the ultimate Absolute unity.  Karl Marx will write of “alienation” of the working class from industrial products and will warn that humans have become so alienated that we are no longer aware of it and exist in a state of “false consciousness”.  Marx’s “alienation” was sociological due to economic causes.  Jacques Lacan will write of Lack, resulting from the human’s entry into society and the severing of the child from its mother (loss of unity and wholeness).  Alienation will be come a major theme and perhaps the definition of the condition of Modernity itself.

Thus aesthetic philosophy becomes a moral philosophy and art becomes an arena for self-actualization, a way of thought to counter the evils of artificiality and civilization. For Schiller, in “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, all art is inferior to nature but all art must begin with nature. Art becomes a way of reacting to ourselves and a means of responding to nature.  Nature takes on a dual meaning: nature is the world surrounding us and our own individual personalities.  Art also seems to assume duality, being equated at times with that which is artificial, in other words with a wide range of artifacts, works and activities, while, at other times, art is the natural product of a creative process.  Art was a means of restoring a natural balance in personality.  Art was a journey towards a purer morality and an exposition of the nature of artistic genius that rises above artificial rules and ideas on morality.  The role of free play of imagination in art and the artist as a genius is indebted to Kant.  Six decades later, perhaps thinking of Schiller, Emil Zola famously wrote of “nature seen through a corner of a temperament” to define art, which is, in those terms, a response to nature shaped by the personality of the artist.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Nov
06
2009

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

For the artist of the modern period, the most essential problem was how to depict the modern: as a new style, as new content, as a new attitude?  Each generation would fine its own answer, only to have the next generation find this answer inadequate.  In the process of attempting to find the “modern,” the role of art would change, the role of the artist would change, the role of the public would change, and ironically, the artist and the public would become completely separate.  How did the artist become separated from the mass art audience? This estrangement was the result of significant social and economic changes that had changed the artist’s role in society.  The condition of the avant-garde—that is, artists being “ahead” of the public’s taste and expectations—is closely linked to the development of the Industrial Revolution.  This social and economic revolution in manufacturing was, perhaps, both the most sudden and swift and also the most complete and comprehensive revolution in history: it changed everything.  The trend away from small scale artisanal or intimate domestic manufacture towards mass production began around 1740, in England and a bit later in America with the industrialization of the textile industry and the development of mining to find the coal to run the machines to run the mills.  Textile mills sprang up near rivers, drawing thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside to new factory towns.

Thanks to the increasing importance of industry, the workplace moved from the home to an environment that was artificial, where there was no day and no night. This interior environment was based upon the relentless rhythms of the omnipresent machines that ruled those who worked for and with them, severing the workers from the outdoor world of nature and its eternal rhythms.  Beneath the earth, miners toiled in an equally artificial environment, in total darkness broken only by candles, in constant danger from escaping gases or cave-ins or flooding. Here, as in the factory, night and day had no meaning, time itself was unnatural, linked to the length of the “shift,” or the span of time one worked, not to the rising and setting of the sun or to the cycle of the seasons.  Far from home, severed from the land, people–men, women and children–now worked long days, measured by carefully segmented time, in dangerous places for low pay.  But their alternatives were few.  With the growth of population due to better hygiene and diet, farming communities could absorb only so many people and many hungry peasants joined the growing army of industrial workers.

“Labor” became a new kind of concept, referring to a new kind of  work regulated by the rhythm of the machine and timed to the ticking of the clock.  Time itself was sped up, cut into tiny pieces.  Work, too was sped up, and was equally divided into a segmented process.  In dusty, noisy factories, absorbed in repetitive tasks, working like machines, the workers were also alienated from the end product, an object produced in pieces, the result of a rational and an analytic process, which investigated and examined each aspect of manufacture.  Each worker was responsible for a segment, for a part of the process.  The factory resembled a vast machine, the workers mere cogs in the machine.  The process and pace of manufacture ruled their lives. With the social and financial shift from landed wealth to industrial wealth, money and power were no longer solely dependent upon inherited position and were increasingly based upon new opportunities provided by trade and commerce and manufacture.  The shift in social power also moved the site of culture from the aristocratic courts to urban centers, teaming with ambitious individuals, all determined to take advantage of the opportunities capitalism promised.  These individuals created prosperity for themselves and controlled the new sources of wealth as completely as the now-deposed aristocrats had once ruled their domains. Working conditions actually declined in quality for the workers who worked every day for well over ten hours a day under inhuman and unhealthy conditions.

Despite the unprecedented hardships on the workers, the Industrial Revolution allowed a new form of upward mobility. Any man with wit and foresight and a few good ideas could become wealthy and powerful. Two hundred years ago, vast fortunes were made by the newly formed middle class who had scrambled up the social ladder, eager to forget their humble origins. Coming from the lower classes, the peasants and the urban proletariat, the factory workers operated machines which fabricated products on a massive scale, making consumer goods available to the entire population, making the owners of the factories wealthy while raising the standard of living for everyone. Those who owned the manufacturing process—mining and making—enjoyed the fruits of what the Prussian philosopher, Karl Marx, called “surplus value,” meaning the difference what the worker was actually paid and what the object was actually sold for. During the Eighteenth Century, the middle class grew in social and political power.  The result was a changing of the guard from one ruling class—the aristocrats who had inherited wealth, which was based upon land holdings to the middle class who had created wealth based upon manufacture.  Land is limited; farming is dependent upon weather; manufacturing, on the other hand, is theoretically unlimited and independent of anything but the marketplace, as Karl Marx pointed out, was driven by desires for commodity.  Later Sigmund Freud would agree with Marx that a commodity was a mere symptom or a fetish, guaranteed to create, not to satisfy desire.

The ephemeral commodity would “melt into air,” as Marx put it, only to be replaced by the next fad and the next novelty.  Writing the Communist Manifesto in exile in England, the Prussian philosopher imagined an uprising of the proletariat once the veil of ideology was torn from its eyes.  The proletariat would seize the mode of production, and during this phase of the people’s ownership would be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Witnessing the degradation of the workers on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Marx waited in vain for the success of the workers’ uprising. But it was not to be. Workers were seduced by the all-powerful commodity, which, as Marx noted, had the qualities of the fetish to arouse desire.

“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it.  The newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want.  The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.  At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

During the Nineteenth Century, burgeoning technology was buttressed by an unfettered optimism.  It was an era when most people believed in Progress, that industrialization had ushered in a better way of life, which, like the human beings who benefited from it, would develop and evolve in a positive direction.  The world became defined by constant changes, some of which were good, but there was a dark side to the state of flux: upheaval and disequilibrium.  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, human beings seemed to be in control of the environment, capable of acting as designers of Nature itself.  Although by the time the Industrial Revolution was fully in effect, the Enlightenment was a philosophical or social movement was long over, the new economic system of capitalism still echoed some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished concepts: optimism and progress.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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