Walter Benjamin's Theory of Distraction

Yesterday I was informed via Twitter that it was Walter Benjamin's birthday. And as someone who's lately needed occasions (however arbitrary) for reading, I pulled one of his books off the shelf: the third volume in a set of anthologies I've up to this point mostly ignored. (I always figured Illuminations and Reflections were sufficient surveys of Benjamin's writing.) In it, I found this fragment, a list of speculative theses and directions for thinking about the development of technology and its role in the regimes of art, perception, and politics. Not surprisingly, the anthology associates it with the composition of what is probably Benjamin's most read essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability," and dates its writing between 1935-1936.

Theory of Distraction
Attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of consecration has been eliminated
Parasitic existence of art as based on the sacred
In its concern with educational value, "The Author as Producer" disregards consumer value
It is in film that the work of art is most susceptible to becoming worn out
Fashion is an indispensable factor in the acceleration of the process of becoming worn out
The values of distraction should be defined with regard to film, just as the values of catharsis are defined with regard to tragedy
Distraction, like catharsis, should be conceived as a physiological phenomenon
Distraction and destruction as the subjective and objective sides, respectively, of one and the same process
The relation of distraction to absorption must be examined
The survival of artworks should be represented from the standpoint of their struggle for existence
Their true humanity consists in their unlimited adaptability
The criterion for judging the fruitfulness of their effect is the communicability of this effect
The educational value and the consumer value of art may converge in certain optimal cases (as in Brecht), but they don't generally coincide
The Greeks had only one form of (mechanical) reproduction: minting coins
They could not reproduce their artworks, so these had to be lasting; hence eternal art
Just as the art of the Greeks was geared toward lasting, so the art of the present is geared toward becoming worn out
This may happen in two different ways: through consignment of the artwork to fashion or through the work's refunctioning in politics
Reproducibility–distraction–politicization
Educational value and consumer value converge, thus making possible a new kind of learning
Art comes into contact with the commodity; the commodity comes into contact with art

From Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-38. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et. al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Ways of Seeing (1972)

Long Conversation: Life Online

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. This month we were asked how our relation to the internet has changed. Here's what I wrote.

Before moving to Edmonton four years ago I didn’t use the internet for much beyond downloading music, reading articles and sending emails. This city gave me may first opportunity to live alone, without the comforting distractions of roommates. As I started my program, I realized most of my academic work and most of my leisure activities depended on the glowing screen sitting on my desk. As some friends of mine pointed out, my presence on Facebook had dramatically increased during my first semester of grad school. I was averaging five Facebook posts a day when I finally joined Twitter, a better home for all the stuff I felt I needed to share.

Work and Facebook consumed most of my days, while my lonelier evenings were filled by Megavideo. I streamed the entire series of The Wire in a few short months and got through most of Friday Night Lights just as quickly. Back then, Megavideo had a viewing time limit (around 58 minutes); once you hit that limit you were forced to wait for an hour or so. Eventually this limit began structuring my study routine. I would go through an entire day, watching 6 episodes of the Wire and reading Derrida for the remaining hours that I could muster the concentration. Each time Megavideo forced me back to work, I knew that after an hour of study, I’d earn the reward of another episode.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t very good at living alone. I needed something (or, better, someone) to give my days structure and with only three seminars a week, the internet was the best option I had. I could watch shows when I was bored and when I was feeling isolated in my basement suite, I could relocate to social media. At it’s best, the internet gave me immediate access to all kinds of data, allowing me to share content and communicate with friends; I could adopt a grammar of sharing. At its worst, it was (and still is) a form of social control that it’s become hard to do without, a place where popularity and visibility are synonymous, not unlike the logic of high school.

Fortunately, I no longer live on my own, but I'm not sure how much my online activity has changed. That being said, my ambitions definitely have. It’s been two years since I humbly entered the world of graphic design, a world built on freelancing, a world that once looked entirely different without the web. I suppose I’m now much more aware of my identity on the internet, in part because I’ve been forced to see it as a place for self-promotion, a place where I can present my work and connect with clients. Over the next 6 months, I’ll be preparing for this to become more of a reality, as I set up a personal website (with my own domain name!) and assemble an online portfolio. The thought of this near future fills me with dread and a degree of excitement. At the same time, it means that I’ve also entered an increasingly precarious work environment. For every illustrator or designer who sees mild success there are twenty more equally talented people who have to pursue their work as a labour of love, or, more realistically, not at all. At least I have some sense of how to navigate the web. In fact, I’ve been thinking about my online identity much longer than I’ve been in Edmonton.

Back in 2008, I started a blog to share bits of writing I was working on and catalogue lists of my favourite things (mostly related to indie music and literary theory). I’ve averaged about 60 posts each year since, and the blog currently figures as an archive of my interests as they’ve emerged over the past six years. Even though writing has become less of a priority, I still make the occasional blog post for no other reason than to extend my archive into the future (and I’m slightly alarmed at how patriarchal that sounds). In many ways, my blogging has prepared me for the kind of online identity I’m now slowly building. It’s allowed me to track hits and views from across the world and see what kinds of posts attract visitors. Every once in a while I’ll find a comment on an old post and sometimes it’s not even spam! 

Last summer I decided the time was right to start two new blogs. One is used strictly as hosting site for mp3s from a radio show I’m part of. The other one is on Tumblr, which I’m finding to be one of the most interesting and surprising places on the internet right now. Part of its charm is the way it accommodates visual media. It also connects with what I do because of how many illustrators, photographers and designers use it to show off their work and process. The structure is more or less like that of Twitter or Instagram, where you have a stream of posts compiled for you on your home page (or “Dashboard”) that’s based on the users that you follow. As a fellow user, you have the option to “heart” or reblog any post you come across. There don’t seem to be many limitations on what you can post, and artists have been known to experience theft of their work or, at the very least, posting without proper attribution. When you visit someone else’s page you see the images they’ve posted or reblogged, arranged according to their page’s structure or theme.

This is what it looks like when you appear on the "Radar," which randomly happened to me just after I wrote this.

Tumblr works for a variety of media, but for me it’s a hub for illustration, photography, and design, both amateur and professional. Some use it for documenting process, others for web comics, and still others (like me) use it as a less discretionary portfolio of current work. Like Instagram, it’s a way of sharing the stuff I’m doing with whoever cares to see it. Unlike Instagram, your work can become incredibly popular if the right people reblog it. I have several images from a year ago that are still getting reblogged, and when I think about the network that exists between my computer and the many Tumblr pages where my image currently appears, my work feels infinitely far away. I don’t expect that anyone currently viewing it will try to trace it back to its proper origin, but at the same time I’m flattered that something of mine has resonated with so many strangers.

Suffice it to say that on Tumblr, you can see something of yours quickly spiral out of your control. You can see your work become part of someone else’s visual language. You can, for instance, see how your image fits into the mosaic of erotically charged pictures on the Tumblr page of a high school student who’s used Tumblr to build the visual ideal of her identity. This might, and often does, turn her followers into your followers. But much more effective for gaining loyal viewers is Tumblr’s built-in system of curation. Certain popular tags (“Artists on Tumblr” for example) that accompany your work can be highlighted and used to prioritize a post in relevant searches. Your page might also appear on the Tumblr “Radar” if you’re deemed worthy. It’s almost enough to convince you that all the labour of making your art is actually valued, but the only return is visibility in a system over-saturated with images. Every now and then I remember that, by all appearances, it’s followers like the high school student with a taste for the macabre that I’m really working for. The only real difference between her and I is that I did this kind of collaging before I had a life on the internet.

In junior high, I had a bulletin board in my room that I covered with photos and clippings from magazines. As I got older, I realized that the bulletin board was a sham and covered my walls with postcards and handbills from concerts. A Tumblr page projects that same kind of archive outward, where the gaze of others is more immediate. But both instances of self-fashioning are fundamentally discursive. They each assemble signs and symbols in a way that suggests an audience, even if that audience is, in the end, a reflexive self. Social media now facilitates this, but despite the possibility of updates, the options for individual users still remains frustratingly limited. Our online “selves” remain fixed in order to be recognizable, often skewed in favour of the privileged and popular. For all the possibilities of our projections, some of us can’t help but be consistent.

The Work of Nostalgia in the Age of Instagram

Following the insights of the German critic Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag once observed that photographs acquire the aura of a work of art by their own visible deterioration. With the advent of mechanical reproduction, artistic images had broken free of the aesthetic regime which once made their value synonymous with their singularity as works of art. No longer context bound, any image can be cropped and made adjacent to any other image. For Sontag, writing in the 1970s, photographs and reproduced images had become so common that they had developed their own type of aura: that of the vintage photograph.

That same aura, the aestheticization of decay and deterioration, is perhaps even more recognizable in its current manifestation on Instagram. With its clear focus on the now, digital photo-sharing has had to evolve in order to accommodate the nostalgic desires of its users. Echoing Sontag’s observation about the acquired aura of the faded photograph, we select from a range of vintage-style filters before posting pictures for the eyes of our Instagram followers. Nathan Jurgensen, writing for The New Inquiry, argues that the filters are a way of coping with the overabundance of images that typifies social medial. It’s a way of convincing ourselves that our photographs are just as worthy of nostalgia as if they belonged to a finite archive from the past. As artificial memory storage becomes more efficient, we are producing more than most of us would deem worth remembering. But this overabundance has not curbed our appetite for images.

Instagram’s filters are meant to instil a sense of nostalgia for the present, a condition of scarcity that digital photography has long surpassed. But, as Jorgensen writes, “Merely making your photos evocative of photo scarcity doesn’t make them actually scarce or make others covet them.” Snapchat, by contrast, he argues, is built upon the idea of real scarcity, where images and videos, once the viewing has started, exist up to ten seconds before disappearing forever. No external memory, no archive. A singular aesthetic experience.

A year before Sontag’s first essay on photography was published in The New York Review of Books, John Berger’s influential documentary about the history of European Art, Ways of Seeing, aired on the BBC. Like Sontag, Berger was deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin’s writing on art and sought to provide his audience with the means to connect the art of the European tradition with contemporary media, advertising, and power structures. Equally impressed with the way images seemed to saturate modern life, Berger argued, “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.”

Not surprisingly, Berger’s work has also inspired some timely reflections on the aesthetic discourse of Instagram. In his article “Ways of Seeing Instagram” the art critic Ben Davis begins with a Google trend chart showing that “Instagram” has eclipsed “art” in terms of popular searches. Photosharing on Instagram (or, for that matter, Tumblr, Pintrest, even Flickr) has become a dominant way of seeing, and like all ways of seeing reflects certain social interests. The tradition of oil painting, observed Berger, could credit its subjects (nudes, fruit, and other commodities) to the presentation of a privileged, often opulent lifestyle. The continuities between advertising photos and still lifes, between classical nudes and pin-ups, are laid bare. Despite differences of social and historical context, Davis, like Berger, draws out the similarities between the art Berger works to demystify and the various genres of Instagram photos. Although current technologies have seemingly democratized the image-making that used to exist only at the behest of aristocrats, Davis argues, “images retain their function as game pieces in the competition for social status.”

But social status comes in many forms. It isn’t all just fine dining and selfies. Having a past worth sharing, and a past that’s accessible through other processes of archiving, is what many of us are now flaunting on Instagram. And we do so on a weekly basis. Nostalgia has finally been reconciled with Instagram’s presentism in the form of the hashtag, throwback Thursday (#tbt). The hashtag has existed for over a year, but it’s only recently become a constant in the feeds of our friends and followers. The #tbt image can come in any format, though the proper distance between the image and its posting date remains a mildly contentious topic. For me, and likely for most of my generation, the most enjoyable images tend to be those of old photographs rephotographed. The past returns again, and I don’t have to wait for someone’s wedding slideshow to see their pubescent class photos or an unself-conscious work of art from elementary school. For those who started snapping photos during the internet age, Throwback Thursday is another chance to mine the recent past for a flattering photo; for the rest of us, it’s an opportunity to reassert the aura of an old photo that hasn’t yet been digitized.

I can’t say I dislike seeing the young faces of my friends crop up on my Instagram feed. Bad haircuts, awkward family photos, and the like. And despite the well-publicized “rules” for how one should participate in #tbt, I was also sort of impressed when I saw Barack Obama tweeted, “Throwback to last week when a woman—not her boss—made her own decisions about her health care. #TBT”. The past has its uses. Even a form whose sole purpose is nostalgia can be a way of politicizing the past. More than anything, though, Throwback Thursday reflects a collective sense of nostalgia that runs deep enough to be ritualized, a way of remembering that isn’t likely to be forgotten, whatever the future brings.

Susan Sontag on Photography

One of the few critical texts that was recommended during my first year of design studies, Susan Sontag's On Photography, features essays that were originally published in The New York Review of Books in the 1970s. Most discussions of technology from the period feel dated and irrelevant, but Sontag follows a critical tradition that blends cultural analysis, history and philosophy in a way that still feels fresh and readable, if not compelling. From the beginning of her first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” Sontag makes numerous attempts to define the cultural moment of her writing through the growing phenomenon of photography as a practice, on the one hand, and the increasing ubiquity of the photographic image. She sees herself surrounded by “aesthetic consumers” and “image-junkies,” for whom experience itself has become a way of seeing. “Today,” she writes in the essay’s final paragraph, “everything exists to end in a photograph.” Sontag will make a similar kind of statement at the end of her penultimate essay, “Photographic Evangels.” This time, instead of revising the French nineteenth-century poet Mallarmé, she alters a famous statement by the late Victorian critic Walter Pater: “A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.”

The essays that make up On Photography are at times polemical and immoderately aphoristic. (The final 25 page section is a collection of quotations featuring the likes of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Lewis Heine, Victor Schlovsky, and Charles Baudelaire.) Definitions for photography abound. Photography appropriates, documents, democratizes, idealizes, distills, amuses, distracts, memorializes, certifies and justifies. As William H. Gass writes in his 1977 review of Sontag’s collection for The New York Review of Books, “No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting.” The collection is at times unhelpfully general and scattered, but certain themes do become apparent, if only because of Sontag’s very deliberate attempt to ground her reflections in her present surroundings. What really interests Sontag throughout these six essays is the relationship between photography and reality: the way that photography gives shape to experience and informs our judgements about what counts as “real.”

But this concern for the “real” happens to be one of least interesting things about On Photography. Photography, as an artistic discipline, was at first naively situated within the genre of realism, comprising of what Fox Talbot first described as “natural images,” once believed to provide the viewer with pure access to its subject. Similarly, the great modernist László Moholy-Nagy saw the genius of photography in its ability to render “an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective intention.” Early defenders of photography as an art form tended champion photography either as an assault on reality or a submission to it. A result of this tension, observes Sontag, is a deep ambivalence towards photography’s means, often manifested in one’s reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment. But this tension wasn’t really an issue for the new class of photographers that emerged along with cheaper, easier technology.

For Sontag, writing in the 1970s, photography had recently become “a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power” for middle class Americans (8). Finally an affordable past-time, photography became a way of constructing personal and family narratives, documenting notable events (that is, turning situations into events) and doing something with one’s leisure time. For Sontag, the modern photographer cannot be considered without recourse to the figure of the tourist. The camera not only helps to “make real what one is experiencing,” but allows its user to occupy as space outside of what he or she is documenting. “Photographing,” she writes, “is essentially an act of non-intervention.” But it is also “an elegiac art, a twilight art.” To capture a moment in time is to step outside of it: to bear witness to an alternate reality, or, at least, a morbid one.

As a mode of knowing and experiencing the world, photography leaves Sontag feeling jaded and cynical. Although they can help raise our collective consciousness to various injustices throughout the world, photographs are perhaps even more potent in the way that they desensitize us and contribute toward false-consciousness. She writes:

The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. . . . By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. 

More compelling, and less speculative, is Sontag’s interest in the relationship between photography and art. This relationship hinges on the way that the majority of art is circulated and experienced; that is, through photographs. As Sontag puts it, “photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed.” It’s not difficult to see how this thread continues to inform the world of digital aesthetics thirty years later. There was a time when the screen was simply a vehicle for the consumption of images. Now, much of the art that is made for the screen is produced on a screen. Categories like viewers, users and producers seem inadequate for capturing the range of activities enabled by the digital platform.

The controversies of photography’s history are all forms of the debate about its relation to art: “how close it can get while still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition.” For Sontag, the 1970s were a time when the public appetite for photography had less to do with experiencing a neglected art form than with making a break with the abstract art that had become synonymous with modernism. Classical modernist painting, writes Sontag, “presupposes highly developed skills of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art.” Photography, instead, seems to simply make form disappear, delivering its content to viewers without asking much of them. In this way, photography aligns itself with modernism’s populist impulse, its eschewal of high culture and traditionalism. Yet, as Sontag notes, this is precisely the dilemma for modernists: for all their promotion of naive art, they continue to espouse a hidden attachment to their own sophistication.

On Art as Therapy

During my recent visit to Toronto, I was able to spend an afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario. After absorbing parallel bodies of work by Francis Bacon and Henry Moore in a new high profile exhibit, I noticed a large display awkwardly thrown into the corner of the gallery’s entrance. Beside the title “Art as Therapy” sat a screen with Alain de Botton’s head prominently displayed, ready and waiting to explain how select works of art can help us better understand one of five select categories he's deemed relevant to the human experience. Of course, the flags go up immediately, not simply because the simple equivocation of art as therapy brings to mind the worst kinds of bourgeois myths — and indeed it’s hard to think of a better face for this than de Botton’s — but because the whole scheme is such an unabashedly self-aggrandizing gesture by de Botton himself. Here, alongside a group of select paintings from the canon of Western art (placed in groups throughout the gallery according to the categories of “sex,” “money,” “politics,” “love,” “nature”), was de Botton’s talking head. Not that it was necessarily out of place. The seamless relationship between ideology and arrogance is nothing new to the art gallery.

In this mini-exhibit, each work of art is accompanied by a reflection and a “problem” for the viewer to digest. Passing through the gift shop, I realized that the project was tied in with a new book (after which the exhibit is titled) and the author had been scheduled for a book signing at the gallery within the next couple of hours. Sure enough, de Botton had also been featured on Q earlier that morning in a debate over his controversial project. I listened to the radio clip today and none of what he said was terribly surprising. De Botton’s approach to art as an opportunity for therapy is not at all out of step with his recent book Religion for Atheists or his so-called School of Life project. In nearly all cases, the cultural products that make up the Western canon are uncritically received and repurposed for the lifestyle politics of the modern consumer. Stripped of their historical and cultural contexts, religion, philosophy and art have a similar function: to make us better people, to help us believe in the supposedly ennobling values of European culture. For de Botton our present enjoyment and use of the arts has been held hostage by art historians. What I find interesting about this strategy for engaging visitors is how it’s all based on an emotional or affective register. There is no illusion here, no attempt to sell this as anything other than straightforward ideology. Visitors are invited to “feel better” about one of the five categories and the selected piece of art will, upon its reflection, help with that process.

I’ve always been uneasy with this brand of easy-going pop philosophy, partly because of how it always seeks to write off intellectual or academic approaches as inaccessible and elitist. In his Q debate, De Botton started by giving a fairly trite summary of art criticism as a field that disregards all questions of functionality or purpose, a field that instead insists upon art’s ambiguity and silence as is best for private enjoyment. Art, he says, should by contrast provide us with an opportunity to experience the whole range of human emotion, but in order for it to do that it needs to be framed in a psychological method that allows us to align our “deeper selves” with works of art.

My main problem with this union between de Botton and the AGO has mostly to do with his patronizing, dull readings of artworks and the interpretive keys that he provides as opportunities for self-reflection and improvement. His approach has been called “reductive” and it is. But it's also worse than that. It assumes that gallery visitors can only find common ground in their individual sense of fulfillment and contentment. Sex, politics, love, money, nature: each category is simply a self-evident way to experience and digest our individual feelings about the world. Against his caricature of art criticism (which eschews all sense of function or purpose) de Botton sets up a program he believes to be controversial and provocative, that is in fact anything but. Rather, it’s the most sentimental form of appreciation possible and does little more than deflate its objects while reproducing the most vacuous of readings. Along with treating art as a good in itself, each category appears fully formed and uncontested. A telling moment in the Q debate occurs when the issue of accessibility arises from de Botton’s opponent (Canadian artist/critic RM Vaughan), who rightly suggests that most art is still synonymous with wealth, class and privilege. De Botton immediately agrees and says, “that’s why I’m a great believer in postcards, online images, and anything that you can do to bring art, freely, cheaply and easily into peoples’ lives.” He then decries our cultural obsession with the original as the problem standing in the way of this. But this is where it stops for de Botton because, as should be clear by now, he only cares about values in the abstract and consistently overlooks any resonance that such cultural obsessions might have something to do with class, history, gender and so on.

It’s perhaps unfair to levy such criticisms at de Botton, who has after all been doing essentially the same thing since publishing his book on Proust back in 1997. His message remains the same, even if his books have gotten bigger and his subjects have switched from high-minded French literature to high-minded European art. What his art criticism project does best is point out how much our cultural categories of aesthetic appreciation increasingly favour of an ahistorical, affective response that finds its footing in the self-help industry. But, then, why should any of us be surprised by this?

A review of Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis

The following review has just been posted over at the CC website. I first encountered Rancière's writing several years ago and it remains a challenging yet indispensable way of think about art and its political meaning. I'm grateful to Verso for sending a review copy. I've been anticipating this book since its earliest reviews began appearing. Parts of this review overlap with some of the work I did last year on William Morris and the demise of modernist architecture.

Book Review: Jacques Rancière. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. New York: Verso, 2012. 304 pp.

In histories of Western art, modernism is a deceptively straightforward term: it is often used to refer to a turning point in aesthetic production, a radical shift in style that belongs to a new form of historical self-consciousness. But such accounts typically disregard the various ways in which modernism was produced and the moments of political and aesthetic possibility prior to its periodization as historical modernism proper. For decades, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has been upending our preconceptions about the relation between art and politics. His newly translated work Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art presents readers with a series of interventions into the field of aesthetics, tracing its role in the emergence of artistic modernism. At stake for Rancière is our reception of modernism's legacy and the political closure that has been entailed by it. As he writes at the end of the book's preface, "Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution, and was only able to deny this relation by transforming a strategic will that had lost its world into a policy of exception" (xvi).

In Aisthesis, Rancière is not looking for an essence or truth inherent to art. Rather, he is concerned with the ways in which what he calls "the aesthetic regime of art" has been used to identify particular images, performances, texts, and objects. Art, for Rancière, does not enter into a domain called politics from a position of autonomy. Rather, art is always already a social practice, a distribution of bodies within a political field. In each chapter, he attempts to trace a logic of art that departs from the interpretive network that gives it meaning. Each of the scenes that Rancière explores in Aisthesis are treated as instances in which "a given artistic appearance requires changes in the paradigms of art" (xi). Each object of study, in other words, is treated as an instance of "art" but also as a singular moment (of novelty, revolution, or emotion) in which art is reconstituted. Each scene is a "fabric," a "moving constellation," in which these various modes of perception, affection, and thought are woven together. Each object of study is an instance in the formation of the aesthetic regime of art and "a displacement in the perception of what art signifies" (xiii).

The term "art" has often been thought to designate a place distinct from prosaic reality: in this mode of thinking, a work of art will break with the everyday to achieve an elevated status. Instead, says Rancière, the aesthetic regime that has formed our perception of art's constitution does just the opposite: it works to "erase the specificities of the arts and … blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience" (xii). Most often, the identification of an artwork's transcendence is a product of retrospection that cuts it loose from such aesthetic conditions.

Although Rancière's analyses move through seemingly abstract categories, he makes it clear from the onset that this project begins not from an idealist concept of art or theory of the human, but from material conditions shaping what he calls the "sensible fabric of experience." Material conditions but also "modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them" (x). These organizing modes of relation and perception are what allow us to formalize a domain as nebulous as art. Indeed, one of art's distinctive characteristics is that it unites what other schemas might distance. One of the implicit arguments of Rancière 's book is that through particular determining forces (interpretation, sensation, and perception), art is continually re-defining its boundaries by incorporating what it once opposed, from the mangled form of the Belvedere Torso to the journalistic filmmaking of James Agee. The history of art is a history of exception and incorporation, and in Rancière's genealogy these transformations in the sensible fabric are the conditions of art's emergence.

Aisthesis moves chronologically through fourteen under-estimated events in the history of Western art in order to construct a historical framework for understanding modernism, which remains a difficult concept despite our familiar associations with a particular style or moment of artistic consciousness. A large part of Rancière's project, here and elsewhere, is to reclaim the domain of aesthetics and redefine its relationship to art. A philosophical outgrowth near the end of the eighteenth century, aesthetics emerged as a field that made possible a new way of identifying art. Prior to the aesthetic revolution, art was schematized according to what Rancière refers to as the "representative regime of art," which followed established hierarchies and classical conventions. With the aesthetic regime, the division between art and life undergoes a transformation: while their distance is maintained, art and life are simultaneously drawn together into the same terrain. As the chapters of Aisthesis demonstrate, this paradoxical configuration allows the domains of art and life to retain their differences by sharing certain commonalities. The crucial question is, then, not what is art? but, what counts as "aesthetic art"? Where, in other words, does the aesthetic regime assert itself?

Each chapter takes an opening piece of art criticism as its point of departure. The first passage comes from Johan Joachim Winckelmann's 1764 text, History of Ancient Art, which went on to influence many of the philosophers and poets whose writings would define the next century of aesthetics. Considered Winckelmann's masterwork, History of Ancient Art creates a chronological account of Western art's development in ancient Greece, drawing together artistic objects and their broader social and intellectual conditions. For Winckelmann, artwork helped to explain a bygone era, but as Rancière illustrates in his analysis, the eighteenth century art historian relies on the destruction of a particular statue, the Belvedere Torso, to construct an idealized image of the ancient Greek city-state and its people. Here, art emerges in the absence of action and the ambiguous sensation that the statue evokes. While the representative order appreciated the harmony of proportions and the relation between visible form and spiritual character, the Belvedere Torso lacks the composite parts to create material harmony or identity. For Rancière, Wincklemann's celebration of this sculpture thus "signifies the revocation of the principle that linked the appearance of beauty to the realization of a science of proportion and expression" (4). A gap has emerged between the two, and it is precisely this gap that will inform what the aesthetic regime defines as beautiful. Wincklemann's comparison of the torso's muscles to waves in the sea carries this dissociation even further. According to Rancière, the wave metaphor suggests both indeterminacy and perfection.

The tension of many surfaces on one surface, of many kinds of corporality within one body, will define beauty from now on. . . . Wincklemann inaugurates the age during which artists were busy unleashing the sensible potential hidden in inexpressiveness, indifference or mobility, composing the conflicting movements of the dancing body, but also of the sentence, the surface, or the coloured touch that arrest the story while telling it, that suspend meaning by making it pass by or avoid the very figure they designate. (9)

Such beauty, however, needed a principle to unite the singularity of the artist and the development of the arts as a technical tradition. Wincklemann's treatment of ancient art uses the concept of history to do just this: it "signifies a form of coexistence between those who inhabit a place together, those who draw the blueprints for collective buildings, those who cut the stones. . . . Art thus becomes an autonomous reality, with the idea of history as the relation between a milieu, a collective form of life, and possibilities of individual invention" (14). For Wincklemann, the statue represents the perfection of a collective life that is no longer present. It is a social body that cannot be actualized. With Wincklemann, art has a new subject, the people, and a new context, history. This paradox between art and history plays itself out in our museums.

History makes Art exist as a singular reality; but it makes it exist within a temporal disjunction: museum works are art, they are the basis of the unprecedented reality called Art because they were nothing like that for those who made them. And reciprocally, these works come to us as the product of a collective life, but on the condition of keeping us away from it. (19)

The following chapters continue this line of analysis through overlapping scenes of painting, poetry, dance, and theatre. Rancière revisits Hegel's posthumously collected Lectures on Fine Art (1835), where the philosopher develops a criterion for art, independent of technical excellence, social grandeur, or moral instruction. Focusing on Hegel's treatment of Murillo's Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon, Rancière locates a symptom of the demise of the representative regime. No longer does the painting's significance hinge on the old hierarchies, which would have dismissed the piece as "genre painting." Instead, Hegel locates his aesthetic criterion in the freedom of the work, which "signifies its indifference to its represented content. This freedom can thus appear purely negative: it relies only on the status of work in museums where they are separated from their primary destination" (30). The indifference of the contemporary observer, Rancière argues, could mean that painting's contents have been increasingly formalized, now a simple matter of shape, line, colour, and so on. Here we witness another departure from the representative regime of art. Painting in particular for Hegel is the work of surfaces, the play of appearances; and, Rancière summarizes, "it is this play of appearance that is the very realization of freedom of mind" (32). Equally important within this chapter is Ranciere's suggestion that Hegel's treatment of art was facilitated by the Louvre's early curators, who reorganized the religious and political art of the ancien regime within a neutralized gallery space.

Several chapters later, Rancière locates the antithesis of Hegel's identification of Greek perfection with the freedom of a people in John Ruskin's theory of gothic architecture, from his influential work, The Stones of Venice (1851). The chapter begins with a passage from Roger Marx's L'Art social (1913), which employs the metaphor of the temple to describe the work of Emile Galle, a master of the so-called "decorative arts." Marx's lecture was originally addressed to an audience of workers and embodied the art critic's quest for aesthetic regeneration, which sought the unity of fine and decorative arts (the "equality of arts") and advocated the idea of social art. Social art, notes Rancière, "is not an art for the people; it is art at the service of ends determined by society" (135). Here, the artisan's life and thought present in an aesthetic object are "the singular manifestation of great anonymous life." Where Wincklemann saw the suspension of life in Belvedere Torso and Hegel saw the freedom of mind within the indifference of painting to its subject, Roger Marx follows John Ruskin in his pursuit of an equality between artist and artisan.

By drawing Ruskin up against Hegel, Rancière demonstrates just how radical the Victorian critic's theory of art truly was. In Ruskin's eyes, the geometric perfection once praised by Schiller and Hegel expresses a rigorous division of labour, an institutionalized gap between artist and artisan. By contrast, Ruskin's idea of true art functions more as "applied art, which applies both to the construction and decoration of buildings, art that serves life, serves to shelter and express it" (139). Opposing form to function undoes art's unity. All true art, according to Ruskin is both decorative and symbolic, integrated into a building that will be inhabited and will thus express modes of social existence that exceed their function. Rather than a simple nostalgia for medieval cathedrals, Ruskin's theory of art is "a social paradigm of art." The continuum of modernist architecture follows Ruskin in understanding true art as that which "adapts life and expresses it," but the important critical question, Rancière argues, has to do with "which life one must adapt to and which life one must express" (143). The ensuing developments of modernism depend on how this relationship is understood. Ruskin's paradigm evolved in its application by Roger Marx, and later, Peter Behrens--the artistic advisor of the German electric company AEG. While Behrens and his friends at the Werkbund have been interpreted as turning to function against form, Rancière argues that such emphasis on function was an artistic affirmation of a society in which utilitarian ends are subordinate to an ideal of social harmony. What truly counts as art for the Werkbund and the later Bauhaus is the reformation of structures linking modes of production and modes of consumption. While Ruskin saw the style of this reform embodied in nature, here it is the abstract lines of industrial standardization that affirm the unity between function and expression.

Rancière concludes Aisthesis with an analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans and an essay by Clement Greenberg on "Avante-Garde and Kitsch." Rancière shows how the work of Agee and Evans is able to give aesthetic treatment to and dignify the lives of suffering sharecroppers during the Dust Bowl before turning to Greenberg's essay. Greenberg's piece remains an influential polemic against the industrial revolution and its culture of kitsch. Here is where we begin to see the institutionalized split between high and low culture that continues to define historical modernism in the popular imagination. For Greenberg it was an imperative to dispense with art that was not serious and politically committed: i.e., the vulgar tastes defined and developed through a capitalism of peasant culture. But what Greenberg was announcing, argues Rancière, was the death of

historical modernism in general, the idea of a new art attuned to all the vibrations of universal life: an art capable both of matching the accelerated rhythms of industry, society and urban life, and of giving infinite resonance to the most ordinary minutes of everyday life. (262)

Aisthesis is a difficult and impressive study that should (and likely will) significantly alter tired debates over modernism's legacy and the relation between aesthetics and politics, more generally. As Ranciere writes in his preface, the work begun in Aisthesis does not represent a finished project and might include other scenes. His present study ends at a significant crossroads within modernism's history: a contradictory moment shared by James Agee and Clement Greenberg in which modernism's concern with ordinary life was undercut by an announcement of its demise. By ending in this way, however, Rancière implies that modernism remains an unfinished project and, indeed, exploring its historical network is a crucial part of its recovery.

William Morris and the politics of artistic production

In 1889, William Morris delivered a lecture titled "The Arts and Crafts of Today," which addressed the degraded state of labour and commerce in industrial England by working through the question of art's purpose in everyday life. Not simply an indictment of late Victorian society, Morris's lecture functions as a manifesto, justifying his radical position to an audience of artists while laying out the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. Like the manifestos of later design movements, such as The Bauhaus, Morris's lecture assumes a close relationship between what he calls the "applied arts" and the complex form of society at large. For both movements, the design manifesto is a polemical call to all creative labourers to recognize their collective capacity to overturn and transform the status quo; it is an attempt to articulate an alternative vision of society in which art does not simply mask reality but actually improves it.

Modernist aesthetics can be seen as a direct engagement with the question of technology and its increasing dominance within industrial capitalism. In this way, the lineage of early twentieth century movements like The Bauhaus can be traced back to Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. If the design manifesto is itself the outgrowth of a modernist attitude toward art and life, it retains the same dialectical impulse that drove Morris to understand the applied arts as a sign of collective solidarity: it is at once critical of its immediate context and pragmatic about how to change it. As Morris's 1889 lecture demonstrates, the rise of the applied arts as a discipline directly follows from art's confrontation with capitalist modes of production and to social inequality.

In a landscape saturated with advertising and mass production, the applied arts provided Morris with tangible opportunities for intervention. His 1889 lecture recognizes this discipline as a site of labour that must be reconciled with degraded labour of the industrial factory. Art, according to Morris, has two related purposes. The first purpose has to do with use and consumption: art adds beauty to functional objects, it enables the enjoyment of everyday activities. Here, Morris suggests that in some forms of human labour (certain moments in agriculture, fishing, carpentry, etc.) beauty is already inherent in nature, or it would be if we recognized that this sort of work is necessary and dignified. Art's second purpose is to add pleasure to labour. Nature again figures into this definition because it models this relationship for us by making necessary activities like eating enjoyable.

For Morris, the vast separation between art and life was symptomatic of England's social and economic inequality. In his lecture, he points out that artists frequently fixate on a particular style or method and consequently lose sight of what that style might achieve. Such artwork finally expresses nothing more than the vanity of the artist: his self-satisfied ability to render a "clever" product, which simply mystifies and alienates his audience rather than working towards its edification. Within the conditions of capitalism, art cannot be commonly experienced: it becomes the lofty domain of aristocratic enjoyment; meanwhile, the factory work that sustains England's economy is stripped down to bare utility.

Removing art from utility does not make utility somehow more neutral; it rather works against the human spirit and against social progress. If we simply adhere to utility, suggests Morris, we have the choice between two dystopian futures. Either society will be organized in a way that allows for the exploitation of the many by the few (fascism), or, as a strict system of compulsory egalitarianism, not unlike the form of communism that would later envelop Eastern Europe. In either case everyday life is defined by the drudgery of work, which destroys creativity and instrumentalizes human energy.

In contrast, the true work of art for Morris must point to the unified bond of true society, where every individual endeavour is grounded, inspired, and made possible by collective interest. In this way, Morris's philosophy was grounded in the "constructivism" that would come to define the avant-garde in the early twentieth century: art is distinguished not by the finished product but by the social process that surrounds it and makes possible its creation (McGann 56). For Morris and, later, for The Bauhaus this impulse toward collective interest culminated in the work of architecture. In "The Bauhaus Manifesto" Walter Gropius suggests argues that arts and crafts must work together in unity in order to create complete objects, the most important of which is "the complete building." Like Gropius, Morris recognized architecture as a way to understand how art and life could influence one another. Even the fine arts, such as painting or sculpture, must be considered within the context of architecture and can aid in the construction of a unified space. The building, argues Morris, is "a unit of art": it is the pure expression of the lives of its builders and inhabitants. What bound these two groups together in previous societies was a common tradition. By Morris's time, that tradition had been superseded by the irrational demands of the market, all of which have led increased specialization and alienation for working classes. In this setup, ornamentation (what used to belong to the domain of art) is mass produced as an afterthought to utility, the ultimate purpose of which is to quicken commerce. The end of objects produced in this kind of context is profit, pure and simple. Beautiful work can therefore only be oppositional because it must, by definition, take into account the mutual conditions of production and consumption.

In his lecture Morris sees the buildings of industrial Britain standing in stark contrast to the cathedrals of the middle ages, not only because of their orientation towards commerce, but because such spaces reduce workers to blunt instruments. Because he is driven solely by commercial interest, Morris argues, the capitalist will either have machines do work of production or rely on "human machines": workers whose desire and creativity must be channeled into spare moments of leisure time. Under such conditions, the working classes are doomed to produce objects of mere utility. In other words, if ornamentation does make an appearance in factory products, it has no purpose beyond the self-interest of those who own the means of production.

Where other social critics of Victorian England, such as John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, valourized work as an inherently ennobling activity and risked having their arguments used to justify the further exploitation of the working classes, Morris was convinced that simple labour reform would not solve the problems of capitalism (Breton 43). Commerce, according to Morris, can only encourage exploitation and treat beauty as a superfluous ornament. When those engaged in the applied arts take seriously their conditions of production, they cannot but be aligned with rebellion. For Morris the free labours of applied artists are therefore the concrete appearance of utopian possibility; they carve out a space of critique and a space of hope. Such work, in other words, reminds us of what the industrial age has forgotten: that labour can be pleasurable, that social equality is attainable, and that both possibilities depend on one another.

Works Cited
 

Breton, Rob. "WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work." Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43-56.

Gropius, Walter. "The Bauhaus Manifesto." Maria Buszek, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

McGann, Jerome. "'A Thing to Mind': The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris." Huntington Library Quarterly 55.1 (Winter, 1992): 55-74.

Morris, William. "The Arts and Crafts of Today." Marxists Internet Archive, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

Rowan Williams: Idols, Images, and Icons

Rowan Williams gave the closing lecture of the Cadbury Lectures this past March. 

The Lighter Side: Tina Fey's Bossypants and Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love

I wouldn't still be in academia if I didn't find some pleasure in it, but during the school semester there's usually something else at stake beyond personal enjoyment. Summer is a bit different. I've finally had the chance to get through two books I've been dying to read. The first, Tina Fey's new "memoir" Bossypants, is pretty much what you'd expect from the former Saturday Night Live writer (and 30 Rock star/writer/creator/etc.). In other words, it's full of smart, funny, sarcastic, and occasionally sentimental stories/observations from her experiences as a suburban improv nerd, Second City starlet, SNL writer, and reluctant Sarah Palin impersonator. The cover image gets the tone of the book just right: Fey is full of self-deprecation, and rarely makes a joke without including herself as the punchline; but she's equally eager to take up the feminist mantle, especially when it comes to equality in the workplace. Even though it's crammed with humour, Bossypants has a semi-serious subtheme: it's not a man's world anymore (well, in a lot of cases it still is, but Fey and her SNL buddy, Amy Poehler, aren't gonna let that dictate the terms of their comedy).

Second, and even more enjoyable: Carl Wilson's 2007 book for the 33 1/3 series, devoted to the 1997 album by Celine Dion, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. I've known about this book for a while and have had friends/roommates read it right in front of me. Why couldn't I take the hint and read it back then? I probably could have saved my self some embarrassment.

It's a strange little book, even within the context of Continuum's series on seminal or classic albums. Every other book in the series finds its writer enamoured with its subject, but Wilson chooses to write on the music critics favourite scapegoat, Celine Dion. Wilson took on this project because he's curious about her global popularity and because he wants to understand his own deep-seated bias toward her music. Some of the content is confessional (like myself, Wilson grew up listening to alternative rock music and made a constant effort distance himself from the "shmaltz" of contemporary pop), but the book seamlessly weaves together interviews with fans; cultural, economic, political and sociological analysis (including the Francophone tumult that gave rise to Celine Dion's career, the way this tension appears throughout her albums and career, and the apex of her popularity at the Oscars in 1997) ; as well as several brief accounts of aesthetic theory, from Kant's theory of "disinterestedness" to Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of "cultural capital." The largest success of Wilson's book, in my reading, is in forcing me to locate my own cultural biases, and see the ways my taste for or appreciation of more "difficult" music is often more shallow than the mainstream offerings of ubiquitous artists like Celine Dion.

The "lesson" is well-represented in the dialectical pairing of Dion with another artist who performed at the 1997 Oscars. As Wilson recounts in an interview, "Elliott Smith serves as Celine Dion's foil in the early part of the book, partly because they met upon the field of not-much-honor at the Oscars in 1998 and Dion roundly trounced my own little indie-songwriting hero. . . . The irony is that when Dion and Smith met at the Oscars, she was so unexpectedly sweet to him that he ended up defending her to friends who criticized her, for the rest of his all-too-brief, burnt life."

Another related success of the book, for me anyway, is that it points out the hypocrisy of most anti-sentimentalist positions. Wilson is talking about music (we antisentimentalists are often prone to celebrating Noise/Industrial music, as well as the authentic sounds of lo-fi indie rock), but I think he also meant it to apply more broadly, to other cultural experiences. Especially in the more serious realms of literature and critical theory, sentiment (often characterized as the flip-side of cold rationalism) is often the scapegoat. Such critical posturing shows how much our culture still celebrates the strong and the stoic without questioning its presuppositions. Hating Celine Dion isn't just an aesthetic choice, it also has ethical implications: it's a way of elevating oneself above her fans, who tend to be poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. Celine Dion's music, writes Wilson, "deals with problems that don’t require leaps of imagination but require other efforts, like patience, or compromise”; although it is “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to,” it “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.” And he ends the book with a Celine-inspired plea for “democratic” criticism: “not a limp open-mindedness” but a refusal to let ourselves (and our own "conspicuous consumption") off the hook and pigeon-hole others. Celine, he says, “stinks of democracy,” and his effort to understand her has taught him to “relish the plenitude of tastes, to admire a well-put-together taste set that’s alien to our own.”