I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives Podcast, which looks at 'Paradise Towers'. During it, Kevin and James' guest Jane (of achairforjane and many fascinating comments - and an amazing guest post on Lost - at Phil Sandifer's blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them. Totally valid and satisfying reading. (And I'm grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)
I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a 'Marxist reading' or a 'Marxist analysis'. I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn't in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a 'Marxist analysis' would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle. I hold my hands up: that's often what I do here, and it doesn't really cut the mustard.
To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production. A more proper sense of the term 'Marxist analysis' would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production - in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like 'the culture industries' or 'ideology' or 'hegemony' (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another). I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation. For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including - but also beyond - texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.
I'm often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis' of this or that. This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I'm not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing. Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.
I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative. Ye gods, I hope not. I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact. One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age. I worry that someone out there might read me and then think they know what 'Marxist criticism' is. I may be vain, but I know my limitations, and I hate the idea of doing my own beliefs a disservice, even in a very small way.
I've reacted to 'Paradise Towers' in a way that is actually a bit more properly Marxist than I usually manage. In this post, I at least gesture towards a proper Marxist contextualising of the story (i.e. I mention the dawning neoliberalism of 1987 as a context for the production of the story, for the way it references modernism, which I also historicise very briefly.) Even so, I'd hesitate to claim the status of a 'Marxist analysis' for that post.
And I wouldn't want to claim that I always even do as well as I do in that piece. My 'essay' about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for instance, has been called a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis'. I'm really not sure it qualifies. It gestures in that direction towards the end, but I think of it as a personal reaction which has a background in my Marxist convictions - something quite distinct.
Going back to 'Paradise Towers', and addressing some of the things said in the podcast... Jane doesn't actually say that the Rezzies represent capitalists or capitalism, but she nevertheless uses the word 'bourgeois' to describe them. Now, that's right - I agree. They clearly (through their aesthetic representation - something Jane is very hot on) signify a certain stereotypical middle-class, middle-brow social position which is deeply associated - and not inaccurately - with a strata of people in bourgeois society who combine the passive, the complacent, the ressentimental, the reactionary and the aspiring. But we should remember to separate the 'bourgeois' from the 'bourgeoisie'. The Rezzies are not capitalists. (To be clear: Jane doesn't say they are.)
Similarly, neither are the Caretakers. Here I have a more serious quibble with Jane, because she says they are the proletarians in Paradise Towers. I don't think that's right... or rather, I think it needs nuancing. Jane mentions elsewhere in the podcast that the Caretakers are costumed in military style... but they are explicitly not the military, because the military took all the rest of the males away to war. The Caretakers are the police. And the police are not proletarians. In capitalism, the police are ultimately aligned with the class interests of the capitalist class. They are, essentially, defenders of private property (and of the peace of the system which normalises and legitimises private property) against people who don't own anything. (This is one big reason why the end of 'Paradise Towers' clangs for me, at least politically. If you wait for the police to align themselves with anybody other than their masters, you will wait forever.)
Jane goes on to say interesting things about how, if viewed as proletarians who have achieved positions of authority, the Caretakers can be seen as an illustration of how power corrupts any class. And that's true too (as long as we expand a bit on what we mean by 'power'). Jane takes this observation on to see a polemic against Stalinism lurking within the story, with the Caretakers as being a kind of nomenklatura, and the Chief Caretaker as a General Secretary. I think it'd be dangerous to generalise that into any kind of ahistorically-detached model, but it isn't inaccurate as a description of what happened in the Soviet Union. A segment of the working class achieved political power and then, detached from the rest of the class (owing to historical circumstances that 'Paradise Towers' almost acknowledges via the business of the male population disappearing into a war), they become a bureaucratic tyranny. (Jane also stresses - in an almost neo-Trot way - that the Stalinists are merely posturing as being in charge while capitalism still runs the show in a hidden form below the surface. All lovely stuff, and music to the ears of someone like me who accepts the argument that Stalinism is the political expression of authoritarian, bureaucratic state capitalism.) But I don't think you need to go as far as post-Civil War Soviet Russia to see what the Caretakers represent. In capitalist society, the police are just what Jane describes: a layer of the working class that is detached from the class position (and therefore the class interests) of the rest of the workers. Even in openly capitalist society, the Caretakers are there.
Kroagnon, by the way, doesn't really convince me as a manifestation of capitalism... though, as a representation of the authoritarian inner-core of some variants of modernism, he obviously reflects capitalism because modernism is part of the cultural logic of early-C20th Euro-American capitalist culture.
For me, 'Paradise Towers' is not really a picture of a capitalist dystopia so much as a picture of a post-industrial one. The theory of the post-industrial is about to be massively in vogue in Britain as 'Paradise Towers' appears. It's an idea that is aloft on the postmodernist wind. It ties in with certain non-Marxist or pseudo-Marxist Left impulses to declare that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of classical Marxism. And it also ties in with impulses within the burgeoning neoliberal Right to claim that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of even old-style social democracy. The response of the anti-Thatcher Left is to point to post-industrialism as a kind of social dysfunction. An understandable (if ultimately unsatisfactory) position which, I think, we see mirrored in 'Paradise Towers'. None of this makes 'Paradise Towers' any less angry and wonderful (I adore it, by the way), but it marks the circumstances of its production as being within the cultural context of early-neoliberal Left thinking. It also allows us to loop back a tad and join this ramble up in a notional loop of logic... because it illustrates the distance between finding a Marx-friendly allegory within a narrative, and actually analysing said narrative using a material-dialectic method (not that I'm claiming to have done more than gesture vaguely towards that here.)
Oh, one more thing. During the podcast, Jane asks James if he thinks Mel has changed at all during the course of the story. James says she's learned a Moral of the Week. I agree, and I've been trying to think how to formulate the Moral of the Week that she learns. I've decided that it would be best expressed as: 'a monomaniacal obsession with swimming pools can be fatal under certain extremely specific circumstances'.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 February 2015
Monday, 1 December 2014
Monsterism
In his famous essay 'The Dialectic of Fear' (published in New Left Review #136, Nov-Dec 1982) Franco Moretti used Marxist and Psychoanalytic criticism to provide a coruscating account of the twin monsters of bourgeois culture: Dracula and Frankenstein.
The entire essay is well worth reading and is findable online if you hunt about. Here are some of the best bits about Frankenstein (the book):
and...
I have some issues with Moretti here. He uses the word 'lies' to describe Victor's supposedly inaccurate descriptions of the monster as beautiful. But, firstly, we are confusing perception with reality. Victor perceives his construction as beautiful because he attempts to construct it according to implicitly classical notions of beauty (note the key word "proportion", and remember that original woodcut which depicts the monster as a giganticised and jumbled reiteration of Michaelangelo's newly-created Adam)... but there is no guarantee that things that accord with classical notions of proportion will actually be beautiful. Rather, beauty is concept we have mapped onto certain stereotypical physicalities which stem from a bastardized and historically re-written version of classicism, recast in terms of 18th and 19th century bourgeois prejudices. It is profoundly local - historically, geographically, socially and ideologically. It is implicitly tied in with notions of 'health' which stem from the privileged lives of the rich (smooth skin, for example), and which later get appropriated by reductionist Darwinian ideologies which link beauty with 'fitness'... a set of notions still widely repeated by today's biological determinists. It would be perfectly possible to construct something according to abstract classical (or pseudo-classical) notions of beauty that turned out hideous and terrifying to the beholder. Just imagine actually meeting Michaelangelo's David in the street.
But this leads us to another issue. As stated, we're talking about Victor's perceptions. What seemed beautiful to him in conception, in theory, during construction, in isolated parts, could well seem ghastly in totality. Or perhaps the totality of the final creation simply brings home to Victor the ramifications of what he has done. He has created something which now has seperate existence, seperate power, autonomy and selfhood. When he looks at it as another person as opposed to a plan or a set of pieces to be assembled, he suddenly finds it frightening. This actually fits better with Moretti's conception of the monster as a proletariat in singular, as terrifying because the creator perceives it as his potential gravedigger. Like many creators of actual proletarian populations, Victor the bourgeois looks at what he has created and, in place of the vast reservoir of ready and eager and docile and easily-exploited labour that he planned, he sees something terrifyingly dangerous precisely because of its autonomy.
This in turn leads to another issue. In the preceding quoted paragraph, Moretti is talking about the bourgeois conception of the lower orders as hideously unequal or inferior. He implies a relation between this (which found itself expressed in Darwinian reductionist narratives about degraded 'types' or 'natural lower orders') and between the racial narrative of capitalism. But he seems to be flailing about for a psychological rationale for racism as a response to the horror of the subjected object. But the process of 'race making', in which the bourgeois social order constructs the ideology of biological race (and thus of biological racism) as a justification for racially-ordered systems of labour exploitation, i.e. slavery and the slave trade, is a fair bit more material than that. Furthermore, the psychological aspect (which is definitely present) is based not on horror at the subject but on the need to confront a living subject and make it an object that is horrifying, and thus subjectable. To turn workers who are black into 'negro slaves' for instance, from people who are being exploited into monsters who deserve no better. Moretti misses the extent to which race is ideologically constructed, and the extent to which it thus filters into perceptions. He puts it the wrong way round, or seems to. Having constructed the ideology of racial orders, the system then creates consciousness in people which causes them to perceive racial difference that is not, as we now know, actually existing in nature. There are no 'races', and we construct them out of ideology which acts upon our perceptions of ethnic variations. This, it seems to me, is actually directly mirrored in Victor's sudden perception of his new creation as ugly. He looks at it and called it beautiful, then looks again and perceives it as ugly - which is to say, as Moretti points out, as racially 'other'. And the only change is a material one. The creature is now alive. He made it ugly because it came alive and its disavowal needed an ideological justification. Victor, in effect, 'makes' a race in two senses. He runs the risk of creating a 'race of devils' in the sense of creating a new breed among humans. But this is the diegetic sense that he, the character, perceives and believes. Beneath that, there is Victor as a textual reification of ideological maneuvres. In that sense, what he's actually doing is 'race making'. He is superimposing an ideology of racial difference and hierarchy upon a 'wretch' that he deems inferior because it is both his slave and his potential gravedigger. Its status as a living thing makes this ideologically necessary. That other people perceive the monster in essentially the same way only speaks to the universality of the ideology of race once constructed.
Moretti goes on to recognise something of the instability of some of those aforementioned bourgeois conceptions of beauty, and to bring in the artificiality of race, in the following passage - which is also a neat demonstration of the Marxist insight that progress and barbarism are forever intertwined, to the extent that they are essentially the same thing:
Mary Shelley became something of a reactionary in later life. Despite being a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and the dawning Industrial Revolution, Frankenstein is a book with more than a seed of the reactionary nestling within it. Like many from the early years of capitalism who disapproved of the new system in some measure, she is in many respects essentially a conservative. Shakespeare, writing at the very dawn of the Early Modern Era, at the fulcrum of the transition from fedualism to capitalism, is highly critical of many aspects of the emergent bourgeois culture (along with being irresistibly attracted to them) but his criticism takes the form of an essentially conservative attachment to pre-bourgeois ideas of social obligation. Capitalism detaches pre-capitalist people from old and established ties of obligation which constitute the social structure of fedualism. He sympathises with shepherds leading newly precarious lives in the Forest of Arden after the enclosures, but he also worries about the fickleness of the new urban proles (so like the vicious Roman mob!), and so on. Timon rages at money the universal whore, the utterly faithless golden metaphor which, in the bourgeois system, breaks down all loyalties and moral certainties... and yet Shakespeare's solution is for the classical virtues to be imposed by martial law in the person of Alcibiades. In the same way, Mary Shelley frets at the emergence of the new bourgeois product - so powerful, so autonomous - and the newly forming proletariat - so powerful, so autonomous - even as she rails at the failure of social justice contained within the new system. The book is a critique from a radical position but also from a privileged one. Shelley sees the ruthless failure of tolerance and compassion and social justice which is contained within these new phenomena. The Enlightenment project will fail if it is not cared for and nurtured, and justice is the most essential pre-requisite... and that justice is being denied. But, even as she rails at justice denied, she frets at the revenge of history. This is perfectly in line with the reservations of Mary's father, Godwin, who wants reform through fireside chats with the educated, and her radical boyfriend-later-husband, Percy Shelley, who flip-flops back-and-forth between foaming revolutionism and elitest worrying about the ignorant mob.
But, in some ways, Mary goes further. Frankenstein is almost a declaration that the entire project - not just reform but capitalism itself - is doomed to failure. This is not a categorical judgement. There are countervailing tendencies in this book and others she wrote. She was always profoundly ambivalent about Romanticism and the Enlightenment - something that makes her such a fascinating liminal figure in her milieu. But it seems that, for her, the monstrous nature of the products - be they machines or classes - dooms them to forever be denied justice and responsible use. Without the perspective of class struggle, she doesn't see the possibility that the new class could remake the world. She does, however, see 'the common ruination of the contending classes'. But she lived before capitalism had spread across the globe and taken over. To her, it's not too late for the world to go back to how it was before, once those warring opposites kill each other. Frankenstein and the monster destroy each other. They both die without issue. The 'race of devils' is never spawned. As Moretti points out, Frankenstein has no way of utilising the creature because capital is erased from the picture. There are no factories for it and its kin to work in. It is never cconceived of as productive, or as having utility. Mary Shelley turns the two men - and Capital and Labour - into a doomed fable.
These days, the end of the world is now proverbially known to be easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. To Mary Shelley, it was decidedly the other way round.
(Edited and slightly amended, 18/3/15.)
The entire essay is well worth reading and is findable online if you hunt about. Here are some of the best bits about Frankenstein (the book):
Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of 'a Ford worker'). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built. Frankenstein is a productive inventor-scientist...). Reunited and brought back to life in the monster are the limbs of those - the 'poor' - whom the breakdown of feudal relations has forced into brigandage, poverty and death. Only modern science - this metaphor for the 'dark satanic mills' - can offer them a future. It sews them together again, moulds them according to its will and finally gives them life, But at the moment the monster opens its eyes, its creator
draws back in horror: 'by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; . . . How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . ?'
Between Frankenstein and the monster there is an ambivalent, dialectical relationship, the same as that which, according to Marx, connects capital with wage-labour. On the one hand, the scientist cannot but create the monster: 'often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion'. On the other hand, he is immediately afraid of it and wants to kill it, because he realizes he has given life to a creature stronger than himself and of which he cannot henceforth be free. ... The fear aroused by the monster, in other words, is the fear of one who is afraid of having 'produced his own gravediggers'.
and...
'Race of devils': this image of the proletariat encapsulates one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley's ideology. The monster is a historical product, an artificial being: but once transformed into a 'race' he re-enters the immutable realm of Nature. He can become the object of an instinctive, elemental hatred; and 'men' need this hatred to counterbalance the force unleashed by the monster. So true is this that racial discrimination is not superimposed on the development of the narrative but springs directly from it: it is not only Mary Shelley who wants to make the monster a creature of another race, but Frankenstein himself. Frankenstein does not in fact want to create a man (as he claims) but a monster, a race. He narrates at length the 'infinite pains and care' with which he had endeavoured to form the creature; he tells us that 'his limbs were in proportion' and that he had 'selected his features as beautiful'. So many lies -- in the same paragraph, three words later, we read: 'His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes. . . . his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.' Even before he begins to live, this new being is already monstrous, already a race apart. He must be so, he is made to be so -- he is created but on these conditions. There is here a clear lament for the feudal sumptuary laws which, by imposing a particular style of dress on each social rank, allowed it to be recognized at a distance and nailed it physically to its social role. Now that clothes have become commodities that anyone can buy, this is no longer possible. Difference in rank must now be inscribed more deeply: in one's skin, one's eyes, one's build. The monster makes us realize how hard it was for the dominant classes to resign themselves to the idea that all human beings are - or ought to be - equal.
I have some issues with Moretti here. He uses the word 'lies' to describe Victor's supposedly inaccurate descriptions of the monster as beautiful. But, firstly, we are confusing perception with reality. Victor perceives his construction as beautiful because he attempts to construct it according to implicitly classical notions of beauty (note the key word "proportion", and remember that original woodcut which depicts the monster as a giganticised and jumbled reiteration of Michaelangelo's newly-created Adam)... but there is no guarantee that things that accord with classical notions of proportion will actually be beautiful. Rather, beauty is concept we have mapped onto certain stereotypical physicalities which stem from a bastardized and historically re-written version of classicism, recast in terms of 18th and 19th century bourgeois prejudices. It is profoundly local - historically, geographically, socially and ideologically. It is implicitly tied in with notions of 'health' which stem from the privileged lives of the rich (smooth skin, for example), and which later get appropriated by reductionist Darwinian ideologies which link beauty with 'fitness'... a set of notions still widely repeated by today's biological determinists. It would be perfectly possible to construct something according to abstract classical (or pseudo-classical) notions of beauty that turned out hideous and terrifying to the beholder. Just imagine actually meeting Michaelangelo's David in the street.
But this leads us to another issue. As stated, we're talking about Victor's perceptions. What seemed beautiful to him in conception, in theory, during construction, in isolated parts, could well seem ghastly in totality. Or perhaps the totality of the final creation simply brings home to Victor the ramifications of what he has done. He has created something which now has seperate existence, seperate power, autonomy and selfhood. When he looks at it as another person as opposed to a plan or a set of pieces to be assembled, he suddenly finds it frightening. This actually fits better with Moretti's conception of the monster as a proletariat in singular, as terrifying because the creator perceives it as his potential gravedigger. Like many creators of actual proletarian populations, Victor the bourgeois looks at what he has created and, in place of the vast reservoir of ready and eager and docile and easily-exploited labour that he planned, he sees something terrifyingly dangerous precisely because of its autonomy.
This in turn leads to another issue. In the preceding quoted paragraph, Moretti is talking about the bourgeois conception of the lower orders as hideously unequal or inferior. He implies a relation between this (which found itself expressed in Darwinian reductionist narratives about degraded 'types' or 'natural lower orders') and between the racial narrative of capitalism. But he seems to be flailing about for a psychological rationale for racism as a response to the horror of the subjected object. But the process of 'race making', in which the bourgeois social order constructs the ideology of biological race (and thus of biological racism) as a justification for racially-ordered systems of labour exploitation, i.e. slavery and the slave trade, is a fair bit more material than that. Furthermore, the psychological aspect (which is definitely present) is based not on horror at the subject but on the need to confront a living subject and make it an object that is horrifying, and thus subjectable. To turn workers who are black into 'negro slaves' for instance, from people who are being exploited into monsters who deserve no better. Moretti misses the extent to which race is ideologically constructed, and the extent to which it thus filters into perceptions. He puts it the wrong way round, or seems to. Having constructed the ideology of racial orders, the system then creates consciousness in people which causes them to perceive racial difference that is not, as we now know, actually existing in nature. There are no 'races', and we construct them out of ideology which acts upon our perceptions of ethnic variations. This, it seems to me, is actually directly mirrored in Victor's sudden perception of his new creation as ugly. He looks at it and called it beautiful, then looks again and perceives it as ugly - which is to say, as Moretti points out, as racially 'other'. And the only change is a material one. The creature is now alive. He made it ugly because it came alive and its disavowal needed an ideological justification. Victor, in effect, 'makes' a race in two senses. He runs the risk of creating a 'race of devils' in the sense of creating a new breed among humans. But this is the diegetic sense that he, the character, perceives and believes. Beneath that, there is Victor as a textual reification of ideological maneuvres. In that sense, what he's actually doing is 'race making'. He is superimposing an ideology of racial difference and hierarchy upon a 'wretch' that he deems inferior because it is both his slave and his potential gravedigger. Its status as a living thing makes this ideologically necessary. That other people perceive the monster in essentially the same way only speaks to the universality of the ideology of race once constructed.
Moretti goes on to recognise something of the instability of some of those aforementioned bourgeois conceptions of beauty, and to bring in the artificiality of race, in the following passage - which is also a neat demonstration of the Marxist insight that progress and barbarism are forever intertwined, to the extent that they are essentially the same thing:
But the monster also makes us realize that in an unequal society they are not equal. Not because they belong to different 'races' but because inequality really does score itself into one's skin, one's eyes and one's body. And more so, evidently, in the case of the first industrial workers: the monster is disfigured not only because Frankenstein wants him to be like that, but also because this was how things actually were in the first decades of the industrial revolution. In him, the metaphors of the critics of civil society become real. The monster incarnates the dialectic of estranged labour described by the young Marx: 'the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature. . . . It is true that labour produces . . . palaces, but hovels for the worker. . . . It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.' Frankenstein's invention is thus a pregnant metaphor of the process of capitalist production, which forms by deforming, civilizes by barbarizing, enriches by impoverishing -- a two-sided process in which each affirmation entails a negation. And indeed the monster - the pedestal on which Frankenstein erects his anguished greatness - is always described by negation: man is well proportioned, the monster is not; man is beautiful, the monster ugly; man is good, the monster evil. The monster is man turned upside-down, negated. He has no autonomous existence; he can never be really free or have a future. He lives only as the other side of that coin which is Frankenstein. When the scientist dies, the monster does not know what to do with his own life and commits suicide.
Mary Shelley became something of a reactionary in later life. Despite being a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and the dawning Industrial Revolution, Frankenstein is a book with more than a seed of the reactionary nestling within it. Like many from the early years of capitalism who disapproved of the new system in some measure, she is in many respects essentially a conservative. Shakespeare, writing at the very dawn of the Early Modern Era, at the fulcrum of the transition from fedualism to capitalism, is highly critical of many aspects of the emergent bourgeois culture (along with being irresistibly attracted to them) but his criticism takes the form of an essentially conservative attachment to pre-bourgeois ideas of social obligation. Capitalism detaches pre-capitalist people from old and established ties of obligation which constitute the social structure of fedualism. He sympathises with shepherds leading newly precarious lives in the Forest of Arden after the enclosures, but he also worries about the fickleness of the new urban proles (so like the vicious Roman mob!), and so on. Timon rages at money the universal whore, the utterly faithless golden metaphor which, in the bourgeois system, breaks down all loyalties and moral certainties... and yet Shakespeare's solution is for the classical virtues to be imposed by martial law in the person of Alcibiades. In the same way, Mary Shelley frets at the emergence of the new bourgeois product - so powerful, so autonomous - and the newly forming proletariat - so powerful, so autonomous - even as she rails at the failure of social justice contained within the new system. The book is a critique from a radical position but also from a privileged one. Shelley sees the ruthless failure of tolerance and compassion and social justice which is contained within these new phenomena. The Enlightenment project will fail if it is not cared for and nurtured, and justice is the most essential pre-requisite... and that justice is being denied. But, even as she rails at justice denied, she frets at the revenge of history. This is perfectly in line with the reservations of Mary's father, Godwin, who wants reform through fireside chats with the educated, and her radical boyfriend-later-husband, Percy Shelley, who flip-flops back-and-forth between foaming revolutionism and elitest worrying about the ignorant mob.
But, in some ways, Mary goes further. Frankenstein is almost a declaration that the entire project - not just reform but capitalism itself - is doomed to failure. This is not a categorical judgement. There are countervailing tendencies in this book and others she wrote. She was always profoundly ambivalent about Romanticism and the Enlightenment - something that makes her such a fascinating liminal figure in her milieu. But it seems that, for her, the monstrous nature of the products - be they machines or classes - dooms them to forever be denied justice and responsible use. Without the perspective of class struggle, she doesn't see the possibility that the new class could remake the world. She does, however, see 'the common ruination of the contending classes'. But she lived before capitalism had spread across the globe and taken over. To her, it's not too late for the world to go back to how it was before, once those warring opposites kill each other. Frankenstein and the monster destroy each other. They both die without issue. The 'race of devils' is never spawned. As Moretti points out, Frankenstein has no way of utilising the creature because capital is erased from the picture. There are no factories for it and its kin to work in. It is never cconceived of as productive, or as having utility. Mary Shelley turns the two men - and Capital and Labour - into a doomed fable.
These days, the end of the world is now proverbially known to be easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. To Mary Shelley, it was decidedly the other way round.
(Edited and slightly amended, 18/3/15.)
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Piece of Cake
Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:
My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.
*
I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.
What do we mean by 'failings'?
What do we mean by 'culture around it'?
Failure is, of course, subjectively judged. Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.
It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system. (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)
Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.
*phew* long sentence.
This is the 'culture around it'...
BUT...
I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture. It is culture.
We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced. It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.
More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.
A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism. The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things. Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.
The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.
You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.
And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.
There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product. This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.
This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social). This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions).
Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).
I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts. That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.
This would involve such basics as:
i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,
ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.
iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]
And:
iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,
v) that we must, therefore, take sides. We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'. Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.
Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social. We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'.
This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story. Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice. Even if only by negation. That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).
I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms. It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake. The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself. The work of art is like this. We make it a slice by viewing it out of context. But we can't then judge it alone. To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake. Try and do otherwise and you'll fail. Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital. The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it. That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake. On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.
Remember, to you, the file is a success. To the Warden, the file is a failure.
To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless. They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.
They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.
See. Piece of cake.
ADDENDA:
1. I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist. Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism. See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.
2. Nothing above is particularly original. I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes. Read the usual suspects.
3. This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.
4. I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity. We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density. Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.
Do you think that it's fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I've been mulling over the past few days and I'm sure you have an interesting response.
My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.
*
I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.
What do we mean by 'failings'?
What do we mean by 'culture around it'?
Failure is, of course, subjectively judged. Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.
It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system. (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)
Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.
*phew* long sentence.
This is the 'culture around it'...
BUT...
I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture. It is culture.
We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced. It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.
More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.
A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism. The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things. Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.
The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.
You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.
And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.
There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product. This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.
This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social). This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions).
Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).
I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts. That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.
This would involve such basics as:
i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,
ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.
iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]
And:
iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,
v) that we must, therefore, take sides. We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'. Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.
Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social. We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'.
This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story. Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice. Even if only by negation. That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).
I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms. It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake. The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself. The work of art is like this. We make it a slice by viewing it out of context. But we can't then judge it alone. To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake. Try and do otherwise and you'll fail. Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital. The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it. That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake. On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.
Remember, to you, the file is a success. To the Warden, the file is a failure.
To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless. They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.
They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.
See. Piece of cake.
ADDENDA:
1. I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist. Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism. See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.
2. Nothing above is particularly original. I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes. Read the usual suspects.
3. This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.
4. I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity. We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density. Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Turnabout is Fairplay
We get nowhere by pretending to ourselves that we can ever break out of culture and view it, as it were, from the outside. We're in it. And we're there to stay. By loving something and criticising it too, you kind of efface the nature of the all-embracing grip. But how can you not? You shouldn't pretend you can.
The solution (for me anyway) lies in using and abusing what you love, forcing it - and your talk about it - to become a way of criticising the society that created it. You don't break out of culture but you do turn an aspect of it into a weapon of sorts, even if you just use the weapon to recarve the inside of your own head. This, of course, comes from my personal ideological perspective.
More. For me, the approach to culture can always be both for itself, for its own sake, for the sheer hell of it, *and* as a way into social criticism. You can love it because you love it and also because you hate it, because of what your hatred for aspects of it allows you to do. Assault everything. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can enjoy the 'use value' of the commodity (TV show, film, book, whatever) while also analysing it. Where does my enjoyment come from, what does it mean, how to others enjoy it, why is it created the way it is, what does it do culturally and politically, etc. I think any other approach ends up with you thinking you shouldn't enjoy stuff you find politically dodgy and then pretending you don't (which leads to strange neuroses that are actually pretty common on the left).
Of course, that model assumes that there can never be any positive critique in mass culture. I'm not one to think mass culture can ever really be 'subversive'... but I do think it can (and does) sometimes provide uncompromised critique that can be used positively rather than negatively, i.e. you can supportively adopt aspects of what it 'says' as well as using some of what it 'says' against it.
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