Danger in the Past

“When a word like dangerous is applied to ideas, language or art, it immediately signals a desire to return to the past. It means that the speaker is fearful … the speaker fears all innovation, which he denounces on each occasion as ‘empty’ (in general that is all that can be found to be said about what is new). However this traditional fear is complicated today by the contrary fear of appearing anachronistic; suspicion towards the new is combined with a few nods in the direction of ‘the call of the present’ or the necessity to ‘rethink the problems of criticism’; ‘the vain return to the past’ is dismissed with a fine oratorical gesture. Regressiveness appears shameful today, just like capitalism. Whence come remarkable jerks and abrupt halts: there is a pretence for a while of accepting modern works, which one ought to discuss since they are being discussed; then, suddenly, a sort of limit having been reached, people proceed to a joint execution. These trials, set up periodically by closed groups, are thus in no way extraordinary; they happen at the end of certain disturbances of equilibrium. But why, today, Criticism?”

— Roland Barthes, Criticism & Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, 32-33

Barthes and Being Bourgeois

Inspired by Michael's recent talk, I've been reading Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes over the past couple of days. The book is a kind of autobiography, written in fragments, arranged alphabetically (and elegantly translated by Richard Howard). Topics are various, but tend to recur: writing, reading, childhood, France, politics, ideology, the body, Japan, Barthes' own works, his own mental and compositional habits and procedures, the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin.

One theme that comes up a lot is his deep, deep worry about being bourgeois. On one level this seems to me silly, and sad, and symptomatic of the cultural context of 1970s France far more than anything else. On another level, however, as a child of the potentially disappearing middle class, I can relate, especially as Barthes turns to defining himself in relation to the avant-garde; and, silly or not, I must say Barthes treats the theme more thoroughly and fascinatingly than anything I've read before. The theme of the bourgeois enters Barthes par Barthes in one of its most purely autobiographical passages, from the early section "L'argent (Money)":

Poverty made him a desocialized child, but not déclassé: he belonged to no milieu (he went to B., a bourgeois site, only for vacations: on visits, and as though to a performance); he took no part in the values of the bourgeoisie, which could not outrage him, since he saw them only as scenes of language, something novelistic; what he took part in was the bourgeois art de vivre. This art subsisted, incorruptible, amid every financial crisis; not misery, as a family experience, but embarrassment; i.e., a terror of certain terms, the problems of vacations, of shoes, schoolbooks, and even food. This endurable privation (as embarrassment always is) may account for a little philosophy of free compensation, of the overdetermination of pleasures, of ease (which is the exact antonym of embarrassment). His formative problem was doubtless money, not sex. (45)

To be bourgeois, for Barthes, is not a matter of money, nor values, but of the art of living: even as he is classed below the bourgeoisie in financial terms and to the left of it politically he still recognizes his ideal life in the middle class comfort, middle class care of the self. So this petit bourgeois class position survives, in the adult Barthes, in the form of habits, pretensions, and, most of all, a disposition toward viewing his habits as pretensions ("An early-morning fantasy: all my life, I have dreamed of getting up early (a class desire: to get up early in order to 'think,' to write, not to take the commuter train)…"). It survives in a tendency to characterize himself in a certain way, and to criticize those self-characterizations: "I have got into the habit of saying migraines for headaches (perhaps because the word is so lovely). This unsuitable word … is a socially accurate one: mythological attribute of bourgeois woman and of the man of letters, the migraine is a class phenomenon: who ever heard of the proletarian or the small businessman with migraines? The social division occurs within my body: my body itself is social" (124).

Every once in a while, Barthes will allow himself to believe that his practice as a writer separates him from, even opposes him to, his bourgeois social origin: "The Amateur (someone who engages in painting, music, sport, science, without the spirit of mastery or competition) … is anything but a hero (of creation, of performance)… he is — he will be perhaps — the counter-bourgeois artist" (52). At other times, though, it appears to him that his writing — not just the content of what he writes but his style, the mark of his bodily presence — has always been inherently bourgeois. Even his self-professed hedonism, which one would think would mark him as an aristocratic libertine, make him legible as a bourgeois: "Being a hedonist (since he regards himself as one), he seeks a state which is, really, comfort: but this comfort is more complicated than the household kind whose elements are determined by our society: it is a comfort he arranges for himself (the way my grandfather B., at the end of his life, had arranged a little platform inside his window, so as to obtain a better view of the garden while he was working). This personal comfort might be called: ease. Ease can be given a theoretical dignity ('We need not keep our distance with regard to formalism, only our ease'), and also an ethical force: it is the deliberate loss of all heroism, even in pleasure" (43-44). And it is indeed "ease" (along with the related term "pleasure") that Barthes exemplifies as a critic, although it's clear from this and several other passages of this book that he feels somewhat uneasy about that.

At the same time, Barthes stubbornly maintains the terms "bourgeois" and "petit bourgeois" as all-purpose terms of abuse, used in order to designate whatever it is he hates and opposes in French culture at any given time: "The Doxa (a word which will often recur) is Public Opinion, the mind of the majority, petit bourgeois Consensus, the Voice of Nature, the Violence of Prejudice" (47). Because they are so loaded for him, they also exert a purely structural fascination, as "operators": that is, he becomes fascinated at how they can flip anything, any word or concept, in the direction of the negative. He even provides a metacommentary on this function in a section entitled "Partitif (Partitive)":

Petit bourgeois: this predicate can be fastened to any subject; no one is safe from this evil (naturally enough: all of French culture, far beyond the books, is subject to it): in the worker, in the executive, in the professor, in the student protest leader, in the militant, in my friends X, Y, and in me, of course, there is something petit bourgeois: a massive-partitive. Now, there is another object of language which affords the same mobile and panic character: the Text: I cannot say that this or that work is a Text, but only that within it there is something of the Text. Text and petit bourgeois thereby form one and the same universal substance, on the one hand noxious, on the other exciting; they have the same discursive function: that of a universal operator of value. (144)

The danger of being purely and only bourgeois surfaces continually for Barthes, and he fends it off with paradoxes, minor structural adjustments. But this structuralist solution doesn't change the fact that Barthes can't escape the bourgeoisie, whether objectified in "public opinion" or embodied in his own consciousness. Again and again he emphasizes that his impetus to write is nearly always a reaction against bourgeois doxa, a desire to avoid "the stupid word," often one he has generated himself: "what he writes proceeds from a corrected banality" (137). A companion concept to the doxa and the bourgeois is the "stereotype" (a term which, incidentally, was coined by the American social critic Walter Lippmann in 1922; I wonder if Barthes was aware of its provenance?): "Frequently he starts from the stereotype, from the banal opinion which is in him. And it is because he does not want that stereotype (by some aesthetic or individualist reflex) that he looks for something else; habitually, being soon wearied, he halts at the mere contrary opinion, at paradox, at what mechanically denies the prejudice (for example: 'there is no science except of the particular'). He sustains, in short, counter-relations with the stereotype — familial relations" (162). This is an occupational hazard of the culture critic: his discourse is fated to be determined by what it opposes.

But there's a further problem, beyond mere repetition and paradox, for this automatic opposition to stereotype leads Barthes into political, moral, and even aesthetic inconsistences. This is because the stereotype, he shrewdly realizes, is constituted as such only by its social context: "The stereotype can be evaluated in terms of fatigue. The stereotype is what begins to fatigue me … In 1971, the expression 'bourgeois ideology' had gone considerably sour and was beginning to 'fatigue,' like an old harness; he then undertook (discreetly) to write: 'the so-called bourgeois ideology.' Not that he denies this ideology its bourgeois stamp for a moment (quite the contrary: what else would it be?), but he must denature the stereotype by some verbal or graphic sign which displays its wear (quotation marks, for example)" (89). We have here a confession — one of many in Barthes par Barthes — of mild dismay toward the ascendancy of the post-'68 left in France, and the radicalization of the avant-garde: "This movement, one of pure form, accounts for the progressions and regressions of the work: it is a pure language tactic, which is deployed in the air, without any strategic horizon. The risk is that since the stereotype shifts historically, politically, it must be followed wherever it goes: what is to be done if the stereotype goes left?" (162)
Barthes' answer is to oppose the stereotype of the radical avant-gardist by identifying himself with the skeptical, timid bourgeois. (This might be interesting to consider in conjunction with his famous claim to be "at the arrière-garde of the avant-garde," and with William Marx's recent volume Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle, which includes a chapter on Barthes — and which I haven't read. Is arrière-garde just another term for bourgeois?) Sometimes he sounds a little agonized and self-accusing about this: "Surrounded by political upheaval, he plays the piano, paints watercolors: all the false occupations of a middle-class maiden in the nineteenth century" (52). At other times he's merely sheepish: "His (admissible?) dream would be to transport into a socialist society certain charms (not values) of the bourgeois art of living (such a thing exists, indeed there once existed several): this is what he calls the contretemps. What rises up against this dream is the specter of Totality, which demands that the bourgeois phenomenon be condemned entire, and that any leak of the Signifier be punished" (60). At others, he claims a strategic intention, a desire to subvert the bourgeoisie from within: "Suppose that the intellectual's (or the writer's) historical function, today, is to maintain and to emphasize the decomposition of bourgeois consciousness. Then the image must retain all its precision; this means that we deliberately pretend to remain within this consciousness and that we will proceed to dismantle it, to weaken it, to break it down on the spot, as we would with a lump of sugar by steeping it in water" (63). Or could it be that he is transgressing against transgression: "Political liberation of sexuality: this is a double transgression, of politics by the sexual, and conversely. But this is nothing at all: let us now imagine reintroducing into the politico-sexual field thus discovered, recognized, traversed, and liberated … a touch of sentimentality: would tht not be the ultimate transgression? the transgression of transgression itself? For, after all, that would be love: which would return: but in another place" (65-66). Or he is taking some kind of private risk: "It is certainly when I divulge my private life that I expose myself most … Yet 'private life' changes according to the Doxa one addresses: if it is a Doxa of the right (bourgeois, petit bourgeois: institutions, laws, press), it is the sexual private life which exposes most. But if it is a Doxa of the left, the sexual exposition transgresses nothing: here 'private life' is trivial actions, the traces of bourgeois ideology confessed by the subject: confronting this Doxa, I am less exposed in declaring a perversion than in uttering a taste: passion, friendship, tenderness, sentimentality, delight in writing then become, by a simple structural displacement, unspeakable terms" (82-83). Or! Maybe his work is avant-garde all right, it's only his life that's bourgeois (after the manner of Flaubert), and this book, as opposed to all the others, reflects the life: "His 'ideas' have some relation to modernity, i.e., with what is called the avant-garde (the subject, history, sex, language); but he resists his ideas: his 'self' or ego, a rational concretion, ceaselessly resists them. Though consisting apparently of a series of 'ideas,' this book is not the book of his ideas; it is the book of the Self, the book of my resistances to my own ideas; it is a recessive book (which falls back, but which may also gain perspective thereby)" (119).

Barthes does not decide — no doubt he would want to say something like it's undecidable — which of these rationalizations of his arrière-garde status he wants to put forward: he only knows he's irresistibly drawn to admit himself to be bourgeois, to "recede" into that class position, to let it mark his discourse. Much of Barthes par Barthes seems animated by a sense of surprise at being, for once, not quite at the forefront of the avant-garde, at feeling, viscerally, antipathies toward the avant-garde: "He regretted not being able to embrace all avant-gardes at once, he regretted being limited, too conventional, etc.; and his regret could be illuminated by no sure analysis: just what was it he was resisting? What was he rejecting (or even more superficially: what was he sulking over) in one place or another? A style? An arrogance? A violence? An imbecility?" (176) All of these terms recur elsewhere in the book, but "violence" seems an especially significant one: in "La scène" he says, "He had a low threshold of tolerance for violence. This disposition, though constantly verified, remained quite enigmatic to him; but he felt that the reason for this intolerance was to be found in this direction: violence always organized itself into a scene … in all violence, he could not keep from discerning, strangely, a literary kernel … In short, all violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype" (160). It's hard to know what particular violence he has in mind here — the rhetoric, if not the action, of post-'68 France could probably supply any number of suitable examples — but there's something brave, and brilliant, and consistent, about Barthes' insistence that his opposition to this violence is not principled or moral but instinctive and reflexive; that it may owe much to his class position, but if so then that class position is not where he is, but is within him; that his resistance to the forms of political violence — even the rhetorical ones — is, in some deep and ineradicable sense, aesthetic:

Aesthetics being the art of seeing the forms detach themselves from causes and goals and constitute an adequate system of values, what could be more contrary to politics? Now he could not rid himself of the aesthetic reflex, he could not help seeing in some political behavior he approved of, the form (the formal consistency) which it assumed and which he found, as it turned out, hideous or ridiculous … Thus … he came to the point of being disgusted by the mechanical character of these operations: they fell into the discredit of all repetition: another one! what a bore! It was like the refrain of a good song, like the facial tic of a handsome man. Hence, because of a perverse disposition to see forms, languages, and repetitions, he gradually became a political misfit [a bad political subject]. (169-170)

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 8

(Here’s another picture of Wolfgang, in a nice Christmas sweater.)

We are now getting to the "science" part promised by Panofsky's subtitle ("Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art"): “Insofar as art history as a pure science of things wants to understand the style of a work of art in stylistic analyses and even in pictorial descriptions it must assume a basis in the fundamental and individual artistic problems. Therefore the fundamental and individual art-theoretical problems are assumed to be already established, even in cases where the practicing scholar could not give an account of these problems and concepts themselves and might even deny their existence.” In other words, the fundamental conceptual problems are what the empirical, practicing scholar is responding to in the work of art, whether she knows it or not. In this respect, it’s like natural science: one geologist who looks at a rock with a certain set of concepts and another geologist who has another set are looking at the same rock, with the same properties, they’re just describing it differently.

“But as art history is only a pure science of things up to the point where it navigates on the basis of the problems as ascertained art theoretically and not when it reflects on them. In instances when this should happen, when the results of art-theoretical investigation do not govern the choice of observation and the construction of concepts within research from the outside but rather directly infiltrate art-historical thinking, art history would move from denoting and interpreting a set of facts in the material world to denoting and interpreting an abstract relation between the formulation of a problem and its solution. At this point art history would cease to be a pure science of things and a restricted historical discipline and would change into what might be described as a transcendental art-theoretical discipline or, more modestly and perhaps more accurately, as a fully interpretive enterprise” (63)

The distinction here is not between a good and a bad kind of art history (which, for Panofsky, would be an art history with and an art history without theoretical guidance, respectively). It’s between two modes of the good kind of art history: on the one hand, empirical observation informed by theory, which EP calls a “pure science of things”; and on the other, a kind of metadiscourse undertaken by theorists (or by the researcher wearing her theorist hat) which, while staying with the object, shuffles the middle-range (not the fundamental) concepts around, and is thus “fully interpretive.” (Interesting how Panofsky makes the big Kantian claim — to be “transcendental,” to be trafficking in the realm of pure metaphysical ideas rather than physical objects — and then backs away from it at once. Lorenz and Elsner, in their introduction, note that this essay is heavily Kantian in a way that Panofsky’s later, American work is not. So maybe that’s what’s going on here.)

This latter, interpretive theorizing is what Panofsky wants to have the right to do, but he, crucially, doesn’t think that everyone should have the right to do it.

“Researchers need not accept this change of states as long as they are content with a solely stylistic morphology, but they must be ready for it the moment they want to move from an understanding of stylistic symptoms (of style in its external sense) to an understanding of the stylistic nature of art — that is, an understanding of style in the internal sense or Kunstwollen” (63). Staying in the first mode, then, of the “pure science of things,” researchers can do plenty of things with artworks: they can do the kind of morphology, for instance, that was getting underway in Russia around that time and culminated in the work of Vladimir Propp (and is currently being revived by Franco Moretti): they can see what looks like what, and how a certain form might transform into another. But, invoking a comparison with medicine, Panofsky insists that these forms are only “symptoms.” (Among the many, many tempting detours I’m avoiding going down here is this pre-Lacanian/Althusserian/Žižekian use of “symptom.” Partly because I’m not convinced that I’d ever come back.) They are the outward signs of the will to make art, the Kunstwollen, but no matter how closely we examine them we aren’t going to fully understand why or how the artist did what she did.

“Because the principles of design in a work of art are nothing other than the artist’s comments, executed in this way or that, on the fundamental and individual artistic problems and because the underlying stylistic principle is nothing but the artist’s comment, executed in this way or that, on the artistic ur-problem, the principles of design and the underlying stylistic principle itself can only be understood if the understanding is based on an explicit confrontation with the problems” (63-64). So this is a funny kind of biographical criticism: one that wants to know what the artist thinks she’s doing, her intention, but that also views everything she does as nothing more than “comments” on pre-existing artistic problems, both fundamental (haptic vs. optic) and individual (how do I differentiate this column from the wall, or whatever). (“Comment” is a very weird word; I wonder what the German is.) But Panofsky’s opponent here is not Romantic, producer-centered theories of artistic creation (as Barthes’ and Foucault’s would later be) but hardcore empiricist art historians who think all one needs to do is collect objects and describe them: his point is you need to know the basic problems, which have been answered (or “commented on”) throughout art history, in order to know what the artist thinks she’s doing.

“Therefore art history as a pure science of things, because it only navigates according to the artistic problems but does not reflect on them, is capable of understanding stylistic criteria and their aggregates but not principles of design and their unity.” This is clear enough: art history without theory (or even a-h that excepts fundamental theoretical concepts, but doesn’t work with a theorist to refine and relate the second-order concepts to research findings) can draw up “criteria,” say what counts as art based on all previous known examples, but they can’t get a handle on the “principles of design” that determine artworks (principles which exist in the minds of artists). (Cf. Wittgenstein/Austin/Cavell on criteria. Or don’t.)

“This deeper understanding is reserved only for that form of study that is familiar with those problems that art history in the strict sense only assumes as known and that, by reflecting on them with the help of an art-theoretically constructed fundamental and specialist conceptual system, is capable of systematically dissecting the relations between the formulation of a problem and the solution of a problem.” The repeated key word here is “reflection,” an activity that follows upon fundamental theory and practical empirical research and reconciles them. (It seems to me that Panofsky owes more of a description of what reflection would actually look like, aside from some super-smart theorist ringing changes on a data set. But maybe it can be reconstructed from an account of his actual practice. I guess this would be a good first place to look.)

Then Panofsky does some algebra — which I hope I will be forgiven for leaving out because I don’t think it’ll make things any clearer (at least, for me) — the gist of which is: “In this way and only in this way can scientific study grasp style in its internal sense or Kunstwollen, which can be understood neither as the sum of sensible qualities nor as an aggregate of stylistic criteria but exclusively as unity within and above the principles of design, which not only requires a tacit relation to the results of art theory but a direct collaboration” (64-65). Collaboration between research and theory alone has a hope of getting a handle on Kunstwollen — that is, achieving a rough scholarly approximation of what it’s actually like to make art. (Value judgment mine.)

Panofsky’s final move, in section B, is a really interesting, ambitious one. It’s one that opens up the heretofore uncharted territory of comparativism, or the relation of the findings of art historical research (once it has passed through the refining process of theoretical reflection) to other disciplines within the faculty of the humanities: “If this Kunstwollen can reveal the immanent sense of the manifestation in question then there is no barrier to comparing this sense as articulated in visual-artistic phenomena with the sense of musical, poetic, and even extra-artistic phenomena. Absolutely all philosophical and religious doctrines as well as juridical statues and linguistic systems must be understood as solutions of philosophical, religious, juridical, and linguistic problems.” After having carefully limited himself to the discipline of art history throughout, Panofsky is all of a sudden advocating the application of his “fundamental problem” approach to the humanities as a whole. But even this is not all. “This is why all humanities disciplines are related to a science of art. Just as a science of art attests that within a certain artistic manifestation all artistic problems are solved in one and the same way, so the humanities in general can attempt to show that within a certain culture (which must itself be determined as regards epoch, region, and the persons involved) all intellectual problems, including the artistic, are solved in one and the same sense.”

Wait a second… “all intellectual problems … are solved in one and the same sense”? What would that even mean, practically? Also, how are we to define “a certain culture” — where does one stop and the next begin? (Cf. Wittgenstein on towns and concepts, or don’t.) It seems as though Panofsky’s made a quick turn from neo-Kantian to way way Hegelian, from Kunstwollen to Kulturwollen, a jump that seems to make EP himself a little nervous — witness the very tentative end of the paragraph: “Though one cannot ignore the dangers inherent in the practical application of this process of comparison, today perhaps practiced all too often (the will to unveil analogies can easily lead to interpreting the phenomenon in question in capricious and even brutal ways), one cannot deny on purely theoretical grounds that it is undoubtedly possible and justifiable” (65). I think he’s almost definitely gesturing at Marxism here, and perhaps other hasty totalizations of the social world — but here Panofsky seems to think that the risk of such theoretical abuses is a small price to pay for the promise of such a grand rationale for the humanities.

French Toys (Notes on Twee #5)

"French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.

"…French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine (miniature instrument-cases, operating theatres for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (driers for permanent-waving), the Air Force (parachutists), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), Science (Martian toys).

"The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult … [F]aced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish."

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, 53-54

Writers who have been hit by cars

1. John Wheelwright
2. Renato Poggioli
3. Randall Jarrell
4. Frank O'Hara
5. Roland Barthes
6. Italo Svevo
7. James Weldon Johnson (by a train, while in a car)