I haven't written about Jacques Ellul's Empire of Non-Sense yet but I'm meaning to. One of a number of key points he made in the book was to argue that art, more than any other realm of public activity, is subsumed in an ideology of technique. Since the technological era began artists shifted from philosophy and idealism of some kind to technique as the focus of activity. Ellul interacted with a lot of literature and a number of abstractions. If you don't already know what "the imaginary museum" is some passages will be opaque.
What is transparent is Ellul's observation that in the technological era art has burrowed into two paths. The first is overt message art, propaganda. The second is a hermetic technocratic enterprise in which the focus of art becomes not content but a formalist exploration of the nature of technique itself. Now when Adorno wrote his damning remarks on neoclassical music by Igor Stravinsky his comment was that Stravinsky had devolved into writing "music about music". Ellul has a comparable criticism of art that is about art, writing that is about writing, and implicit in this argument is an observation that interacts with the work of Adorno, proposing that once art for the sake of art (what Adorno regarded as bourgeois art religion) came into the technological era the aim and end of art became not art as finished thing but art as sociological and existential process.
Ellul demonstrated that the artist in the formalist idiom creates work that has no meaning until meaning is conferred upon the work by art critics, journalists and professors. The reward the artist receives for taking the posture of the artist, someone who for all manner of public relations statements does not even have to make any art, is to be anointed into a priesthood of artists whom the clergy of arts critics take seriously.
That's a prelude to part of an interview with one such contemporary artist and we'll highlight the way in which the artist has, by his account, been christened a particular type of artist by arts coverage in the West. Bold emphases are added:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/
...
Ai said the label of a Chinese avant-garde dissident artist wasn’t one he had assigned himself but rather that been bestowed on him by Western media. Speaking about Chinese dissidents more generally, he declared: “When there is no freedom of speech, there is no freedom.”
From there, he discussed the 2008 earthquake in China in which tens of thousands died, including at least 5,000 children killed in shoddily constructed school buildings that became a major focus in his art at the time--solidifying his standing as activist artist.
It also drew the hostile attention of the Chinese government as it harassed and pressured parents who lost children into silence, with “seven officials per parent to suppress them under the idea of stability and harmonious society.”
Bruguera asked Ai where he now considers himself in the “political situation.” He said he has no clear party, since “I consider myself an individual,” which seemed an exceptionally American answer.
...
Bruguera asked about the tension between Ai's role as an activist artist and his immense financial success, and he called himself “a so-called political artist.” Still, he said, “you play the game,” and argued that if as an artist he had been politically active yet financially poor, that would show that his political activism wasn’t successful.
Bruguera kept pressing as Ai shifted in his chair and seemed to become a little frazzled, asking about his highly controversial photograph recreating the grimly iconic image of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach.
Ai, who took the shot while spending the beginning of this year helping refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, said of its critics: “I don’t react to them. They react to me.”
He went on: “I’m an artist, not a priest. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, I’m raising questions,” to which the audience flooded him with applause. He responded to that by declaring “I don’t give a damn shit about it,” which was met him with more applause which he obliged with more swearing, saying “take it or fuck it.”
Someone christened a political artist admits that you play the game and have a role to play and ...
Ah, "I'm an artist, not a priest." Of course. Of course being an artist means you play the role of not caring what society things even though without that society you could not be playing the role of the artist.
The axiom that without freedom of speech there is no freedom is the kind of slogan that could only exist in our time. When Roger Williams wrote The Bloudy Tenet he referenced a King Stephen who said he was king over men's bodies, not their souls. The possibility of real freedom despite not having "freedom of speech" because there was nothing like an institutional press seven centuries ago is probably not an idea that a contemporary artist could readily accept.
Well, the artist made a point of writing a piece in The Guardian earlier this year. It is remarkable to learn that the very idea of human rights was not invented until just a couple of centuries ago! Let the artist instruct us on how this was the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/
Ah, "I'm an artist, not a priest." Of course. Of course being an artist means you play the role of not caring what society things even though without that society you could not be playing the role of the artist.
The axiom that without freedom of speech there is no freedom is the kind of slogan that could only exist in our time. When Roger Williams wrote The Bloudy Tenet he referenced a King Stephen who said he was king over men's bodies, not their souls. The possibility of real freedom despite not having "freedom of speech" because there was nothing like an institutional press seven centuries ago is probably not an idea that a contemporary artist could readily accept.
Well, the artist made a point of writing a piece in The Guardian earlier this year. It is remarkable to learn that the very idea of human rights was not invented until just a couple of centuries ago! Let the artist instruct us on how this was the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/
What does it mean to be human? That question sits at the core of human rights. To be human has specific implications: human self-awareness and the actions taken to uphold human dignity – these are what gives the concept of humanity a special meaning.
Human self-awareness and human actions determine the interplay between individual thought and language and the wider society. It is our actions as humans that deliver economic security, the right to education, the right to free association and free expression; and which create the conditions for protecting expression and encouraging bold thinking. When we abandon efforts to uphold human dignity, we forfeit the essential meaning of being human, and when we waver in our commitment to the idea of human rights, we abandon our moral principles. What follows is duplicity and folly, corruption and tyranny, and the endless stream of humanitarian crises that we see in the world today.
More than two centuries have passed since the concept of human rights was first developed. During that time humanity has gone through various stages of history and the world has seen enormous changes. In Europe, what was once a collection of colonialist, autocratic states has transformed into a democratic society with a capitalist orientation, establishing a mechanism that protects individual rights. Other societies are also seeing structural changes, and the concept of human rights is facing grave challenges.
In part these challenges stem from the disparate demands of countries in different stages of development, with contrasting economic situations and competing interests. But challenges also come from divergent conceptions and understandings of human rights, human dignity, morality and responsibility, and from different interpretations and applications of the core principles of human rights. In the contemporary world, as our grasp of the fundamental values and principles of human rights and humanitarianism weakens, we risk losing our rights, responsibilities and our power to uphold human dignity.
History shows that a moral failure is always accompanied by painful realities, visible everywhere. The global refugee crisis is worsening daily, and 70 million refugees have been forced to leave their homes by war and poverty. Our living environment is constantly being degraded, and the ecological balance is ever more fragile. Armed conflicts persist and potential political crises lurk; regional instabilities grow more acute; autocratic regimes brutally impose their will, while democratic governance is in decline. Unreasoning and unrestrained expansion under a nationalist, capitalist order is exacerbating the global gap between rich and poor. Our views of the world have become more divided and more conflicted than ever.
Individuals in many countries and regions lack the opportunity to receive an education, to access information or communicate freely. They have no chance to exercise their imagination and creativity or fulfil their ideals; no chance to enjoy freedom of belief and freedom of association. Such rights and freedoms pose a fatal threat to autocracy and authoritarianism. This is why, in so many places, lawyers have been imprisoned, journalists have been disappeared and murdered, why censorship has become so pervasive, why religious and non-governmental organisations have been ruthlessly suppressed. Today, dictatorships and corrupt regimes continue to benefit from reckless arms sales, and enjoy the quiet support of capitalist nations. Religious divisions, ethnic contradictions and regional disputes all feed into primitive power plays. Their logic is simple: to weaken individual freedoms and strengthen the controls imposed by governments and dominant elites
The end result is that individuals are deprived of the right to live, denied freedom from fear, and freedom of expression, or denied the rights to maintain their living environment and develop.
The concept of human rights needs to be revised. Discussions of human rights used to focus on the one-dimensional relationship between the state’s rights and individual rights, but now human rights involve a variety of relationships. Today, whether demands are framed in terms of the rights of the individual or the goals pursued by political entities and interest groups, none of these agendas exists in isolation. Historically, the conditions governing human existence have never been more globally interdependent.
The right of children to grow up and be educated, the right of women to receive protection, the right to conserve nature, the right to survival of other lives intimately connected with the survival of the human race – all these have now become major elements in the concept of human rights. As science and technology develop, authoritarian states invade privacy and limit personal freedom in the name of counter-terrorism and maintaining stability, intensifying psychological manipulation at all levels. Through control of the internet and command of facial recognition technology, authoritarian states tighten their grip on people’s thoughts and actions, threatening and even eliminating freedoms and political rights. Similar kinds of controls are being imposed to varying degrees within the global context. From this we can see that under these new conditions human rights have not gained a common understanding, and if discussion of human rights becomes narrow and shortsighted, it is bound to become nothing more than outdated, empty talk.
All of that technocratic authoritarianism sounds so oppressive that it would seem that the right to conserve nature would have been better preserved had the modern West never happened ... but it implicitly seems to be the modern West that the artist invokes as having developed the idea of human rights ... .
A tragicomic irony in this concern about authoritarian states using facial recognition technology is that it was recently reported that this technology was used by an artist.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-technology-surveillance
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-stalkers-rose-bowl-concert
Now I recognize plenty of people will refuse to concede that Taylor Swift is any kind of artist but I'm not going to engage that question. I'm pointing out the paradox, or irony, that an artist at a popular level has made use of technology that another artist is concerned is getting used by authoritarian regimes. Ellul's argument in The Empire of Non-Sense is that the artist has long since stopped being the rebel in anything but stance and that contemporary art, more than any other aspect of technological societies, is how people are assimilated into what Ellul called the technical system.
Even a conservative could argue, pretty easily, that the idea of human rights was not invented just a couple of centuries ago. The idea that the individual had a dignity and value that the state should be able and willing to uphold might have developed slightly further back then the 17th or 18th centuries.
If Weiwei has the luxury of claiming "I'm an artist, not a priest" he kicked of 2019 with an op-ed that seems to double down on the artist-as-priest in the late capitalist West. To this end he defends an ideal of human rights that seems predicated vaguely on consumer activity. People without education as we know it, who lack access to contemporary communication technology as we know it, have lived productive and fruitful lives. I recall a friend from my Mars Hill days who ended up living in Romania and wrote about how contemporary Westerners abject the past and abject whatever it is they can't imagine living with. In a Romanian village that doesn't have electricity or running water, where everyone has to go to the local well just to get the day's water, those people don't think of themselves as bereft of any kind of life that is worth living as someone in Seattle or Phoenix might imagine.
But let me come back to the artist and to a passage from Ellul describing what the artist actually is, as distinct from what artists want to imagine themselves to be.
Any kid could drop a vase but, of course, dropping a vase as performance art and then using the act as a springboard for a literate explanation of what it means, that's something only a modern artist steeped in technique and theory could do. The dropping something part has a role, but it is in a sense the catalyst for subsequent theorizing, something for another post.
Any kid could flip the bird in a selfie but only a Weiwei could do something like that and have it be regarded as conceptual art. He may really think he was born a radical but in the sense that he is regarded as an artist and has Western training he could "also" be regarded as having been born into the privilege of being a radical artist. Without what Ellul has described as "Didyouseemeism" what Weiwei is known for might not be different from what teens who take selfies could accomplish, to invoke a lament made by one Justin Smith.
Even what is formally the artwork is able to be a mere catalyst for talking about art as a kind of political activism. As delineated by writers like Adorno and Ellul there's a word for this kind of performance art activism, propaganda. It might e for a really worthy cause but in Adorno's accounting of the aporia of contemporary art in the administrated society you're stuck with art that is either pure propaganda or hermetically isolated technical exploration.
I don't buy for a second that human rights were developed or discovered in the West just a couple of centuries ago. For the posture of "I'm an artist, not a priest" Weiwei is as priestly an artist in the contemporary Western idiom as one can possibly get.
All of that technocratic authoritarianism sounds so oppressive that it would seem that the right to conserve nature would have been better preserved had the modern West never happened ... but it implicitly seems to be the modern West that the artist invokes as having developed the idea of human rights ... .
A tragicomic irony in this concern about authoritarian states using facial recognition technology is that it was recently reported that this technology was used by an artist.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-technology-surveillance
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-stalkers-rose-bowl-concert
Now I recognize plenty of people will refuse to concede that Taylor Swift is any kind of artist but I'm not going to engage that question. I'm pointing out the paradox, or irony, that an artist at a popular level has made use of technology that another artist is concerned is getting used by authoritarian regimes. Ellul's argument in The Empire of Non-Sense is that the artist has long since stopped being the rebel in anything but stance and that contemporary art, more than any other aspect of technological societies, is how people are assimilated into what Ellul called the technical system.
Even a conservative could argue, pretty easily, that the idea of human rights was not invented just a couple of centuries ago. The idea that the individual had a dignity and value that the state should be able and willing to uphold might have developed slightly further back then the 17th or 18th centuries.
If Weiwei has the luxury of claiming "I'm an artist, not a priest" he kicked of 2019 with an op-ed that seems to double down on the artist-as-priest in the late capitalist West. To this end he defends an ideal of human rights that seems predicated vaguely on consumer activity. People without education as we know it, who lack access to contemporary communication technology as we know it, have lived productive and fruitful lives. I recall a friend from my Mars Hill days who ended up living in Romania and wrote about how contemporary Westerners abject the past and abject whatever it is they can't imagine living with. In a Romanian village that doesn't have electricity or running water, where everyone has to go to the local well just to get the day's water, those people don't think of themselves as bereft of any kind of life that is worth living as someone in Seattle or Phoenix might imagine.
But let me come back to the artist and to a passage from Ellul describing what the artist actually is, as distinct from what artists want to imagine themselves to be.
THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE:
ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by
Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael
Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7
page 145
The world is harsh,
closed in, unimaginative, ruled by technique, rigorous, and hostile. We
have neither leisure nor the possibility of self-expression nor the
demonstration of freedom (which surely must exist), and so we place all our
hopes on the specialists of freedom and personality. And the artist fulfills
that self-imposed role. We cannot do without freedom or resign from being a
person. The artist is the specialist in playing the role of freedom. This means
that the artist is basically a play actor. All that the modern artist does is
meant to call attention to himself and to his comings and goings and not to his
work. ... This also relates to the
innumerable interviews where we find the minute details of the lives of great
modern artists. The reign of "Didyouseemeism" is absolute. The artist
who, formerly, sought to create a work is now occupied with creating a
personality, and that relates to what we have said about an intent that was
especially notable in the generation of Beat Poets--to make an exemplary work
of their own lives. And for a lack of anything better, this can be done through
drugs and alcohol, and this is, truly, magnificently, a role to undertake.
Ultimately (and this is often the case), it is no longer necessary to write a
poem or to draw a line: it suffices merely to be there. The drugged artist,
because he violates the awful bourgeois morality, is the great artist of his
own lie. A poet of life experience no longer creates a work but rather provides
an act, a product, or an event. ...
page 148
... Not only has art
become an economic production, a piece of merchandise, but art that challenges
and proclaims freedom fulfills an essential function: it's the label, the
guarantee that this wonderful society is indeed free because it sanctifies the
heroes of freedom and revolution for the admiration of the masses. ...
Any kid could drop a vase but, of course, dropping a vase as performance art and then using the act as a springboard for a literate explanation of what it means, that's something only a modern artist steeped in technique and theory could do. The dropping something part has a role, but it is in a sense the catalyst for subsequent theorizing, something for another post.
Any kid could flip the bird in a selfie but only a Weiwei could do something like that and have it be regarded as conceptual art. He may really think he was born a radical but in the sense that he is regarded as an artist and has Western training he could "also" be regarded as having been born into the privilege of being a radical artist. Without what Ellul has described as "Didyouseemeism" what Weiwei is known for might not be different from what teens who take selfies could accomplish, to invoke a lament made by one Justin Smith.
Even what is formally the artwork is able to be a mere catalyst for talking about art as a kind of political activism. As delineated by writers like Adorno and Ellul there's a word for this kind of performance art activism, propaganda. It might e for a really worthy cause but in Adorno's accounting of the aporia of contemporary art in the administrated society you're stuck with art that is either pure propaganda or hermetically isolated technical exploration.
I don't buy for a second that human rights were developed or discovered in the West just a couple of centuries ago. For the posture of "I'm an artist, not a priest" Weiwei is as priestly an artist in the contemporary Western idiom as one can possibly get.
4 comments:
He's right that Human Rights as a concept only developed from the Enlightenment. No time prior had the concept that the mere fact of being Human, derived from Nature (defined statically), gave us a whole host of social and political rights. But that didn't mean things were always bad, or that Human Rights prevented anything (the shift was then to define some people as not quite Human, or justify certain actions as within the boundary).
The Image of God argument never meant what Human Rights meant until after the fact. Hence we should be suspicious of just-so, feel good, stories about Christianity making the West great (as opposed to elsewhere).
Fair point.
Weiwei's stumping seems to fit in well with what Ellul described as the social function of the artist in technocratic societies, to provide a rubber stamp that the society provides "freedom", which it does not really do at all for people. In a way the artist is simply the official "superhero" of contemporary Western societies for those who would otherwise scoff at the superhero. It doesn't mean I don't like superheroes being in favor of human rights. :)
"the shift was then to define some people" is right! It wasn't until 2007 that American Indians were able to implement probate processes thanks to the American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004 reversing long term policy goals of, say, the Burke Act.
I think a better litmus test is functionality. Common folk lived quite well, at times, under a monarch, pleading the system to subvert evils committed in its name. There are limits to it, but there's no iron logic of necessity that says because you believe x you must act y. Instead, we say that we don't torture, but instead we do enhanced interrogation. We say mankind is endowed by nature, but then some people aren't quite mankind.
And most of the world basically gets this point. Claims of "freedom" and "democracy" are met with a cock-eyed stare and a demand to know what it means for me/us. But what's intolerable is the general disposition of Americans to an air of self-righteousness. And playing up the "Defend the West!" card is a recipe for propaganda and disaster. Not saying there aren't many good things in the West, but they exist only in as much as they are functioning, not on a phony history of clashing ideas. Hence the irony that very few people can praise Donald Trump for anything, even when he has done things (e.g. defuse war situation with N. Korea) that they had, in fact, desired.
I guess that's what Zizek means when he talks about ideology (although he's basically a clown).
"the phony history of clashing ideas" phrase gets at something I've been blogging about with reference to the arts in the last few years, that I don't think now that the old left vs right narrative about Western art adds up. It's just become too easy to see how far out the Russian futurists got before Stalinism emerged, and it's gotten to a point where music historians have been able to find cases of essentially pro-fascist innovators like Stravinsky and anti-fascist nationalist/traditionalists as Bartok has come to be viewed in some scholarly circles.
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