Jacques Ellul riffs on Pierre Boulez as emblematic of technocratic art in The Empire of Non-Sense: Art in the Technological Society

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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 112

Now, the decisive importance of theory is found in all the arts.  In music, we have serial music, which at first glance is simply theoretical, especially since its extension, beginning with Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt, among others, to the domain of measure and dynamics. It becomes a type of mathematical composition. But, from another point of view, the systematic search for analogies between visual symbols and sonorous symbols is also theoretical. The same can be said when one undertakes to reintroduce freedom into musical play: here again this is the result of taking a theoretical stance (John Cage). At any rate, we now have a non-figurative music without reference to either history or to the existing body of sounds.  The influence of theory is, one could say, greater in music because it is nonrepresentational and better reflects the forms of thought. A perceptible order of pure theory emerges from the random improvisations of Andrei Markov or in the use of statistical law in certain works of Iannis Xenakis. It becomes a matter of assembling sonorous objects according to a rule or a group of rules that one has set down. Types of experimental music are also formed on a theoretical basis because the composers create their experiment on the basis of precise ideas. This experimental music is also divided into schools as a function of theoretical differences: concrete music, electronic music, music for tape (Vladimir Ussachevsky). In all cases, it is a matter of creating new sonorous objects, of not taking account of natural sounds or of customary compositions. Music becomes a procedure for organizing new sounds that are totally abstract. Ultimately one could say that theoretical validity is what makes music.  It goes without saying that architecture, like music, lends itself particularly well to this triumph of theory. ...

although Boulez isn't specifically named, he fits well into Ellul's axiomatic comment that  

page 118

... We stand in the presence of art of elites for elites. A moderately competent intellectual who does not have the "key" is left out in the cold.  ...

Boulez comes up for another mention in the following:

pages 128-129

... After having constructed a very complicated theory with the utmost scholarship, and after having written the deepest reflections of writing on writing or on language, one is finally left with nothing more than ridiculous mouse talk. It is clear why these same critics ardently challenge the very idea of a work of art. Clearly, nothing of all this grandstanding has duration or permanence just as crossword puzzles done on a train are not worth saving any more than episodes of a television game show hosted by Guy Lux. Now, this is the level of our descent. These are crossword puzzles for highly qualified intellectuals or Guy Lux programming for dyed-in-the-wool aesthetes. But since we are considering a game, there must be interest and amusement. If one plays, it is to escape the grey, dull boredom of the everyday. But what is proposed is not at all playful. One is invited to agonize over incomprehensible material. This is not play for me.  I will even claim that I am more bored and frustrated when I read Robert Pinget or Claude Simon, and when I hear Boulez or Victor Barbeau, and when I look at Vera Molnar or Mondrian, than when I am in the metro.

This is not an issue of intellectual difficulty. I can read rather difficult texts, more difficult than Roussel; it's really a question of boring exhaustion and emptiness after an initial moment of curiosity. ...

page 129

... When one sees the results of theoretical art-play--and there are always results--one is bored to tears by an explanation of how they are obtained, and one is faced with the famous questions: do they paint that way because they are incapable of painting? Do they poetize in that way because they are impotent? Sadly, yes. And the gravitas, the depth of the theory is there only to hide these incapacities and impotence. Technical society renders the creator of art impotent. He can only be an entertainer.   ...

What's ironic, doubly ironic perhaps, is that Adorno had the same withering remarks to make about serialists in the 1950s and 1960s. Even Adorno thought the total serialists wrote music that wasn't even music, that was empty and inhuman, technocratic nonsense that existed not to express a subject but to rationalize the use of a technocratic system.  We can get to that material in some other post, though.

Now I actually do enjoy some music by Xenakis.  As has been said about Tom Wolfe's fusilades on art criticism, he was not exactly blasting away at the art itself but at the critical establishments that made it quite literally their business to tell us what we were supposed to think about all this stuff.  Ellul's larger criticism of the role criticism plays in promoting contemporary art in technocratic societies that criticism itself embodies the technocratic rather than humanistic tendencies that you would imagine, in earlier epochs of humanity, would have been the "real" aim of both the arts and arts criticism.  In that sense Adorno can remain one of the villains of such an arc of critical work in the sense that when he declared tonality to be "used up" he was writing a great big "been there, done that" that prohibited anyone from being thought of as "allowed" to do "that" again.  Sure, he'd make some vague exceptions for a Bartok on account that, oh, maybe Slavs haven't evolved culturally as far as Germans had so tonality wasn't as "used up" for them in Bartok's homeland.  If you can't believe Adorno could even write something like that trawl through the endnotes of Philosophy of New Music if you dare!  Ellul, for his part, regarded Adorno as at least grasping the nature of the crisis of the arts and humanities in the age of technocratic societies and the implications this new era has had on how differently artists and arts critics think about the arts.

Now maybe ... maybe humanity has not caught up to speed of the possibilities in the arts that are available through our technology.  Maybe, to piggyback on Ellul's work a bit more, there's a distinction to be made between technology that can be used to better the lives humanity and a technocratic ideology that becomes self-serving, self-rationalizing and enslaves rather than liberates humanity.  That's the impulse in arts criticism that I think Ellul was blasting in The Empire of Non-Sense. Others, of course, may disagree.