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I wouldn't compare Foucault to Shakespeare, but I do think that Caravaggio and Shakespeare must share something on some meta-aesthetic level of adventure, masculinity, feminity, gender ambiguity and transgression, crime, power, and master craft. They both belong to the big scale of accomplishments and performances. (CG)
I don't really see the substance of your argument here. Isn't this just another invocation of 'Shakespeare as genius'? -- an invocation that relies on canonisation industries as well as on any reading of Shakespeare in comparison to other writers. You name some themes that can be found in many places and specificy that these occur on a 'meta-aesthetic' level in S. and in C. But how? What are you using this to mean? (CD) ---------------
What did I mean? Part of it was that I get a feel of adventure and risk out of Shakespeare, the sonnets mostly where it is far from clear which gender is speaking to which. Caravaggio plays on a similar ambiguity, with the added dimension of the sacred and profane, the Catholic and the Pagan (also in S of course). For some reason C took on John the Baptist as youth, as man, as tragic figure of torture and death. So, C painted two or three of his boyfriends done up as the young John, one with his arm around a ram, who returns a curious look, as if he were the wooly lover. Finally, he painted the beheading as a crime in the darkened streets of Rome with the curious looking through iron window gratings. Catherine, you really should look at these paintings. Considering the Catholic bit and the sheep thing--I mean jesus, they should take you places. Virgin Marys are not the only dark corners in Catholicism's rendition of gender. ---------------
The only reason for my suggesting a comparison is to gage what we consider adventurous, progressive, and an accomplished performance in art, life and transgression by some other scales. It isn't a matter of the decline of the West, but the contraction of expression. (CG)
These are assessments which, as you well know, are shaped by all kinds of contexts. This is true for the people who dislike/d the work of S. and C. as much as for those who love it. This is true for the people who like and/or dislike the work of Foucault, Butler, or Hockney. (CD) ---------------
Where to go with this? Okay, the contraction is the limiting of the scale and emotive register, the understatement in the style of textual narratives, the tight focus on single lines of thematic development, the removal of metaphorical complexity--these are all part of what I think of when I look at our cultural milieu as compared to Renaissance painting, poetry, or Baroque music. Now, if you consider mass media as a totality, then of course there is no constriction but a vast explosion. On the other hand, in any given medium, in an single production it should be fairly apparent that such a constriction has taken place. This is a cultural transformation that has been created by the changes in the means of production, i.e. capitalism, technology, and mass production methods; and, buttress by a Calvinist ideological dimension, which I just dismiss as moral terrorism and oppression. The combined effect of these determinations has been a contraction in the scope of our aesthetic and emotive expressions--our culture, our language, our visual and narrative worlds, and so on. We barely keep our aesthetic-sensual lives, alive--we seem to require extreme therapies like pornography, load bad music, drugs, and a continuous stream of visual tintilations. I consider these therapies indicative of a cultural pathology--one brought to us by our reduction under a yoke of stupid and meaningless work, aka global capitalism/mass production. The pathological aspect is found in the reductionist means of expression and overriding simplification of narratives--a mirror to the same sort conceptual methodology that makes and maintains mass production, industrialization, mass urban living and so on.
Why do I call this living a pathology? Well, I felt sick most of the time, so I stupidly assumed I was sick. Since I've tried all the known therapies (load bad music, drugs, sex, mass media, pornography) and none of them worked, I finally took a different track--the most difficult to understand reading, the toughest mathematics I could even conceive, the most effete and complex music available, the most extreme physical exercise I could tolerate, and went back to practicing writing and art (substitute computers for art at the moment--Doyle was right). Viola. The latter worked, the former didn't. I conclude these were better therapies for what ailed me. They also illuminated the pathogen rather than fed it. ----------------
Yoshie wondered vaguely about the suppression of histories of transgression. Most people who look at Caravaggio or go to Shakespeare never see what we are talking about here--it has indeed been suppressed, and quite successfully--squeezed flat so to speak. On the other hand, we have been diminished and the fact that writers like Foucault or Butler struggle within extremely confined little boxes of analysis is a fairly accurate reflection of that diminishment.(CG)
We have been diminished? How would you assess this? In comparison to the people of the Renaissance I am presuming you to mean, and by what third term will you judge this? How can you have a full enough perception of the people of that period to ground that judgment? Do you think selected works of art sufficient for that? And could selected works of art be sufficient to judge 'us' (and as to this -- meaning who, exactly?). (CD)
It isn't a matter of declines or hierarchies, but constriction and reduction of the means of expression. (CG)
Which is a hierarchical system of judgment.(CD) -----------------------
Actually, I don't think of these as hierarchical, as in best, nice, mediocre, bad, worse. I think of them literally as contractions and expansions. But you can map it a lot of different ways. A contraction in my mind indicates a reduction of the skill set and skill level required to accomplish the task and has nothing to do with a mystified essence like 'genius' versus 'idiot'. This form of aesthetic analysis as skill, makes it possible to link the cultural world with the socio-economic world, since the acquisition and development of skill takes time and practice--the two things that the rich and bourgeois have that the working and lower middle classes do not have--unless they make the time, by doing crime (rap as art and crime?).
But just mentioning skill in the abstract doesn't quite illuminate what I mean. Draw a single continuous line, and make it look like a woman laying on a robe, propped up on a rolled pillow--make her Asian, probably Korean, or northern Chinese by the shape of her head and the squareness of her shoulders--you can't see her face--its a three quarter view off the left shoulder, looking down across her reclined body. I'd mail the gif but it would bounce. That took skill. It was the best line drawing I ever did (just imagine a nice looking line drawing of your choice). It took about forty minutes. Now I am a very good wheelchair mechanic--skills up the ass: weld and braze thin wall tubing, debug control circuits, hand turn motor commutators, sew upholstery, mold foam seats, blah, blah, blah. In other lives I've done all sorts of highly skilled work. Most of these came directly out of art studio training--nice irony, huh? Art school makes you the highest skilled working class slob you can imagine. So, what's wrong with this picture?
Capitalism isn't interested in skilled labor--it is interested in appropriating the skills as such and turning them into a more profitable means of production, say video cameras, stamping machines, or computer programs. This process of skill appropriation has a cultural effect, because succeeding generations don't learn the skill and therefore possess the means of expression or production, but consume the products designed with the appropriated skill. Instead of possessing the skills to create and express themselves (make a world), the next generations simply pay to be a witnesses and presumably enjoy or consume the experience. That is the sort of reduction I am talking about. --------------------
Butler is constricted, and has reduced her means of expression, just like her prose style, into tight little circles. As I was reading her, I wanted to scream, Come on Judy, open up a little. Take a few broad strokes, stretch out a little, exercise the flamboyant, the expressive, and a more broadly conceived spectrum of registers. Risk being a fool, a slut, a poet and a philosopher all at the same time--make me admire you and worry that you will fail or fall in love with you if you succeed--you know take, the fucking chances. (CG)
She is not writing literature. I presume from this that you have such responses to Hegel? Well I don't, not at all. I find Butler's style not very sexy and sometimes disagreeable, but more enjoyable than Hegel. What does that mean? -- not much at all. I am just trying to understand what you're asking for here. I don't turn to Butler for stylistic brilliance, but to engage with new sets of questions about my cultural contexts. I get that. I don't always agree, I am even often annoyed or frustrated, but that is to be expected from such engagement. (CD)
And the same goes (of course posthumously) for Foucault. Too fucking tight ass. (CG)
Playing your terrain, I find Foucault's style very sexy indeed. Varies between texts, but _The Order of Things_, for example, makes me laugh aloud, which I always find exciting. Does this pleasure prove anything about the comparative worth of F. and B.? It might. But it doesn't prove that B. asks no productive questions, which is what I want from her. (CD) --------------------
Well, I have to just retract what I wrote, because you reminded me that I did like Foucault and did breeze through Madness and Civilization as a pleasure. And, yes Butler made me think and does evoke hard questions that do lead somewhere--although usually, not back to her. And, she certainly did put this thread on LBO (technically, Doug did, but anyway...)
As for Hegel, well, you certainly can not accuse Hegel of being shy or miserly in his output, can you? But it isn't just a matter of quantity, but also its comprehensive scope. He walked up to the biggest questions he could imagine and talked those SOBs into print. That was a pretty admirable feat. So, my point was that Butler constricted her focus to interrogating relations of power and their formative effect on consciousness. That just isn't of the same comprehension as Hegel's. But, my real question is why the hell not? Why not go after the big ones? The complicated, hard, and scary questions that make you seem like a fool for even thinking about? Well, we just are not in an intellectually expansive mood these days. So the next question is why not? Part of the answer, and this is more of a suspicion than a statement, is that we don't live, feel, exist in the same spectrum of emotive and expressive registers as other people in other periods. So, why not? We are scared, confined, oppressed, punished, and shamed into living a reduced existence.
My obvious choice of culprits are pig capital and the nasty deacons of Righteousness--ie bourgeois moralisms and ideology. But the whole exercise is to explain how this connection works. The potty training tyranny that Butler explores and invites us to escape, isn't sufficient and so that is were I think a look at the skill or the means of expression and their relation to the possession of cultural traditions is a more expansive and exploratory view. That is, such a view makes for a more obvious connection with how we live in a socio-economic system that is only interested in extracting skills so as to dismiss our existence as labor, and therefore abolish those costs, and instead concentrate on consumption (and therefore profit) as we are turned entirely into consumption drones on a low maintenance regime (ie. crummy wages).
We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Did you catch the last episode with Seven of Nine and the machanistic aristocrat of power personnified--our Lady of Sorrows, Madame de Borg?
Chuck Grimes,
PS. Nice to hear from you on lbo. I only glanced at the huge postings today and responded to this one. So, if the points go elsewhere, well, more anon. Haven't we had this conversation before?