Hansen & Munster

Both of our readings for this week take up issues surrounding technology and embodiment. Hansen and Munster both seem to be reacting against assumptions and practices that attempt to cut the body out of digital media. While Hansen's project takes this up by detailing radical works of digital art that reconceptualize the relationship between the body and technology, Munster's work seems to take up issues of technology and embodiment from a slightly different angle by re-thinking the goals of projects like Hansen's and pushes at the ethical implications of such projects.

What is at the heart of each of these projects seems to resemble many of the readings we've seen before. Hansen and Munster seem to take up the project of technologies and bodies to think through what potential these have for social transformation. Hansen's text seems fundamentally more hopeful to me than Munster's in that he organizes his text primarily through examples of artists attempting to do this work (his extended introduction of Kruger's work, for instance). Hansen seems to be suggesting that by focusing our attention on only the visual (3-D graphics) as a means for creating digital spaces, we are losing some of the most important potential that technology has to offer us: a space to re-work and re-mediate our own bodies in participatory ways that challenge passivity. For example, Hansen focuses on how Krueger's work allows the participants to take on some of the "programming" that might traditionally done by the "artist" by being responsible for the "input" in these virtual spaces that reconstruct the body and having the "output" speak to all of our senses. What results, then, from Hansen's work is something like what Dan Cameron refers to when describing these pieces as "a new category of beauty" (37). This new beauty is created through a new kind of awareness that is born from pairing body and technology in the ways Krueger (and others) accomplish.

This is where I see a nice link to the Munster text, which seems to nuance some of the claims made in Hansen a bit more. Although Munster also focuses on the necessity of bodily inclusion in the consideration of what she terms an "information aesthetic," she seems to consider some of the implications for the claims like those present present in Hansen. For example, in Chapter 5 Munster provides a complicated version of the "digital divide" argument questioning the place of new media in creating a more participatory space. Here, Munster detail the concept of the ethico-aesthetic which allows us to ask questions about what kinds of connectivity and social relationships are formed through certain texts. Munster points out here that although bodies (and art) are re-configured through new media, these reconfigurations or remediations do not promise or guarantee social trasformation; yet, there is certainly some potential for this. I appreciated this point in Munster because it reigns in the claims about "new potential" in some of the texts that we've read that often leave me skeptical.

Ah, there is so much more I want to write about here. But I need to save some time today to keep working on my final project. Here are some terms/concepts/ideas that I've found interesting that I'd like to talk more about in class if there is time:

-I'd be interested in talking about Hansen's description of the subject and individual on page 85 (especially in terms of how this paragraph pulls us in a different direction than how we've previously discussed these terms)

-I'm also interested in discussing Hansen's term "intercorporeity" in terms of how this allows us to move away from the notion of a body, one body that has been so consistently present throughout our readings

-Lastly, I'd be interested in talking more about Munster's ethico-aesthetic and what this might mean for relational art, performance, or some of the art Hansen described

That's all. For now, anyway...

Back to Beauty?: On Steiner's Venus in Exile

Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art traces the dismissal of beauty and the feminine subject in the realms of Modernist art and literature of the past century. Steiner mainly focuses her critique on avant-garde art where Kantian notions of transcendent and detached, disinterested beauty seem to have resulted in "masculine" works where women, beauty, ornament and domesticity come to lose their place. Very early on in her text, Steiner contrasts a Kantian notion of beauty with the aesthetic theory latent in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and eventually suggests a societal revision of aesthetics in ways that pull us toward Shelley's critique. It is clear that Steiner sees the 21st-Century as having much potential for bringing back beauty (albeit a beauty that has been somewhat transformed by the Modernist history that has preceded it). Steiner seems to find hope in a renaissance of beauty as bodily, pleasurable and world in which generosity, love and making oneself again through a recognition of the Other are once again valued.

For me, Steiner's text was a wonderful pulling together of some pieces (and critiques) that I was struggling to give voice to. I appreciated the through examples she gave to demonstrate (instead of telling us) just how significant the departure of beauty was on many facets of life from home decorating, photography, novels, and art. I would imagine that Steiner's audience is more heterogeneous than some of the previous texts we've read in that she gives a lot of context information and, while she does assume background knowledge of art and literature, I was able to engage in her argument even when I was unfamiliar with a particular painting or novel.

I very much enjoyed Steiner's discussion of ornament and domesticity; however, these parts of the book left me with some questions regarding what was happening and going on in domestic spheres of life within certain cultural pockets despite the general devaluation of the beautiful. That is, while Steiner's project traces high art and lauded literature, I kept wondering what was going on in everyday society in the homes and lives of women who most likely did not leave ornament and domesticity behind (think, working-class womens' decorations/clothing as being called "gaudy"). Granted, Steiner does give mention to decorating books, fashion magazines and photography in a few places throughout her book; yet, I was wondering about who--despite its lack of popularity and cultural prestige--has clung to notions of beauty throughout the 20th century--who were the guardians of beauty and now that beauty is becoming in vogue again, how will this same groups relationship to beauty be changed? The reason I ask this question is that it seems to me that Steiner seems to be suggesting a cultural force (because of need and desire of individuals and society as a whole it seems) back toward beauty. Yet, a focus on the avant-garde then fails to recognize which people have held on to this notion all along and their role (if any) in how beauty will become re-appropriated in high art. I want to know more about the relationships between the avant-garde movement and "common" or "lower-end" consumption" as I think these relationships are crucial for thinking through what the renaissance of beauty will do to and for those who have less available power. Hmm...I hope this is making sense...I guess I'm just trying to reign in the hopefulness Steiner has for a return to beauty because I'm skeptical about what that shift will actually do for those that have been left out of Modernist art. Will the return of beauty be just a reorganization of the relationships to it in ways that make access to what is deemed valuable and artistic less available?

Rancière & Bourriaud, kind of...

Okay, so on Monday night I found out that I ordered the wrong Bourriaud book from Amazon so my reading of Relational Aesthetics has been shaped by some of the .PDF essays from the book that I've been able to track down on the internet. I had imagined, at the time, that I could focus my post here on Rancière, but then, well, I read Rancière and I must confess that this may be an "interesting" post...

Both of the texts for this week seem to share in common a focus on the public and an embracing of the connectivity of life in generally and the role of aesthetics in this connectivity. For Bourriaud, this connectivity (or, more specifically here, relationality) moves art and aesthetic experience from the realm of the private into the realm of the public. In other words, the value of art rests in its potential to bring people in relation to one another in particular ways an in specific cultural contexts. For Rancière, the role connectivity comes in somewhat differently through the connection between aesthetics and politics.

From what I can discern, Rancière seems to be suggesting that aesthetics is deeply entangled with (not necessarily causally, though) politicization and subjectivation and most fundmentally, with experience. Rancière is concerned throughout these interview-essays, among other things, with mapping out the relationship between the visible and the sayable and although I know that these ideas are central to his overall argument, I'm confused about what exactly he is doing with them. Hopefully this will become clearer before class...

I guess I'll stop here and revisit this writing when I am clearer about some of this and have more productive/focused questions and useful things to say...

Back to the Body: Bourdieu and Eagleton

Our texts for this week, Eagleton and Bourdieu, both seem to take up an interest in aesthetics alongside a renewed focus on the body. While the interest in the body is perhaps much more explicit in Eagleton, it is taken up centrally (albeit often implicitly for our reading today) in Bourdieu through his discussion of acquiring competencies and educational, symbolic and cultural capital--and to go beyond our reading some, what he fleshes out as the notion of the habitus in the later chapters of the book. While aesthetics for Eagleton have some radical potentials, Bourdieu's take on the social role of aesthetics and on how aesthetics are embodied seems to imply a more deterministic view. That is, Bourdieu seems to see less opportunity to use taste/art in ways that break down or challenge the system; rather, he suggests that while individuals attempt to move within this system they often ultimately end up unconsciously reifying the system all together through, for example, conspicuous consumption.

I'm interested, then, in talking about how Eagleton's view of the role of the body (and also subjectivity), when juxtaposed with Bourdieu's sense of the embodiment of taste and aesthetics, might suggest as we move forward in the course. In his introduction, Eagleton describes the aesthetic in the following way:

The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at the present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates it or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity (9).

Given Eagleton's passage here, how might we talk about bodies, subjectivity and the aesthetic as Eagleton sees these in relation to how Bourdieu might see these? What room for change and shift does Eagleton afford? Where are these affordances located (if at all) in Bourdieu's text?

I'm also interested in Eagleton's description of the Bourgeois social order--particularly in terms of how it seems to correspond with Bourdieu's focus on social practice and other minutiae such as taste. Eagleton states:

The ultimate binding of bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body's spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed (20).

What does this passage suggest about the ideology of aesthetics and, as Bourdieu would point to, taste?

Williams & Bérubé

Both of the texts for this week, although written decades apart, move us toward a forging of culture with art. While Williams' text accomplishes this through a series of chapters which take up Marxist concepts in service of a materialist critique, Bérubé's text contextualizes the place of aesthetics within the contemporary academy (English departments in particular) to demonstrate the the rifts between cultural studies and "the beautiful" are created due to a misinterpretation of the role of cultural studies. Essentially, ideology and art/the beautiful, although they have developed varying academic traditions, are quite compatible if we shift our focus to begin to look at what Bérubé calls "cultural forms".

Speaking of forms, I'm interested in the shape that Williams' writing took. Although I appreciated the detailed and often seemingly painstaking tracing of terms, I found it interesting that these terms were written about in ways that relied upon neatly-bound splits in chapter or section (something Williams claimed to theoretically be working against). Anyway, moving on from my grumbling, I specifically appreciated the following passage in the "Ideology" section:

....'thinking' and 'imagining' are from the beginning social processes...and (they) become accessible only through unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned and printed writing, in arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone. To exclude these material social processes from the material social process is the same error as to reduce all material social processes to mere technical means for some other abstracted 'life'. The 'practical process' of the 'development of men' necessarily includes them from the beginning, and as more than some technical means for some quite separate 'thinking' and 'imagining' (62).

For me, this spot in the text was one of the most explicit places that clearly speaks to not only a critique of Marxist aesthetic theory but also affords a critique of the early aesthetic canon which heavily relied upon abstract notions of the aesthetic and beauty as being at odds with everyday process and practice (which Williams argues are a part of one another to begin with). I appreciate the moment, then, when Bérubé makes an argument for breathing as having an aesthetics and this section begins to address my concerns at the beginning of the semester a to how we see the mundane as being divorced from the aesthetic.

What was most surprising to me, though, given Williams' critique, is that it seems as though Bérubé is writing about a split within academia between cultural studies and aesthetics that, at its root, stems from the issue that Williams is first writing about in the late 70s. That is to say, it is interesting how the social and cultural trajectories of the two fields Bérubé writes about often see themselves as incompatible despite the work that has insisted upon a connection between the two.

Anyway, in terms of our class discussion tonight, I'd like to talk more about Bérubé's use of the terms instrumentality/noninstrumentality of art. I feel like these are key to the main arguments in the texts today as well as key concepts for addressing how the concepts of art (materiality) and the social and cultural are being explicitly brought back together.

Continuing on with the Frankfurt School: Marcuse and Adorno

Both part of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Marcuse seem to be writing about art and its radical potentialities. While Marcuse views the radical nature of art as the merging of form and content (by foregrounding form) toward a transformation of consciousness, Adorno posits that art is radical due to its ability to move beyond reality--to present us with the possibility of "other".

The imagined audience for this week carries with it many of the same traits as our previous readings--these writings are written for an academic audience that is familar with Marxist theory and certain literary works. However, these writings (Benjamin, Marcuse and Adorno) seem to be even more tightly in dialogue with one another than some of our readings in the past due to the fact that these scholars all belong to the Frankfurt school. Both Marcuse and Adorno, for example, focus on the autonomy of art and its radical potentialities. Because of the relatively homogeneous audience, these writers, particularly Marcuse, again make assumptions about universality regarding values and tastes. It is sometimes shocking to me that these texts--claiming to move toward a more just and free society--can so easily reinscribe some of the current class stratification through the values latent in these theories.

I'm still finishing my reading of Adorno's text, so I'm not ready to formulate any questions yet. I do have a couple of points I'd like to discuss regarding the Marcuse, though:

While Marcuse goes on to nuance these terms in his later chapters, I'm interested (and troubled) by his notions of "autonomy", "quality", and "standard" (with his discussion of Shakespeare). I agree with Marcuse that Marx's attribution of the class and how social position appears in work is overly simplistic; however, it seems to me that Marcuse's discussion of art lapses into talking about art in ways that make the means of producing art more available to some and not others. Am I missing something here?

Also, I was wondering about the passage at the very beginning of the Marcuse text (3-4) where he is discussing the moving away from individual consciousness toward a class consciousness. I found this passage interesting because it seems that pre-Marx aesthetic theory focuses so heavily on the individual that it erases the collective sense of how we both produce and experience art. If we have time, I'd be interested in talking about this passage more and what Marcuse is referring to exactly with the phrase "the subjective potential for revolution" (4).

A critique of Critique, a review of Review: Collapsing Performance, Production and Critique

This was supposed to be a review, a critique of a text. It will not be, at least, not in the most traditional sense. I simply cannot imagine it being this without taking on some of the major assumptions lurking within the forms of “critique” and “review” writing and these are the assumptions I want to work against.

This post, instead then, will be a critique of a performance--my own “aesthetic” performance in creating my first blog post for this class. I will “critique,” so to speak, the process of writing my first blog post--the review of something that I found pleasurable. My critique of my own critique, though, will be interlaced (and in service of) a more general critique of Critique and review of Review. Because without this essential move toward critiquing or reviewing the embeddedness and performativity of Critique or Review itself, it will be all the more impossible to get at some of the core issues that have concerned us in this class, and, perhaps most importantly some issues that have emerged both in the foreground and background of the pleasures (and displeasures) of our everyday lives.

My performance is formulated long before it is witnessed. It begins, perhaps, in the barely comprehensible remarks that a baby can make out through her families’ spattered phrases and gesture. Whatever it is, though, the beginning of the traditional critique must erase this. A traditional critique often neatly begins at the so-called chronological beginning and forgets the social, cultural and historical beginnings. It freezes a text and its conventions within time and space despite the fact that time and space flow through these texts. I must insist that we start from different beginnings, but nonetheless, beginnings that must inevitably be trapped by their narrativizablilty. Tied up in my first blog post are many beginnings...the course that we are all in that prompted us to create this blog post; knowledge of what a blog post is and how to create one; how to “design”--or choose from the available templates on the blog; how to select something that is “pleasurable” that will say particular things about the identity I want to construct and not other things....these are some of the many, many invisible beginnings in the blog text I created. Beginnings that, are not often not available or even acknowledged when a we engage in the act of review or critique.

I could tell you that when I look at a painting, or the ocean, or my niece’s focused gaze, that I experience beauty in ways that completely undermine (or are at least in tension with) the formal writings we’ve read in this class. I could tell you that despite the rigid taxonomies and hegemonic assumptions, beauty evades this theoretical writing, that it is somehow more than the attempts to define, to formalize, to claim knowledge of it. Yet, disappointingly, I do not believe this to be true--at least not completely. Although I was not previously aware of the deep culture roots of what we deem “aesthetic,” I know they are there. I know they are there in every utterance of what is beautiful and what is not. I know this through social and cultural experience and although I cannot pinpoint why thinking particular things are more beautiful than others is more associated with power, I know beauty and power are inseparably bound up in one another.

I start to write my first blog post several times but am halted by my worry of what I think is beautiful and how that might be read by others. I formally know nothing about “aesthetics”--I am still prudent around this word...careful with my relationship to it. I spell it cautiously, paying attention to when the red squiggly lines call out to me to tell me that I have missed an “e” or an “h”. But I know that I have to write about it. I know I have to locate what I find beautiful, what I find pleasurable. I toss around multiple possibilites, keenly aware of what each will say about me, how each will mark my taste. I definitely can’t write about my love of Celine Dion music unless I can do this writing in a tongue-and-cheek I-know-I’m-totally-uncool-way--unless I can pre-empt judgements about my taste. I choose to talk about cuneiform. I chose to talk about something that is often believed to be divorced from bodies.

A critique is always a performance and performance responds to and then becomes critique. I critique my own production, then, because I want to attempt to break down the passivity of the observer, viewer, listener, audience. During live performances, the role of the audience and the collective experience is often acknowledged; however, I want to highlight here that texts that are experienced in a less immediate way are experienced actively as well. For example, there was a great moment at the Next Step theatre three weeks ago that I could easily have written this entire post about. An actress mistakenly set down a prop at the very outer most edge of the table. The scene, which was already suspenseful, was heightened by the fact that I, and other audience members, were so keenly aware of the fact that the prop might, at any minute, fall and alter the performance in unforeseen ways. It is easy to see how performances, which frequently depend upon the contingent movements of human bodies, are seen as active and dynamic. It is much more difficult, I think, to see how a painting or a drawing or a blog post are also contingent and dynamic in this same way as they too are forms of responses to contexts. Every time we struggle to articulate something or decide not to write something, we are placing the frame on the edge of the table. To break down the boundaries between critique and performance, it is necessary to view texts more fluidly and dynamically and less passively.

Hmm...so now I don’t have much time left. So...what to write about in my first blog post for this class??? Whatever I choose will say something about me. But what should it say? I could write about the textiles in the production of Belle’s Strategem I saw in August. No. I could write about the fact that I grew up listening to music by Celine Dion music (in French and English) and still have a soft spot for it. No, writing tongue-and-cheek isn’t a comfortable style for me. I am finally so short on time so I choose to write about one of the most interesting--and least visited--exhibits I saw at the Louvre this past summer. I chose to write about cuneiform. I am fascinated when I see cuneiform. I am moved. But I also know that talking about this is a safe choice in an English department. It is a safe choice because it is so historically and institutionally validated and stamped with a social and cultural seal of approval that it won’t say much about me.

I write my post on cuneiform and I hate that I can’t easily articulate the complexities around this decision. I hate that I can’t make my blog post or my blog, both shrouded with the lie of “choice”--choice in color, choice in template, choice in picture, choice of what to write about, say what I want them to. Bloggers design constraints push me away from creating a blog that represents what I want it to. The constraints of culture and social position constrain me from representing myself in a way that I want to. What would it be like to be able to create a blog that reflects what I value in design? What would it be like to not have to consider so carefully how what I write about will position me? Choice without much control is not choice; yet, it is framed as such and I am responsible to it as such.

I am so thrilled when someone critiques how people wrote about art in European museums during our first night’s class discussion. I know this critique is, in part, aimed at my post. And it helps me to unravel and see more clearly what I already knew...that my performance of critique was too careful, too neat.

What does it mean to step into the role of “the critic”? A “critic” is one person, one individual who sees or hears or experiences something and then engages in the act of critiquing that thing, generally for the supposed benefit of others. Yet the performance, critique and production are so tightly bound. Before I knew you, the members of this class, I could imagine how you’d respond to what I said. I tried to anticipate your critiques of my critiques and, when, possible, to pre-empt them. I produced my text for you and for myself in line with the constraints imposed upon me by the culture and the social. Most importantly, my critique of my own performance on my initial blog here was no less a performance than it was there.

I cannot, then, very honestly take on the role of “The Critic” as an individual writing this post or any other “critique” or “review” . I know that although it is my hands that are pecking at the keys at this moment, that my performative critiques are shaped by you and others and that without this software, without our class discussions, the museums I’ve visited, the books I’ve read, the food I’ve eaten, the places I’ve been to, the amount of sleep I’ve had, I would have performed critique differently. I know that critique, although seemingly the act an observation of an individual, entails far more than this...includes far more than this.