Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Williams- Marxism and Literature

In part one, Williams explains how linguistics and literary theories developed. He describes the interplay between history, language development, and linguistics. He points out how literature blossomed at the end of the feudal period as European society shifted from a society centered on religion to one with more secular concerns. From these shifts, he notes, literary theorists developed the concept of "tradition" (upholding certain ideologies) to distinguish "good" literature from "bad," thus keeping literature from becoming too egalitarian.
In part two, Williams goes on to reinterpret Marx's ideas (and post-Marxist ideas) regarding the base-superstructure. He points out the difficulties in separating art from production (with his piano example -- his one specific example!). He also rejects the idea that art is merely a reflection of society. Rather, Williams agrees with Adorno's theory that art/culture is a mediation of society -- that the mediation takes place within the art itself. He then discusses the problem of aesthetics, claiming that aesthetics is really a social function/reaction. However, he doesn't reject aesthetics because of this. He claims that artists (writers) must confront the "hegemony" within themselves (social forces) to be truly creative and to bring something "unknown" or new to the world.

Values
Marxism but reinterpreted.
Euro-centric. Asia had novels before the 17th century.
The Frankfort school highly valued.


If culture is a mediation of society, is the reverse also true?
What have these theorists got against specific examples?

Links

The aesthetic experience takes place socially? Is this like Hegel's reconciliation through art?
It's no longer the divine within, but the hegemony within. Yikes! My sense of self is either expanding or contracting. Am I a WE?

Williams reminds me a bit of Adorno in his critique of Marxist interpretations. Williams says art is not merely a reflection of society. Adorno criticizes Kant and the Freudians for their sense that art is valued not for what it is but for what it means in terms of something else.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

I don't yet have a sense of the whole with Adorno, so here it goes.

After art was supposedly "freed" from "cultic function," it lost its place in the world; thus, progression becomes regression. Although art has taken the place of religion, it must turn against this role to become something "other." Adorno counters other theorists like Kant and the Freudians, for removing the body from the aesthetic experience (Kant) or substituting art for bodily experience (Freud) (10). To Adorno and Marcuse, pleasure can be radical (14).
In addition, Adorno states that the "ugly" has its place in art. This idea of "ugliness" stems from recognizing and rejecting what was once feared. When rejected, we deem it ugly. He also links the ugly to the beautiful in terms of symmetry, writing that we understand symmetry better through its contrast with asymmetry. Here, he suggests some Hegelian opposition. Adorno traces the place of the "ugly" in art, from the ancient Greeks to anti-feudal paintings of the nineteenth century (48). He states that the bourgeois rejection of industrial landcapes as unaesthetic stems from nature's domination over man rather than the opposite. Aesthetics, Adorno claims, must be about more than beauty, for art needs tension. Ancient cultures recognized this and represented this tension in art and myth. Only in the Enlightenment was art associated with a more formal beauty. However, he also notes that ancient cultures didn't recognize the individual in art (Greeks sculptures vs. modern ones). Overall, Adorno stresses the importance of the aesthetic experience. To lose the aesthetic, even a sentimental one, makes art "barbaric" (61).

Like Marcuse, Adorno links aesthetics with radical thought (through individual, subjective experience).
Like the French concept of jolie-laide, beauty in ugliness.
This reminds me of the birth of Aphrodite. In one version, Aphrodite rises out of the sea after Uranus's severed organs are thrown into the sea. Love and beauty stems from violence (and sexuality).

I don't have a sense of how this all hangs together.
How does Benjamin's theory fail? (56)

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Marcuse's Aesthetics

Marcuse posits his theory in terms of how it fits into a continuing discussion of aesthetics. He points out that aesthetics is more important than Marx and many post-Marxian thinkers claim. Marx and post-Marxists, he notes, have incorrectly devalued the subjectivity of aesthetics/ beauty, thinking it superfluous to more pressing social needs (and the radical agenda). Marcuse asserts that aesthetics are an essential part of radical change as art represents an "otherness" that reveals and opposes "reality." Art, he says, should contain an element of hope that the world could be better even as it remains cynical as to whether that will actually happen. To Marcuse, beauty gives us the will to live.

Questions: Page 63. I understood the link between fascism and art but not between fascism and literature. What does he mean?

When Marcuse discusses recognition, how is this like Aristotle's recognition?

Values: Literature over painting as the most radical artform.
Europeans still dominate the artistic discussion, but one culture within Europe not better than another. Brecht dominates.
New Values: Contrary to many of his peers, Marcuse values beauty.

Links: Plato's mean (54) and Hegel (55) suggested by these pages.
I see many links to modern art. Warhol seems heavily into anti-beauty movement. If art is everything, then it is nothing. Marcuse seems to question Warhol's legitimacy. The "factory" can be no factory.

Friday, March 13, 2009

James Dean at the Domes

Initially, I wanted to write about the train exhibit at the Mitchell Park Domes. I had some vague desire to analyze the odd visual aesthetics of advertisements (on box cars), lovely, blooming azaleas, and lego scenes in conjunction with the ordinary sights and sounds of deafening, runny-nosed children (my own included). Looming over the industrial valley, the giant hot houses form a strange link to the values of the Romantic era in an industrial age. A frequent backdrop for wedding photos, the tropical garden acts as a cheap getaway in February. Despite these interests, I’ve decided to critique Rebel without a Cause instead. Much as I need the riot of azaleas in February, I appreciate bold color and and composition of Rebel as well.

Directed by Nicholas Ray (who hails from Galesville, WI) in 1955, the film marks the beginning of the teen movie genre. The film opens with the protagonist Jim Stark (James Dean) sprawled on the ground playing with a toy monkey while the credits flash over him. Soon after, Jim is picked up by the police and taken to the station. Here, he sees the two other characters that will, with Jim, drive the film’s plot. At the station, all three central characters, Jim Stark (James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood), and John “Plato” Crawford (Sal Mineo), have problems with inept or absent parents. Because of these problems, these adolescents struggle between opposing forces: isolation and community. In the end, Plato’s problems alienate him while Jim and Judy’s resolve when they forge new relationships. Several links to aesthetic philosophy spring to mind when watching this film, especially in terms of key conflicts and symbolic settings.

Plato, named for the Classical philosopher, grows up without parental love, isolated from his peers. Picked up for shooting puppies on his birthday, Plato and his nanny tell Officer Ray that his mother is often away on vacations. Foreshadowing his own death at the film’s end, the puppy massacre lets viewers in on the depth of Plato’s alienation and self-hatred. Plato later describes his father as a sailor on the China Seas among other stories to explain his absences. Later, when Plato retrieves the gun (Put back after killing the puppies? Nice work, Nanny) in order to protect Jim, he finds a check noted, “For care of son.” In another scene, Plato hangs out in an abandoned mansion, symbolic of his own abandoned home. Clearly, Plato’s parents have some explaining to do, but they never appear in the film.

Because of their total rejection, Plato seeks a father figure in Jim, the new kid in town, whose own problems stem from his weak father and domineering mother. Like Alcibiades looks at Socrates, Plato often looks longingly at Jim, suggesting he desires more than a father. Jim, however, to compensate for his own isolation, tries unsuccessfully to fit in with the cool kids, a violent group led by Buzz Gunderson, Judy’s boyfriend. When they meet at the Planetarium, Buzz and Jim’s square off in a knife fight. Later that night, Jim and Buzz agree to meet at a bluff to play “chicken” with fatal results. Before they get into their cars, Jim and Buzz stand together on the edge overlooking the sea. When Jim asks why they have to compete so dangerously, Buzz responds, “Well, you gotta do something.” Shortly thereafter, Jim survives the game, but Buzz careens off the cliff, leaving his gang leaderless and Judy isolated. The brief attempt at joining the adolescent community fails.

The planetarium and the cliff scenes both link to Kant’s concept of the sublime. Both settings force the teens to confront their own mortality, fears, and insignificance. When they are first at the planetarium for a school field-trip, the speaker’s narration during a simulation of the end of the world echoes Plato’s isolation. “Man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence,” he narrates. Plato responds, “What does he know about Man alone?” but he cowers shortly before saying this. The vastness and emptiness of space mimic his inner isolation. This also reminds me of Hegel who describes the spiritual force existing internally in the Romantic man. However, instead of the divine within and without, Plato has internalized his family’s estrangement. At the end of the film, Plato returns to the Planetarium as he tries to escape the police. When Jim tries unsuccessfully to save him, Plato rejects him (for going off with Judy), running out of the building to be shot by the cops. No simulation of the world’s end this time, Plato’s nanny cries, “Poor baby ain’t got nobody.” A far cry from the Hegelian idea of reconciliation, Nicholas Ray’s modern man dies violently and alone.

Like the planetarium, the cliff represents a symbolic setting where the plot turns and Jim shifts his attention to Judy. First, looking over the edge forces the truth out of Buzz and Jim. Here, they confront the stupidity of their actions but to no avail. “I like you,” Buzz says to Jim, out of everyone else’s earshot, of course. After Buzz’s death, Jim pulls Judy back from the edge, suggesting he will save her from despair. By setting these pivotal scenes in nature (or a simulation of it), Nicholas Ray aligns himself with the Romantic era philosophers but with a less hopeful sense of progress.

After Plato's death, Jim introduces Judy to his parents with his arm around her, as their betters. Thus, love bridges the gap between adolescence and adulthood. Plato, however, ends as he begins, without love. Jim and Judy, on the other hand, both find love, the mean between the Platonic extremes of isolation and community. To Nicholas Ray, isolation destroys the individual while the community fails the individual.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Summary:

Benjamin describes how art went from being produced to being reproduced and how improvements in reproduction techniques have changed the aesthetic experience by removing the ritual and uniqueness associated with the art. In addition, reproduction makes art ubiquitous, available to the masses rather than just to the elite. He notes that modern audiences question art forms like film and photography, which he notes is a more valid artform for modern man than painting. Art, he says, must change with society.

Questions:

How does reproduction make art political? Because it's available to all?

Is photography more valid that painting for modern man? Why?

Values: Like Marx, he shifts away from art for the elite.
Taking the ritual out of experience is better for all.

Links: I can see Andy Warhol taking this a step further, lauding reproduction and doing away entirely with ritual.

The Aesthetic State - Josef Chytry

Summary:

Chytry describes how Marx, using his Classical background and Hegelian structures, claims that labor unifies the mind and body as well as the public and private worlds of individuals. However, modern capitalism, with its pursuit of profit and technological advances, alienates man from the whole process of production by devaluing his time and by developing a division of labor. To transform society would take a revolution, but the new society would result in the "'cultivation of the five senses'" and the "flowering of a 'humane' sensibility."

Questions:

In what ways have we come back to the beginnings (Greco-Roman)?

Does this mean that in order for labor to be aesthetic there must be a physical product?
If we end with "sensibility," does this mean Marx has reversed the order of aesthetic ideas? It seems that prior readings started with senses.
Why was Germany such a hub of philosophical ideas?

Values:

Whole better than parts.

New values:

Aesthetics no longer tied to upper classes with "taste."

Links: Marx predates the ashcan school (Robert Henri, John Sloan, et al), but I can see his influence on their work.