Art and Authority

[Dave Monroe]

>From Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of
Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1993), "Art and Authority," pp. 1-10
..

"The argument for the epistemologically or morally
superior nature of art, and even for its redemptive
value, has a more distinguished history than the
current reductive exploiters might suggest.  It is a
pervasive current in our culture ....  Yet ... it is
essentially reductive and dismissive about both life
and art.  On teh one hand, art is reduced to a kind of
superior patching function and is enslaved to those
very materials to which it presumably imparts value;
on the other, the catastrophes of individual
experience and of social history matter much less
(thereby making active reform and resistance less
imperative) if they are somehow 'understood' and
compensated in art.
   "Everything changes when the work of art becomnes
stubbornly inhospitable and opaque.  And the opacity
we have in mind is not that of Ulysses.  Joyce gives
us all sorts of keys to help us work--for years, if
necessary--to make his novel transparent.  There are
no keys to Company or Worstward Ho, and there is
nothing that can be done to make the paintings in the
Houston chapel easier to see ....  The opacity of the
artists we will be discussing is not a function of the
difficulty of their work.  Or, rather, the work's
difficulty is inherent in the way it inhibits our
movement toward it in order to take its measure. Thus
we will frequently see Beckett, Rothko, and
Rsnais--all masters of their media--engage in certain
sacrificial or crippling moves ....  In short, we have
a writer who may not wish to be read; a painter who
may not wish to be seen; a maker of movies in which
movement seems designed to immobilize us.
   "Difficulty in these artists is, then, not
substantive.  It is a function of the obstacles put in
the way of our approaching their work--a function of
mobility rather than of understanding.  The artist's
renunciation of authority, as we can begin to see, is
not necessarily inspired by humility.  To be inhibited
in our moves toward the work is to be  blocked in our
efforts to appropriate the work.  If it has
traditionally been assumed that, with the proper
amount of attention and study, readers and spectators
can understand, store within themselves and ultimately
profit from works of art, this, it has also been
assumed, is because artists have completed an
analogous process: their work records their
appropriation of the real, their distillation of its
sense.  The inhibiting of our movement toward the work
should be taken as a sign of a profound change in this
relation of the work to the real....  And if the
artist loses his status as a privileged subject, so
does his audience.  If there is nothing to appropriate
within the work, we can no longer be, in our relation
to the work, appreciatively appropriating subjects. 
how, then, can we 'move' at all?
   "The art we will consider trains us in new modes of
mobility (or modes to which we may have been
blind).... a problematics of space....  Is there a
nonsadistic type of movement?  Is there a mode of
circulation--within the work of art and in our
realtion to it--different from the moves of an
appropriating consciousness? ... two realted questions
central to a problematics of space: the questions of
fantasmatic mastery over and identification with
others.
   "The films of Resnais will, however, be more
helpful ... in suggesting alternative (nonsadistic)
modes of mobility.  It is a characteristic of those
films to be engaged in what might be called a
narcissistic concentration on themselves.  Part of
what makes them so difficult to read (to get an
interpretive hold on) is that they so seldom address
us; they appear to 'associate' not with the real or
with their audience but only with themselves.  Each
work becomes a model of self-contained
(nonreferential) identity,  Yet this self-containment
is also self-explosive.  For teh activity of this
narcissistic concentration is extraordinarily
agitated.  The work is constantly finding itself in
otehr parts of itself--although what it finds is
always diferent from itself. And the difference is
what saves the work from collapsing into a deathlike
and ultimately chimerical immobility in which each of
its parts would accurately reflect all of its other
parts....  immobility is the logical end point in a
system of correspondences within the work; internal
reflection need only be 'perfected' in order to
transform resemblances into sameness.  To save the
work from thet transformation is to maintain its
identity as a continuously mobile communication of
forms.  Narcissistic concentration is thus manifetsed
as self-dispersal, as the simultaneous confirmation
and loss of identity in a potentially endless process
of inaccurate self-replications." (pp.3-7)

"Far from taking the authoritative ego for granted,
they treat individual human identity as merely one
instance of provisionally stabilized and bounded
being.  What is individual ... is always a momentary
arresting of the communication of forms." (p. 8)

   "The works of art we will be studying are acts of
resistance.  They refuse to serve the complacency of a
culture that expects art to reinforce its moral and
epistemological authority....  We could even speak ...
(we might have studied others: D.H. Lawrence, George
Bataille, Thomas Pynchon), of an art at war with
culture.  Self-divestiture in these artists is alse a
renunciation of cultural authority." (p. 8)

   "Might there, however, be a 'power' in such
impotence?...  To be lost or disseminated in a space
that cannot be dominated, and to register attentively
how relations are affected by a shattered ego's
displacements within that space, may at least begin to
reverse or arrest the devastating effects of a view of
space as an appropriable collection of objects and
human subjects.  Without an authoritative center, the
impoverished and dispersed self may become an
unlocatable target...." (p. 9)

Cf. ...

"So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now--early
Virgo--he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked,
hell--stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's
doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the
conventional sense of 'positively identified and
detained.' Only feathers ..."  (Gravity's Rainbow, Pt.
IV, p. 712)

Okay ...

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