Art and Authority

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

D. 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.]

Is this the debate over aesthetics and fascism in another
guise- i.e., whether art is somehow neutral or arbitrary w/r/t any
given moral posture? Can great art serve to "compensate"
the inevitable shortcomings of any master?

  [  "Everything changes when the work of art becomnes
 stubbornly inhospitable and opaque.  

                          (snip)

 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?]

One can always close the book, leave the theater, etc. The above
premise, which I assume the following paragraphs will be debunking
is a little grandiose, even for a "straw man" isn't it?

  [  "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? ]

Are they using sadistic here for controlling, and "modes of mobility"
for perception? If so, maybe it is Bersani and Dutoit who are
coveting unreadability, invisibility, immobilization, etc. Why the need
to be so arcane?

 [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.]

Are we to assume that "fantasmatic mastery over... others" is another
expression for that "sadistic movement" stuff? Just reading this is a bit
masochistic, is it not?

  [  "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. ]

"Narcissistic concentration on themselves" is that something like
self-referential, or am I totally not getting this?

[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. ]

Is that kind of like what a non-French speaking American experiences
in a Parisian restuarant: "...they so seldom address us; they appear
to 'associate' not with the real or with their audience [customers]
but only with themselves." It doesn't improve the quality of the food,
either.


 [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)]

The above paragraph seems a deliberate attempt to obfuscate in 
order to achieve profoundity. It does not seem worth the effort to sort
it out.

[ "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)]

When did anyone ever assert that individuality was anything else
but temporary. Isn't that the trade off and one of the greatest
motivations for art appreciation in the first place? These two should 
brush up on their Shakespeare.


   [ "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)]

Of course, understanding any of this, or the above cited artists, requires
that one be a card carrying intellectual, not to mention elitist, with enough
free-time to make the effort. These authors and the artists cited are
the embodiment of "cultural authority." Maybe that's the "agitated
narcissistic concentration" angle- they are really at war with themselves.


   [ "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)]

Or incapable of being understood, perhaps, by anyone with a lick of 
common sense?

[ 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 ...]

The difference (and long live that difference) is that Slothrop wants to
understand, and probably longs to be understood. That's what provides
him with a measure of our sympathy. These two are much more concerned
with replacing the old system of control and domination with one of their
own.