Mediumism

A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning

René V. Arcilla

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438429274
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Mediumism considers what the modernist movement in the arts could mean for us today. It examines how artists and critics, particularly in the visual arts, responded to the growth of industries of distraction since the nineteenth century by creating new kinds of artworks that stress their mediums. René V. Arcilla draws out the metaphysical and ethical implications of the work of critics Clement Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and Michael Fried from a perspective rooted in existentialism. He finds in the resulting moral orientation a way to understand the distinctive purpose of liberal education and its political resistance to consumerism. Eschewing terminology that would be familiar to only one set of specialists, the book aims to be accessible to a general audience as well as to readers interested in modernist art, cultural politics, existentialist philosophy, and the philosophical principles of liberal education.

CHAPTER ONE
Modernism: A Pedagogical Culture?

How might the fields of education and culture better support each other? This book is going to seek some initial answers to that question, both utopian and practical. Of course, as soon as you mention culture these days, many reach for the more skeptical query, whose? Cultures, we are reproved, belong to disparate groups with interests in excluding, dominating, or protecting themselves from others; these interests necessarily shape and find expression in any cultural work. As a first step toward opening education to this tense diversity, then, we should be upfront about the specific cultures, and interests, we each represent. I ought to declare the one or ones with which I identify and how they stand in relation to others.

So let me start there. As I see it, my culture emerged out of experiences in the early 1970s while attending college at the University of Chicago. The sixties counterculture appeared to be changing everything, and I was eagerly trying to catch up. More than Dionysianism, this culture represented for me a refusal to settle for the functional compromises associated with “adulthood,” and a commitment to the experimental life. Still, I remained retrograde enough to attend classes and the ones that affected me the most, ironically, were those devoted to the Establishment's classic texts, “the best that has been thought and said.” I found the whole idea of a Great Conversation about what it means to be human inspiring; it revealed something universal and eternal about my most fundamental quandaries and reassured me that in my loneliest moments I was in the company of seers.

A traditional high culture and an avant-garde populist one: yes, I did worry about being torn apart by my attractions to both of these, and my betrayal of each. But that worry also excited my imagination of what these cultures could have to say constructively to each other; it made me feel like I had my hands on some crucial koan. Probably one reason I took seriously even these cultures' most hyperbolic ideals is that I wanted their combined contradictions to come into acute focus. I suspected that if I could in a manner reconcile them, or at least bring them into sustained dialogue, I would find there my authentic self.

The Great Books and the Grateful Dead? I must be joking if I am claiming these as my culture today. Unless I am some kind of reactionary, surely I have unlearned the naïve pretensions and ideological collusions of such works by now and have outgrown the communities that once revered them—communities that themselves have largely passed away. Would I deny that most of what currently hypes itself as countercultural is merely, as Thomas Frank would put it, fashions in commodified dissent?¹ Or that Western high culture is based on the Imperial Monologue? Has my learning been somehow stuck in time, my culture mere nostalgia for daydreams of the tuition-paid moratorium?

Furthermore, I can imagine an incredulous reader thinking that what I call culture here hardly seems adequate to the term. A person's culture is rooted in the groups to which one voluntarily or involuntarily belongs. It would be more accurate to speak of one's culture or cultures being hybrid. In either case, a particular culture becomes especially meaningful for one when membership in the corresponding group makes a pronounced difference in one's life. One will tend to value one's ethnic culture more in societies where ethnicity matters in how one is treated. Now even in the ivory tower, surely, my race, gender, sexuality, and class—likening me to some and distinguishing me, often conflictingly, from others—shaped the course of my life more than the music I surrounded myself with or the books I read. Did not my socialization into groups in the above categories, my informal, mainly unconscious learning of what it means to be Asian American, masculine, heterosexual, and petty bourgeois in Chicago at this time, have more of an impact than any idealistic identifications? Is not this uneven, manifold, materialist positioning in society my true culture?

These are no less serious objections for being obvious. Perhaps, though, their reasoning adds up less to the conclusive untenability of my cultural understanding than to a need to elaborate it further. Let me see if I can translate them into two sets of constructive questions.

Granted that both the sixties counterculture and the Arnoldian culture of old-time liberal education are as such, for the most part and for good reasons, moribund. Are there nevertheless key remnants of these that could, and should, be preserved, even developed, in the present? Is there some culture that might bring these two sets of remnants together for some important purpose?

Granted that the cultures that mean the most to us are rooted in those social groupings that most affect our actual material and practical lives. Could an above culture of remnants be so rooted?

Before I take a crack at these, let me seize the opportunity to gloss that most slippery of terms, “culture.” My remarks are hardly intended to be definitive—how could they be, given the long, contested history of the term?—but they are meant simply to suggest one way of figuratively understanding the term that may be useful.² Think of culture as the central nervous system of a community.

Individually, our biological nervous systems enable us to become aware of how the world affects us, to derive from that awareness intelligent decisions about how to respond to the world, and to take reflective responsibility for our identities over time. Culture, I am suggesting, facilitates these same functions for a community. It registers the community's experiences—not all of them, obviously, but those that attract popular concern and conversation. It derives from that register general, model judgments about how to live. And it summons an audience to recognize the experiences and models of conduct that its members have in common and to take responsibility for the welfare of this community. It is in this sense that a work of culture in conversation with other such works may be likened to a nerve transmitting a message that must be integrated into a whole network of such messages, forming self-consciousness. Culture, as such a self-consciousness, would be focused on what Raymond Williams calls its “basic element”: the “effort at total qualitative assessment.”³

Is there, then, a communal nervous system that usefully brings together components of high culture and the counterculture? Yes—modernism. Of course, how this may be is far from evident. It is not clear that modernism, understood initially as a movement in the arts, is even a coherent whole, let alone a fullfledged culture. Moreover, if it were, how it would combine high-cultural and countercultural elements requires explanation, since modernism of course postdates the ancient sources of Western high culture and predates the twentieth century, not to mention the sixties. Finally, and perhaps most problematically, even if modernism could be understood in the way I am proposing, there remains the inconvenient fact that it, like the other two cultures, is widely considered to be over. We are all postmodern now, no less than post-canon-worshippers and post-'68-ers, and while particular works from these pasts may shed light on our present, the idea that they could form as a whole our living culture seems, again, like nostalgic escapism.

What is modernism? Does it—did it—even exist? I imagine that many of us who try to get a handle on the subject must struggle with the same doubts that Franco Moretti did.

Initially, to be honest, my project was entirely different. I was thinking about modernism—a theme on which I had already written on more than one occasion, and which I had been studying for years. During that time, however, Perry Anderson had been trying to convince me that so heterogeneous a category (Mayakovsky and George, Kafka and Proust, perhaps even Lawrence and Tzara) could be of little use: it was too contradictory, or too vague, to have real explanatory value. For a long while I thought Anderson was mistaken. Then I came to the conclusion that he was half right (and modernism should precisely be described as a field of contradictions). Finally, at a certain point, I decided it was I who was mistaken. Weary of trying to square the circle, I resolved to abandon modernism and broke off my original project.⁴

No doubt the category, like many others, can be grist for some skeptic's decon-struction, showing how its components are ultimately arbitrary, contradictory, and incoherent.⁵ But then deconstruction being the double-edged sword that it is, one could use it equally to demonstrate that arguments debunking the idea of modernism tend to rely on modernist assumptions and devices. For what it is worth, I propose to build on the work that so many precursors have invested in giving this idea meaning. This is scarcely because I think I am better informed than Moretti or Anderson—far from it. I concur that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the idea. Yet I am looking in it, ultimately, for a different kind of “explanatory value.” I am less interested in calibrating the comprehensive, historical order of the arts than in showing how an open-ended set of their works may be enrolled in the service of a specific project in the present. From here on out, while of course inviting criticism, I shall be striving less to establish categorical facts than to articulate the promise of particular speculative possibilities. For me, modernism is a concept whose significance is entirely pragmatic.

To be sure, the artists, critics, historians, and philosophers who have concerned themselves with this concept have hardly been unanimous. Most, especially at this late date, have distanced it from loose notions of modernism as art that is strikingly novel, fresh, or advanced, or as a taste for these qualities. Some have associated it with a distinct style or language characteristic of a historical period that reveals beauty and meaning (or ugliness and meaninglessness). Features commonly associated with this style include not only self-reflexivity, dissonance, and inconclusiveness but also functionality, geometric perspicuousness, and so on.⁶ Some, examining such various and conflicting stylistic features, have traced them to an overarching aesthetic philosophy, an “-ism” coincidentally or communicatively shared with significant variations, of how artworks should be made and appreciated with a sense of their timeliness. And then some have tried to explain how this aesthetic philosophy was shaped in turn, and held in place, by forces rooted in particular historical situations of modernity. These represent some of the most general ways of interpreting modernism. Within and between them, there remain refractory disagreements.

The idea of modernism that I am drawn to inherit is perhaps the most commonplace one: that based on the stress on medium. The medium of an art consists of a set of regular materials, instruments, techniques, and forms. The artist employs these to produce recognizable works of that art; in this sense, the medium constitutes the means of artistic production. Normally, such artworks, with their interacting elements, stimulate experiences of beauty, pathos, or meaning in audience members. Artworks often do this by representing parts of the world or life in some special yet intelligible fashion. The same medium that enables an artwork to be produced also enables it to signify something. Conversely, the medium sets certain conditions for the artwork's production and signification. The process of signification highlights another dimension of the medium: it constitutes a communicative interface between the artist and the audience. The medium places these two in a social relation.

Equipped with this rough notion of the artistic medium, we may wonder why it is that certain artworks—call them modernist—are evidently bent on stressing their mediums, on celebrating and threatening them. The two writers who have broken the most ground in responding to this question, defining modernism as such a response, are Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg. The former, most notably in Aesthetic Theory, explains how the stress represents an attempt to mournfully acknowledge, and check, the threat posed to genuine artistic aspiration by commodification.⁷ Although I very much want to keep Adorno's concerns and insights in view, I would like to proceed from Greenberg's account. Adorno's critique of the current crisis of the arts expands to cover a larger crisis of reason in toto; this critical theory leads him to toil without prevarication and with painstaking patience in the contradiction of having constantly to undercut the very grounds of his own critique. Writing today on the other side of deconstructionism, so to speak, and having become disenchanted with the extremely scholastic fruits of such metalinguistic, paratactic, recursively ambiguous tours de force, I prefer to be more cautiously modest and to accept that the grounds of my criticism will only be incompletely apparent, let alone rational. I am ready to rely on, and be corrected by, that most human, all too human of instructors: experience. Hence my turn to the hardheaded New Yorker. Greenberg, James Elkins reports, “in the United States and in England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and France … tends to be considered the most important [art] critic of the second half of the twentieth century.”⁸ Fredric Jameson affirms that he is the “major theoretical figure of the late modern age and indeed that theoretician who more than any other can be credited as having invented the ideology of modernism full blown and out of whole cloth.”⁹ His theory is conceptually plainer than Adorno's, yet backed by close reading and criticism of numerous specific works; the data supporting it, as it were, is clearer. And Thomas Crow and Thierry de Duve, among others, have persuasively detailed a number of intriguing parallels between these two thinkers.¹⁰

Just as Adorno developed his concept of modernism in dialogue with works of primarily music and literature, so Greenberg's thinking is rooted in a career of judging works of the visual arts. By engaging at length with Greenberg and his critics, then, I will be initially rooting my understanding of modernism in approaches to sculpture and painting. Most of the examples I consider in passing in the next few chapters will come from these arts. My ultimate aim, however, is to explore how his theory of modernism can be extended and reinforced to comprise a culture of all the arts. Accordingly, when later in the book I try to support this revised theory with an examination of several concrete examples, I shall look to cinema.

Greenberg characterizes as modernist any artwork that is engaged in a project of Kantian self-criticism with respect to the question, what elements of its medium are necessary to works of this particular art? His classic formulation of this idea is in the late essay “Modernist Painting,” although, as we shall see in a moment, some of his earliest essays are arguably even more crucial for getting the idea off the ground.¹¹ I shall be examining and developing this interest in illuminating the artistic medium at length over the course of this book; Greenberg's own elaborations may be found throughout much of his writing, particularly in Art and Culture and “After Abstract Expressionism.”¹² As many know, Greenbergian modernism eventually bred a fierce backlash sharpened by antipathy to its author's notoriously peremptory manner as well as by the gold rush to all things postmodern. Currently, much of the art world treats him as a figure of ritual scorn. However, there has been some recent, sensitive criticism of his thinking by J. M. Bernstein, Crow, Arthur Danto, de Duve, and Jameson and an in-depth study by Caroline Jones.¹³ As we will see, the critical responses of T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, arguably the two most influential critics and historians of modernist painting after Greenberg, have proved especially helpful for my purposes. What I would like to explore is how, in the stress on medium, there might actually be more at stake than the experience of beauty. I wonder if we might not be able to derive from this “mediumism,” as I shall call it, a basic sense of who we are and what is the good for us. Such a philosophy would be at the heart of modernism as a culture.

This returns me to my claim about modernism's cultural components. What would substantiate it is a historical account of why and how modernism inherited important elements of high culture and anticipated—even influenced—those of the counterculture. Clark, particularly in his magisterial commentary on Green-berg, offers us such a history. “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art” develops a critical interpretation of the cultural understanding that guided Greenberg's practice as a critic, focusing on his early, formative essays.¹⁴ Greenberg situates the tradition of avant-garde art, which he and many others would later call modernism, in a crisis in bourgeois culture, one in which “all the verities of religion, authority, tradition, and style—all the ideological cement of society, in other words—are either disputed or doubted or believed in for convenience's sake and not held to entail anything much.”¹⁵ Although Greenberg does not delve into the reasons for this crisis, Clark draws out his implicit historical understanding of them from these essays' pointed Marxism.

Focusing on the key work “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clark observes that “it seems to be an unstated assumption … that there once was a time, before the avant-garde, when the bourgeoisie, like any normal ruling class, possessed a culture and an art which were directly and recognizably its own.”¹⁶ Writers and artists like Daniel Defoe, Stendhal, Théodore Géricault and others Clark lists, helped record the experiences with which this class largely identified. However, “from the later nineteenth century on, the distinctiveness and coherence of that bourgeois identity began to fade.”¹⁷ Its culture slid into the crisis that eventually produced modernism. What precipitated this were pressures from the classes the bourgeoisie strove to rule. As Clark explains,

“Fade” is too weak and passive a word, I think. I should say that the bourgeoisie was obliged to dismantle its focused identity, as part of the price it paid for maintaining social control. As part of its struggle for power over other classes, subordinate and voiceless in the social order but not placated, it was forced to dissolve its claim to culture—and in particular forced to revoke the claim, which is palpable in Géricault or Stendhal, say, to take up and preserve the absolutes of aristocracy, the values of the class it displaced. “It's Athene whom we want,” Greenberg blurts out in a footnote once, “formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.” … Add to those qualities intransigence, intensity and risk in the life of the emotions, fierce regard for honour and desire for accurate self-consciousness, disdain for the commonplace, rage for order, insistence that the world cohere; these are, are they not, the qualities we tend to associate with art itself, at its highest moments in the Western tradition. But they are specifically feudal ruling-class superlatives: they are the ones the bourgeoisie believed they had inherited and the ones they chose to abandon because they became, in the class struggles after 1870, a cultural liability.¹⁸

In order to present less of a target to working-class discontent, particularly after having so conspicuously affirmed with this class a democratic rhetoric that helped overthrow the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie found it advantageous in the late nineteenth century to downplay and camouflage its class identity. This meant giving up any claim to a distinctive culture or communal self-consciousness, let alone one that trumpeted inherited “ruling-class superlatives.” Aristocratic high culture was let go. In its place, the bourgeoisie manufactured a new “popular” culture, one that purports to belong to all of us classless individuals. Such a culture functions to flatter, excite, and distract so that we can stand another Monday morning—quietly overlooking the fact that not everybody needs such mollification. Indeed, for some of the latter, it constitutes a lucrative market; as a result, commercial considerations tend to supplant aesthetic ones in its works, “hence what Greenberg calls kitsch…. It is an art and a culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday, of avoidance of difficulty, pretense to indifference, equality before the image of capital.”¹⁹

This crisis, where an unabashedly challenging, genuinely communal culture is being replaced by a pandering, pseudouniversal, mass one, is what gives birth to modernism. Modernism is a movement that dissents from this development. It tries to hold on to “bourgeois art in the absence of a bourgeoisie or, more accurately, … aristocratic art in the age when the bourgeoisie abandons its claims to aristocracy. And how will art keep aristocracy alive? By keeping itself alive, as the remaining vessel of the aristocratic account of experience and its modes; by preserving its own means, its media; by proclaiming those means and media as its values, as meaning in themselves.”²⁰

A couple of things are happening here. First, a fraction of the bourgeoisie is reacting against most of that class's support for the emerging culture of kitsch by asserting...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• CHAPTER ONE Modernism: A Pedagogical Culture?
• CHAPTER TWO Existential Learning
• CHAPTER THREE Strangerhood
• CHAPTER FOUR Presentmindedness
• CHAPTER FIVE Counterconsumerism
• CHAPTER SIX Examples
• CHAPTER SEVEN Who Is a Mediumist Educator?
• Notes