3/11/19
I was thinking this morning of how the type of account I want to write should begin with a statement of main themes, that it’s not enough—as I tend to do in lists—to enumerate proper names with maybe a tagline to indicate critical orientation. Then, having had a look-in yesterday at Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art, I picked up this morning Barthes’ “Myth Today,” which includes, as perhaps ultimate inspiration or challenge, the lines: “In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry.”—with the two seen as “two equally extreme methods”: “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize.”
For me, the true poeticization is something like “Metro Lace” where language serves the purpose of asserting arbitrary relations to the subject and object—it is a bridge between two things, each with its own status, and the poem approximates moods only, making the capacities of language register presence—thus a sensual act because the writer is a locus of senses and sensory impressions in the act of operating language.
But a critical language needs history—which is biographical first because the utterance has to be placed in time and because the evaluation is retrospective. “Entirely permeable to history”—though—is more extreme than what I had been considering. And that’s where reading Barthes’s very lucid discussion may be crucial at this time. For I begin to see that what has hung me up all along is what I might call the particular vantage of my intervention. I’ve wanted it to be “autobiographical” or “lyrical” criticism, a story of becoming, à la Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes Who One Is,” but that is fraught with the difficulty of articulating who and where and what one is. The account creates its author, I don’t doubt, but that’s an intimidating prospect. As “lyrical,” the account allows for a love story, of sorts, and that might too easily become fan notes or the glib appreciations the internet is rife with. But Barthes’s concept of myth brings me to something I’ve been trying to suggest with such formulations as “exile,” “pursuit,” and “flight.” The point is that the perspective has to be one willing to excavate the myths built into the objects by their context (the historical imperative) and to witness the myths of becoming that each object bequeaths.
Here, then, we’re engaged in true critique, the type that would extract principles of becoming, not so absolute as an interrogation of essence by means of substance, or of form by accident—since I don’t think I will uncover Platonism at the heart of the endeavor, nor phenomenology, but rather a Nietzschean or possibly romantic irony, a gesture, in other words, toward art/poetry by other means. But if I am attentive to the myths built into, or incorporated by, the reception of the object, and how that reception creates or stimulates a certain subject—the subject as receptor/receiver/reader/viewer—then the point of the writer in the equation (what Barthes calls the mythologist) is to delineate the ideology at work each step of the way because, in Barthes’s terms, revolution does not occur. The failure of revolution is the real failure, or the failure of the Real. The arts are, at best, a gesture toward emancipation, but that impetus only exists to end up in art. So that even a “revolution of the word” or a revolution of ways and means within the artform still stops short of eradicating the art world and the history of art. This particular confrontation, compromise and concession has to be acknowledged within the objects, but also within the spectator—as observer, not actant. We are always watching a pageant go by, that’s the nature of the condition. What Barthes points us to is acknowledgment of the degree to which we take the “nature” or naturalness of our condition from the bourgeois world that dominates all critique and tables each intervention. As such, protest is always theater and acting out, unless one sets aside representation and manifests overthrow; that, at times, is the context by which the object is informed, but that gesture becomes encoded into its subsequent reception, into its status as a historic break or defeat.
See Barthes: “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types . . . . So it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixed this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight toward other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at least become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”
It’s clear to me, from the above, that for too long I’ve entertained the idea of enumeration, the weighing in the scales—this is more significant than that—for the purpose of creating “the universal order of the hierarchy of possessions”—to create that eternal analogue of my former life, the life I lived within the objects as “worlds” to explore. But I see in Barthes the challenge to objectify the myths of the things themselves, to write as a means to “take in hand and transform the Usage”—where the “usage” is the values gained from the museum, the library, the archive, the collection, the syllabus, the news bulletin, the ad, the prospectus, and the transformation has to come from the twin actions of ideologizing and poeticizing—where history is the autobiography (a life in time) and lyric is the acquired language/taste of a life lived in art.
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