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Morning's Glory
Subscribe in a readerThe rhododendrons have grown six inches in the past two weeks. The winter cactus is blooming in spring. Chaz tested the irrigation system of the greenhouse for a leak. When he found it, he daubed a freeze-dry plastic out of a tube to plug the hole more or less permanently. Thank god for chemical engineering, he muttered to himself. He called out to the greenhouse foreman that it would need to cure for thirty minutes before they could turn the system on to water the plants. Some of them near the end points of the tube network were starting to look blanched, wilty.
He made a note to himself not to say that out loud, because he’d come as soon as he got the message. Central booking has been slacking, clearly. He tsked out loud, and a greenhouse attendant who he didn’t notice creeping up behind him asked him if he said something.
After starting slightly, Chaz excused himself and said he got here as soon as he could. The attendant, who introduced himself as Stan Klepton, responded that Chaz had saved the day around these parts, because Stan had noticed his boss’ visible relief when he learned Chaz could come on a Friday afternoon, so they could be all rarin’ to go on Monday without having to front-load the week by having to problem solve at its very outset. Chaz smiled at him and said he was glad he could help.
You know the plants. . . they listen to us you know. They feed off our stress.
Yeah, ok bud, Chaz thought to himself, put off. Who creeps up on person and says such weird shit! He walked past an enormous bulbous cactus that filled the background of the room with menace.
The word stress echoed in his mind after he left the nursery, and made a line for his pick-up truck, his keys jangling in his hand. He filled in the home visit report, and sat there, looking around. A man in the park across the street, dressed in the orange jumpers of city workers, was buzzing the corners with a weed whacker, sending dandelions, ditch weeds and clover flying. Some grass inevitably got in the way, but for how high it was; it definitely was not “friendly fire.”
He put on his bluetooth in preparation for the drive, started his truck, revved the engine a bit to check for odd sounds, and then pulled out slowly into traffic, while putting on his seatbelt. He hit HQ on his speed dial, and after two rings Masia picked up.
Hi Masie, I just finished the Anderson nursery job. It was a simple patch-up, nothing too dramatic. I’m checking in to see whether there have been any more assignments, or am I good to go for the weekend? My monthly report is on schedule.
Ok Chaz, I’ll let Bill know. Nothing has come in at all since you last checked in, and Bill made sure to tell me to let you go for the weekend, and he said to enjoy your weekend in Haliburton.
Great! That’s good news Masie, thanks for the message. I’m in traffic here, so I’m going to wish you a happy weekend too and sign off for the week.
Will do Chaz, see you on Tuesday.
Sure thing Masie, goodbye.
He pulled onto the Allen expressway and made for the 401. He had packed for the long weekend at the cottage; since Jessica was in Boston on business he arranged to meet Jason Kemp at the cottage for a weekend of fishing, beer-drinking, and college reminiscing. After the kink of the 400 clover leaf, it looked like heavy traffic. Sirius radio was just installed, so there was that. Howard Stern bought up all the shares of that right quick. A slight fatigue grew inside him, swelling behind his eyes. Look forward, he retrained his eyes. Signs, sky, the oak ridge disappearing behind him in glacial mounds, former shoreline of a sea far larger than the present lake. Chunks of rock started to wall in the highway as it traversed the Shield. A slight jaunt west on seven, up 135 past buckhorn lake and he would be there. The fishing show he had just watched, River Monsters, idled in his thoughts as he drove, as well as a youtube video of a pike snapping at a fisherman’s hand. Yawning fish mouths traversed his imagination as he drove. Traffic suddenly slowed, and it was a half an hour wait to get through a bottleneck caused by a severe accident. Blood smeared the pavement lightly, drag marks prominent; EMS was on the scene.
That was a sobering thing, he thought as he merged back into traffic, and shifted in his seat to get more comfortable. The first dirt road he entered was quiet, not even a birdsong, but soon strange shapes started to appear out of the woods. A burnt scarecrow hanging, broken bodied above the road -- he’d been on this road hundreds of times, and he had never seeen anything like that. He hoped a satanic cult hadn’t moved in next door, but he didn’t see anyone as he reached the 1.2 km driveway to his secluded cabin and manouevred his truck slowly down the rocky terrain.
Five years ago he had bought a small landing between two huge shears of rock, on which there was a small but elegantly designed cabin. The parking area was perched about 10 meters above the cabin, and stairs zig zagged between the rock; the lake's light blue-green susurrated beyond. It was the best purchase of his life, he thought, as he walked down the steps, feeling more and more relaxed. Jason was nowhere to be seen, even though Chaz had seen Jason’s sister’s saturn parked on the side of the driveway. There was a pulley system for moving luggage up and down the granite monolith underneath which, his log cabin sat placidly, complete with hot water and tv; he was proud of that pulley. As he reached the wrap-around deck that enveloped the house in a hexagram of regular rectangle shapes, seen from above, Chaz remembered the summer he had built the cottage with his father; he used to have strategems to become an architect.
He found Jason at the front of the house, on the deck, looking out over the lake, which was spotted here and there with rugged outcrops of rock: little jagged islands. The sun hung low in the late afternoon stratum; they were shielded from this apocalypse by a bigger pine-covered island, some of the trees towering over seventy feet above the rock. They could see Cedars spindled about along its edges, their muscular roots clinging to the rock, tenacious. A cloud passed over the drooping sun, momentarily darkening their reunion. Something was very different about his college friend
Some people have the quality of chameleons: their moods, their clothes, their faces, their hair, even their accessories seemed to change so much, and yet despite all this they seem to slip into the background of every gathering; they wear make-up and talons, their faces look this way and that in a maelstrom of expressions. They tended to make others around them feel more powerful. Jason was one such person
He took Jason’s hand warmly, and patted his shoulder, then together they looked out over the lake, commented on its beauty.
Jason spoke first:
Saw some fish jumping the twilight.
I don’t doubt it, I said as I noted the cloud of mosquitoes around Jason’s head, and his periodic swats around the air around him.
These bugs make it hard to enjoy a beautiful sunset. There’s beers pre-chilled in the fridge for you.
Thanks. I'm going to go use that pulley to get the weekend’s supplies down here.
When he returned a beer waited for him in a frosted glass. Jason’s not usually this nice; something must be up. His mother has cancer? His daughter has a fever?
Did you see that scarecrow thing when you came in? Chaz asked as soon as he could. Jason smiled strangely at his friend’s question.
No, what are you talking about?
Hanging in the trees, like an effigy, a burnt scarecrow. Like a scarecrow skeleton.
You need to lay off the drugs, bro!
A chill ran down my spine in the early spring evening air.
You aren’t trying to pull some Blair Witch shit on me, are you?
Jason laughed heartily. Relax, man. The neighbour’s daughter is probably some emo-goth chick and is trolling you hard.
My nearest neighbour is two bays across the lake, I told him.
You’re not going to rape me or anything like that, are you?
You wish!
His quickly emptied first beer was replaced by Jason, who nursed a mojito with the corner of his mouth. The leaves of a huge potted palm in the sunburst lobby at the front of the middle part of the cabin, enclosed by specially treated glass that dispersed light, but insulated well, hung heavily in the room. Jason immediately took the position in the room best for viewing the magnificent palm.
Oh, that reminds me! I brought you a reunion present. Don’t worry if you didn’t get me one, because it’s a pretty ridiculous occasion for a gift. But I remembered you had this wonderful palm, and I saw this new miracle grow formula advertized on television, and I thought it would be a perfect thing for your palm. His speech was quick and unshakeably certain.
Might reduce all the dried leaves; he looked at Chaz sideways. That was among its guarantees, so you’ll have to keep me updated.
Thank you Chaz said, appreciation in his voice mixed with an uncomfortable curiosity. He strolled into the living room, where the sun burst started, after chipping open another beer. He stared at the birds, in little clouds like schools of fish flicker in and out of the window frames. Behind him, he heard Jason rip open the miracle grow, sprinkle it in the palm’s soil, and then water it.
Chaz fired up the hot tub that was between the cottage and the halved rock behind it; the crickets were out in force. A couple frog songs emerged and echoed off the hard surface above them. He unpacked the groceries for the weekend: some steaks for bbqing, some chicken wings, some cheese and crackers, some veggies for skewers, he stocked up the bathrooms with toiletries, then slid out of his clothes and put on his swimsuit. Usually he would just go naked, but he was a little unsure of that because Jason was here. With a towel draped over his shoulder, Chaz made his way to the hot tub with another beer, and another mojito for Jason, who came out five minutes later. The stars by that point had already come out in their glory; Jason too was naked. Chaz felt a little sheepish about that, so he asked Jason to get a bag of chips from the cupboard above the stove, and he slipped his swimsuit off and hid it behind the control panel for the tub. They soaked quietly for a minute or two, sipping their drinks and staring into the great beyond, arms stretched out, facing one another. Steam rose from the water and hid their faces from one another in a melting mask. After twenty minutes, the heat broke Chaz, and he hopped out carefully, testing himself for dizziness. The cool air against Chaz’s body was invigorating and rejuvenating, as if every evil had been burned from his body and now floated off into the lovely and comforting air; a falling star streaked the sky above the cottage as he re-entered it. When Chaz passed the palm on the way to the kitchen for drink refills, he swore that it had four branches that hadn’t been there before the miracle grow. He saw that Jason had spilled some of the grow formula on the floor, so he swept it up and took it to the back yard to dump it; it was best to reduce the garbage they had to drag all the way up to where the driveway joined the county road. The four extra branches struck him as strange as he wandered wearily back out to the hot tub with a tray that hooked onto the edge. On it he put his beer, Jason’s mojito, and some dip and veggies to accompany their chips. They ate, drank, and listened to the waves lapping the shore on the other side of the cabin before they started to reminisce.
Jason was quite the player back then, so most of the stories were about his sexual adventures in which either I or one of his other friends played the wingman.
Chaz sometimes tried to change the topic of conversation by asking about Jason’s wife. Divorced last year, apparently. He asked him if he intended to resume his player lifestyle, and suggested he needed a new wingman because Chaz’s relatively new familial responsibilities almost automatically disqualified him. Kids change the way you smell, and single women can smell it on you. When that didn’t work, he asked if Jason had run into or heard from Glen, another one of our college buddies. This launched him on to his Vegas adventures with Glen, but he ended up admitting he had lost track of Glen too.
Do you think he’s married by now?
Pshhhhh! Glen? Do you remember how awkward he was with women?
Do you think he’s gay?
No, he’s just one of those forever alone people. Undateable, but a great friend to either gender.
After our fourth drink, Chaz suggested getting out of the hot tub before we passed out, and either going for a walk along the small pebble beach skirting the rock wall, or watching a movie. Jason surprised Chaz by endorsing the latter option. They brought a bottle of tequila, a barbeque lighter, some paper for a fire, and a couple logs for a fire, thrown haphazardly in a canvas rudsack.
Wandering out on to the windy beach, they walked sloppily on the smooth pebbles with their loads. Just past the point where the rock rescinded into dark woods, where strange hooting and muted bellowing periodically emerged and disappeared, they found a familiar alcove in the rock, with fallen trees that had washed up on the beach after travelling on the longshore drift. These logs formed perfect benches between which they could build the fire.
Jason made a stone circle, dug up the sand to make a hole, and Chaz went to collect kindling from the woods for the fire. The air was quite cool by now, so he hurried about his task and soon brought an armful of kindling, dumping it beside the ring of stones. Jason had placed sticks parallel and perpendicular, making what they called in boy scouts a log cabin. Inside, Chaz placed a teepee of dried grass, twigs, and small branches. Around the whole thing, they built a much larger teepee with bigger branches, and then Chaz lit the kindling; they watched the fire consume their elaborate construction.
Orange fire-cules wafted up on the mysterious air movements fire makes with the wind. The tequila slowly disappeared and their laughs drowned out the coos and riddles of the woods’ inhabitants. A loon called out in the night’s darkness. They did their damnedest to imitate them, blowing wind through different configurations of their fingers, like their friend Glen used to, but the most they could manage was an eerie whistle. Mostly it just resulted in them falling over laughing.
An osprey called out in the accumulating mist, and a chill went down Chaz’s spine again. Two hours later, their conversation slowed and stopped, replaced by intermittant snores, but the movement of their bodies easing off the log always caused them to wake up again. Finally, they decided it was time to return to the cabin for bed, and they noted a mist had enveloped the entire lake; Jason estimated he could only see two metres into the heavy fog. They left their garbage, promising to collect it in the morning.
Chaz woke up once in the night; through the skylight, towards the hills rising on the other side of their little bay he saw a scarecrow, on fire. He blinked, and light traces of it remained. But it was not the same. The windows were open because he was like a furnace at night. He heard people calling across the lake, scared. A local air raid siren bleeped and then fell silent. He sat as still as he could in his bed, listening for new developments, daring hardly to breathe. But nothing; sleep came easily again as his liver worked out his stupor. He dismissed it as a nightmare as he dozed back to sleep.
Chaz woke to a scream; he practically jumped into a pair of clean underwear, and rushed into the sunburst. Before he even got there, he saw undulating forms pass through the opening of the stairway. Jason screamed again, horribly.
Chaz called out his name, hesitant to go down to where those slithering and wriggling stems were doing god knows what to Jason.
Jason called Chaz desperately. Chaz ran down the stairs, and faced his palm, which had doubled in size over the night: the leaves seemed alive, swallowing Jason in tight rolls. It looked like a terrible hydra spreading out of his solarium to occupy the living room as well. Luckily, the stairs to the basement were right around the corner from the stairway to the bedrooms upstairs. He could get some weaponry from the basement – a spade or a pick, or something. A chainsaw.
He slipped around the corner, glued to the wall, and opened the door to the basement. He jumped down the stairs three at a time, scanned the room in a frenzy, and found his chainsawt. He tested it; two pulls of the cord passed before the grating noise revved through the low empty basement. He let it settle to a malicious growl, and then he ran up the stairs, opened the door, and flung the chainsaw against the first plant limb he found. The plant dropped Jason, all its tendrils aimed towards the source of the hurt. Chaz withdrew quickly, not wanting to anger the creature his palm had become. He hugged the walls, holding the humming chainsaw up in front of his chest. Jason was hurt; he didn’t get up. He had stopped making sounds altogether, actually.
The plant limbs danced in front of Chaz irritably, and he leaned the chainsaw under the kitchen table, before rolling out and crawling towards Jason. He got him by his armpits and dragged him to the hiding spot under the kitchen table, so he could get his weapon again if necessary. Apparently, it wasn’t necessary because the plants limbs were slithering only around the one decapitated end, confused by pain’s first little explosions.
Chaz shook Jason firmly to resuscitate him. He woke up, but he was groggy, as if the plant had drugged him.
Jason, we gotta get out of here.
Before he could finish his sentence, a limb flashed out like a whip and seized Jason by the ankles, dragging him mercilessly towards the palm, and his head hit everything behind him. A giant mouth in the trunk of the palm tree swallowed Jason whole. Chaz sprawled over the floor, rolled and broke out into a run out of the door to the hot tub and the stairs. As he passed the threshold, however, the morning glory on the trestle hanging from the upper-level deck grabbed him and stung him with electric poison. He called out for help as loud as he could, and he heard a response a few moments later from across the lake.
Plant problems, son?
It was the last thing he heard before the morning glory, in collusion with the solitary pine in his back yard, made a meal of him.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Epic Poem excerpt two
And the baobob and the jackpine might
nod in abeyance.
The city of square trees might ban yan
g rowth p otentate.
In the city of lost children, the reeds in oboes
are soggy and splintering.
A culvert they found, mold growing on bodies,
Obeah signs on the DoWling
A body drenched in kerosene, and lit
for the cause.
What crocuses for spring; what care for an imaginarium?
What a foufoura
for a drawn and so fourth dream?
What idea cannot be evicted; what brain cannot be emptied?
That it may leap to the next dream.
There’s a war on and its soldiers are soldered
on circuit boards. Tweet
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Monday, November 07, 2011
Goya References in Film
Compare this scene from The Big Lebowski , of a bunch of men tossing a naked woman into the air with a blanket stretched between them with Goya's painting The Straw Mannekin.
Likewise, compare his print The Sleep of Reason to this shot of Norman Bates from Hitchcock's film Psycho.
TweetTuesday, October 04, 2011
It was all just a big misunderstanding
It was all just a big misunderstanding: Culture and Agency in the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools
What are the differences in the use of the word "culture" between the Frankfurt and the Birmingham Schools, especially in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Adorno and Horkeimer; and according to them, how has culture functioned as an impediment to or an enabler of agency?
Culture, according to Raymond Williams, is one of the most complex words in the English language, second only to a word it is often opposed to: nature. In his work and others who were influenced by him, especially those associated with the Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, culture takes on a quasi-anthropological meaning approximating a total “way of life,” organically deriving from humans, their communications practices, and their activities. The Frankfurt School and its affiliates, on the other hand, had a strategic conception of culture that was conceived in their much discussed full frontal assault on “the culture industry.” They re-introduced the idealism of Hegel and Kant into Marx’s materialism in a thoroughly dialectical manner (Buck-Morss 1977). In this essay, I will draw from the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall to clarify the way they conceptualized culture, as well as the work of Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school to demonstrate how they conceptualized culture specifically within their critique of the “culture industry.” I will then go on to argue that the linguistic complexity of the word culture is at the root of the perception that these two schools are incompatible with regards to their stances towards the individual’s agency in navigating the heavily mediated lifeworld of advanced capitalism and its institutions. Once you account for this linguistic complexity, their work is not incompatible at all; indeed, there is a good deal of overlap in their lesser known work, which I will discuss briefly because of constraints of time and space. It should be noted in this regard, that Gunster (2004) has written an excellent partial synthesis of the two approaches in his book Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies. More work, in this vein, remains to be done.
Addressing this central misconception regarding the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson contends:
“the ‘Culture Industry’ chapter [the most widely cited and read work of the Frankfurt School] does not propose a theory of culture at all, in the modern sense; and the passionate responses it has most often aroused have tended equally often to stem from this misunderstanding and from thinking that it does.” (1990, 143)
Jameson then cites Williams’ account of ‘hegemony’ to argue that there is no equivalent concept in Adorno and Horkheimer, and it is worth quoting this account at length here:
[It is] a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a ‘culture’ … (Williams, qtd. In Jameson 143).
In the work that Jameson is quoting, Williams then goes on to substantiate the concept of hegemony as the lived dominance or subordination of particular classes, but the part that Jameson quoted is a great exemplar of both Williams’ and Hall’s conception of culture. In William’s lesser known essay “A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy,” one can find Williams historicizing and comparing the clashes between the political right and left in the 1960s to a period one hundred years earlier, when Mathew Arnold wrote his book Culture and Anarchy in response to a protest movement that often met in public spaces such as Hyde Park in London. This protest movement rallied for the enfranchisement of working class men, to extend the vote beyond the propertied classes. Arnold’s stance was that Culture was “the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world” (qtd. in Bennett 2005, 90). He thought that the “anarchy” wrought by this protest movement could be diffused most effectively by a mass pedagogy via Culture as he defined it. Put simply, Arnold saw in “Culture” a form of social control, the prerequisite order for society to work itself towards perfection.
Williams’ response to Arnold was ambiguous; on the one hand, he thought the “anarchy” that Arnold demonized, wrought by popular uprisings, was a necessary and positive extension of the rights and freedoms supposedly guaranteed by democratic theory. That is, such social movements contributed to the actualization of the emancipatory content of democratic theory. On the other hand, you can detect in Williams’ prose a tone of sympathy towards Arnold, which isn’t without irony, when he summarizes some of Arnold’s points:
He criticized the national obsession with wealth and production; there were other things more important in the life of a people. He criticized the manipulation of opinion, by politicians and newspapers: a minority talking down, simplifying, sloganeering, to people they thought of as ‘the masses’. He criticized the abstraction of ‘freedom’; it was not only a question of being free to speak but of a kind of national life in which people know enough to have something to say (2005, 5).
In the end, Williams sided with the protest movement because of this sympathy with Arnold’s criticism of the abstraction of freedom; he thought the movements to make this abstraction real were ultimately justified and beneficial for the ongoing renewal of society.
In this summary, one can detect quite a bit of resonance between Arnold and the critique of the “culture industry” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno’s further work The Culture Industry. Indeed, many of the dismissals of Adorno and Horkheimer are based on a facile conflation of their critique and the work of conservative cultural critics such as Arnold, F.R. Leavis, and T.S. Eliot. This conflation is somewhat understandable, considering such statements as “The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years” (Adorno 1991, 107). Jameson thinks of Williams’ previously quoted account of hegemony as a “missing link” in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, but in “The Culture Industry, Reconsidered,” Adorno specifies his and Horkheimer’s use of the word in their earlier work. In this specification, he registers a conception of culture that Jameson argues is missing in his work. Adorno says that in the drafts of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors “spoke of a ‘mass culture’. We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art” (1991, 107). Although Jameson does an admirable job of defending Adorno from his critics in Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistance of the Dialectic, he misses the point that this commentary on the choice of vocabulary used in The Dialectic of Enlightenment actually reveals an awareness of a more anthropological concept of culture as arising spontaneously from the activities of people. Or, as Terry Eagleton puts it “Whereas culture as civilization [in the sense that Arnold uses the term] is rigorously discriminating, culture as a way of life is not. What is good is whatever springs automatically from the people, whoever they may be” (2000, 14). It is simply that Adorno and Horkheimer avoided the more anthropological use of the word culture to distinguish between authentic culture and manufactured culture, a distinction necessary to produce the “genuine individual” who can exercise agency in a more substantive sense .
Furthermore, most of the dismissals of Adorno and Horkheimer are predicated upon this single book, and they don’t take the historical situations of the respective authors into account, nor do they properly register Adorno’s method of negative dialectics. They are based largely on a projection of the idea of the industrial-age masses as passive dupes into their work, without contextualizing it in the larger projects of the Frankfurt School and especially without an adequate appraisal of their methodologies. Indeed, “Horkheimer stressed the active element of cognition, which idealism [in the tradition of Kant] had correctly affirmed. The objects of perception, he argued, are themselves the product of man’s actions, although the relationship tends to be masked by reification. Indeed, nature itself has a historical element, in the dual sense that man conceives of it differently at different times, and that he actively works to change it” (Jay 1973, 53-54). Having witnessed the failure of the proletariat to become the collective subject of history in an international revolution, many of the Frankfurt School members abandoned this idea after 1930 and focused on the potentials inherent in the bourgeois concept of the individual in philosophy, and on the relationship between individual consciousness and social situation and structures of authority in the empirical social sciences. The promise of the concept of the free and socially equal individual had not been realized, especially with the tendency of entrepreneurial capitalism to cyclically bottleneck into monopoly and oligopoly capitalism in Europe and America from the 1920s onwards. Under the leadership of Horkheimer, the second generation Frankfurt school members sought to explain this phenomenon by shifting their attention to the superstructure, especially the ideational contents of science, philosophy, and the arts. Conversely, the first generation Frankfurt School, under the leadership of Kurt Albert Gerlach (Jay 1973, 9) and later Carl Grünberg and typified in the work of Friedrich Pollack and Henryk Grossman, focused on empirical investigations of the economic base of society.
Therefore, the second generation of Frankfurt School theorists, which this essay examines more closely than the first, figuratively flipped the classical Marxist problematic of the base and the superstructure on its head. While orthodox Marxists insisted on the primacy of the base, Critical Theory searched for the articulations of this primacy in the superstructure itself. It would be a mistake to say they utterly abandoned Marx’s assignment of chronological, logical, and social priority to production in the conceptual quadrangle he drew out in The Grundrisse: production, distribution, exchange (circulation), and consumption. But they adjusted their theory to the historical unfolding of the relationship between theory, practice, and praxis (theoretically informed practice). This reframing of a Marxist problematic is a familiar trope in the work of the CCCS as well, especially as derived from Williams’ essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” In this essay, Williams locates part of the problem of the notion that according to Marx the base determines the superstructure in a lack of insight into the flexibility of the word “determine” and its other forms. According to Williams it has a “hard” and a “soft” meaning: the “hard” meaning has “a theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity” (Williams 2005, 32). Alternatively, the “soft” and ultimately preferable, interpretation of the word in the Marxist formula is “a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures” (ibid. 32). Williams elaborates:
It is not only the depths to which this process reaches, selecting and organizing and interpreting our experience. It is also that it is continually active and adjusting; it isn’t just the past, the dry husks of ideology which we can more easily discard. And this can only be so, in a complex society, if it is something more substantial and more flexible than any abstract imposed ideology. Thus we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture. (2005, 39)
Just as the Critical Theorists shifted gears from examining economic policies and practices to an analysis of the arts and tendencies in science and philosophy, the CCCS, under the directorship of Stuart Hall, shifted gears from the process of encoding (production) to decoding (consumption). The mediating work in this sequence of events is Williams’ essay “Means of Communication as Means of Production” (2005). Furthermore, there was a member of the Frankfurt School who urged the necessity of reception studies in a materialist, sociological analysis of literature as early as 1932: Leo Lowenthal (1989, 42). This anticipates the “struggle over meaning” that was the object of study for the CCCS in the 1970s, many of whom studied the reception (decoding) of cultural products. Indeed, Lowenthal argues that:
Contrary to common assertions, this theory (Critical Theory) neither postulates that culture in its entirety can be explained in terms of economic relations, nor that specific cultural or psychological phenomena are nothing but reflections of the social substructure. Rather a materialistic theory places its emphasis on mediation: the mediating processes between a mode of production and the modes of cultural life including literature. (45)
There lies the rub. Mediation is one of the essences of the dialectic method, especially its Hegelian variants. Some of the people who dismiss The Dialectic of Enlightenment on account of its alleged treatment of people as ‘passive dupes’, on account of its overwhelming pessimism, or even on account of its purported disdainful treatment of jazz (properly historicized, it is the specific form of swing that is criticized, as opposed to virtuoso variants of jazz such as bebop) should take this to heart. If anything, The Dialectic of Enlightenment is the supreme antithesis of advanced capitalism; as it registers its mechanisms, its betrayals, and the trajectories of its highest ideal – Reason – it opposes the totality of the commodity fetish as the pre-eminent structuring form of society. To react to such a complete antithesis with simple rejection and dismissal is to counter antithesis with antithesis, that is, to completely obstruct the realization of the dialectic in synthesis. The kernals of such a synthesis can be found in the pages of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Culture Industry, The Eclipse of Reason, and Negative Dialectics themselves.
Take this sample passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example:
The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film. Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.
Agency for the individual, according to this passage, is obstructed by the surfeit of information (“precise detail”) framed by the filmic representation. Its mimetic faculty – the ability of sound film to reproduce reality – reinforces the practice of reification: the transformation of phenomena into objects bought and sold on the market. In “The Schema of Mass Culture,” Adorno states that “in so far as the individual images are played past in an uninterrupted photographic series on the screen they have already become mere objects in advance.” (1991, 81). The identity logic of the commodity, that objects are rendered equivalent through exchange value – for example, two pigs are worth the same amount as a used Ford focus – is inherent in the form of subjectivity itself. Under the aegis of capitalism, each individual is coerced into selling their wage labour as a product on the market, thus becoming an object. The documentary form of this self-objectification is the resumé. The inability, or more precisely, the strategically undermined ability of the individual to distinguish between life as it is lived in the film and as it is lived in reality, or objecthood and subjecthood, compromises their ability to exercise their agency. As Deborah Cook (2004) argues, “Adorno maintains that individuals are incapable of relating to one another immediately because they now see themselves, and are seen by others, as ‘economic subjects’; that is, as defined by their wages or salaries, and levels of consumption” (26). Just as in the quoted passage, the boundaries between the commoditized representation of reality and reality itself become blurred, “Dissimilar life contexts and situations are thereby forced into a legal mould where differences are effectively leveled and dissolved” (Cook 2004, 31). And yet, the accusation of “pessimism” so frequently leveled against Adorno and Horkheimer misses the mark, for it is Adorno who argues that “as little as regressive listening is a symptom of progress in consciousness of freedom, it could suddenly turn around if art, in unity with the society, should ever leave the road of the always-identical” (italics mine, 1991, 59). For Adorno, art’s function was to hold before us the possibility of happiness, a happiness Adorno distinguished from pleasure because of the former’s truth content. Pleasure, for him, is a partial happiness that compensates for the absence of real happiness. Finally, Cook also finds an optimistic streak in Adorno:
Indeed, Habermas makes the same category mistake as many others who have taken the linguistic turn: from the proposition that needs and desires are expressed in language, he infers wrongly that needs and desires are themselves inherently linguistic. At the same time, however, if nature were radically Other than reason, it would be fruitless to speculate – as Adorno certainly does – about a future reconciliation between reason and nature. (89)
The imperialism of Capital is that it has conquered both space and time: space in the guise of colonialism and then arbitrage (Carey 1989), and time in the expansion of market activity to the commotization of leisure, and the elimination of sacred temporalities such as the Sabbath. It does not eliminate social classes by generating wealth; it disguises the operation of class in terms of both wealth and power. The elimination of poverty is thus akin to the proverbial carrot, hung in front of the donkey, not coincidentally a “beast of burden.” Stuart Hall, sees these “masks” disguising the operation of class as “an ideological effect of the new consumer culture, a sense that increasing access to commodities and consumer culture has released the working classes from a prior state of poverty” (Proctor 2004, 16). Hall, in his book Resistance through Rituals, examines the way subcultures develop as a result of the perennial “struggle over meaning” that is part and parcel of the multi-accentuality of discourse, an idea he derived from the Russian linguist Volosinov. He adopts an idea from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe the practices of subcultures in re-contextualizing meaning according to their particular weltanschauung: bricolage. This practice, which Levi-Strauss used to delineate how pre-modern societies engage with the everyday world around them, Hall labels as a means of “negotiating (as opposed to overcoming) class difference” (Proctor, 2004, 91). This sounds quite similar to Adorno’s valorization of Mahler’s music in his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening:”
Not popular music but artistic music has furnished a model for this possibility [to transcend the repetition compulsion of the always-identical]. It is not for nothing that Mahler is the scandal of all bourgeois musical aesthetics. They call him uncreative because he suspends their concept of creation itself. Everything with which he occupies himself is already there. He accepts it in its vulgarized form; his themes are expropriated ones. (59)
Indeed, just as Jameson finds in Adorno, who identified most closely with modernism, an appropriate antidote for the postmodern logic of late capitalism, this passage could be read in the documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, which launches an attack against copyright, without missing a beat.
However, while Hall finds in the engagement with the popular the crux of agency, Adorno found possibilities for escape from the toxic totality and for individual agency in high modernism. Where Hall differs from Adorno is his privileging of the moment of decoding: he elevates consumption over production. According to Proctor “his [Hall’s] emphasis on the audience’s active role in the production of meaning signals his culturalist faith in human agency” (Proctor, 2004, 70). However, if we use the German word aufheben, which usually is translated as “sublation” and which means both elevation and cancellation in Hegelian dialectics, in place of “elevates,” then Hall’s elevation of consumption simultaneously cancels it, leaving production bared in its wake. Hall has successfully integrated Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to describe how the struggle over meaning articulated in culture works to secure rule by the dominant class by consent rather than force. Finally, Proctor contends “It is pointless, Hall and Whannel might argue, to compare the music of Kylie Minogue and Mozart because ‘different kinds of music offer different sorts of satisfaction’” and that such a comparison neglects “giving credence to the specific pleasures of different audiences” (2004, 21). As I argued before, however, Adorno was more interested in happiness than pleasure, and as such, he didn’t develop a positive engagement with popular culture like Hall did. Happiness for Adorno constituted more than the simple absence of suffering or the evanescent quality of pleasure.
Therefore, the perception that the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools are fundamentally incompatible is a classic case of overstatement. It is at least somewhat due to a flawed conflation of the way both Schools used the world “culture.” They share a lot of common ground, from Horkheimer’s affirmation of the active nature of cognition as a salvageable concept from bourgeois idealism, to Hall’s location of agency in the manner in which popular culture is received and subsequently mobilized. They also share some important differences, as I have shown with the comparison of Adorno and Hall. I would conclude, however, that the polarizing nature of the perception of them as incompatible is counter-productive, and that the overarching and enduring influence of Marx on both schools hails a dialectical reconciliation of the two approaches to culture.
References
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The culture industry: selected essays on mass culture. London:
Routledge.
Bennett, Tony. 2005. Culture. In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
Eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris. London: Blackwell.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. Origins of Negative Dialectics. New York: Free Press.
Carey, James. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Cook, Deborah. 2004. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London
and New York: Routledge.
Eagleton, Terry. 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford, Eng; Malden, UK: Blackwell.
Gunster, Shane. 2004. Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural
Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Horkheimer, Max. 2004. The Eclipse of Reason. London; New York: Continuum,
Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the persistence of the
dialectic. London; New York: Verso.
Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination. New York: Heinemann.
Lowenthal, Leo. 1989. On Sociology of Literature. In Critical Theory and Society, Eds. Stephen
Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 40-52. London and New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1971. The Grundrisse. Trans. David Mclellan. New York: Harper & Row.
Proctor, James. 2004. Stuart Hall. London ; New York: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond. 2005. Culture and Materialism. London: Verso.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
I've started a new multimedia, narrative blog!!!
I have started a new blog. The new one, which I've developed with the tumblr platform, will be more coherent and less eclectic than this one. It is a concept blog; the blogger is a fictional character, a persona. He is a mad scientist type of character who is performing experiments on human beings. The blog is also multimedia, with relevant photos or stills from films with relevant imagery, and songs that the scientist or his subjects make. I've been wanting to share some of my music, and I thought this would be an interesting way to present it: as part of a digital narrative. I have synched the blog with my facebook and twitter accounts, so updates are automatically posted both places, so follow me @trevorcunning or friend me (with the subject line "caconoia"). The name of the blog, "caconoia," is a new word I coined made from two greek word-parts meaning unharmonious thought, or ugly, dissonant thought. I have also posted paypal donate buttons, so if you enjoy the content on this site or the new blog, or find them useful in anyway, please support the hard work I put into them by donating. I will donate 10% of the money I make in the next 6 months to Doctors without Borders. And remember to always check your browser address box to make sure the padlock symbol, signifying a more secure site, is there when doing transactions online. Thank you for your support!
Sunday, July 31, 2011
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