i en kronologiskt omkullkastad roman i fiktiv dagboksform
Nu är hon här igen. Utan förvarning dök hon upp i morse. Slyet på den illa efterhållna grusvägen gav vika medan jag satt till frukost, och strax efteråt smällde hon igen bildörren och kramade om mig på förstukvisten. Hon hade saknat mig påstod hon, och jag fick tillstå motsvarande känslor.
Att hon helt sonika tagit för givet att finna mig på samma plats som för tre veckor sedan och inte ens brytt sig om att ringa i förväg, fick mig att inse hur statiskt mitt liv blivit. Förutom promenaderna upp till sjön och måndagsturerna till lanthandeln har jag knappt rört mig utanför tomten.
Så i skrivande stund sitter jag här i bara mässingen på en köksstol och betraktar hennes rygg där hon naken sover eftermiddagslur. Hon har världens vackraste nacke. Ett pekoralt påstående, som skulle kunna följas av en mängd lika subjektiva överdrifter, bara det att det här faktiskt råkade kännas sant precis nu. Jag har svårt att tänka mig något som skulle kunna göra en nacke mer perfekt än den i mitt blickfång. Hela rummet fångas upp i de mjuka kurvorna ner mot axlarna och den knappt märkbara fördjupningen kring nackkotorna.
Jag vet att det är dumt att sitta här och skriva, istället för att ligga där och känna. Men jag känner ett tvångsmässigt behov att spara detta. Jag vill minnas detta nu. Just nu, då det bara är ögonblick sedan det hände. Man vet aldrig när senildemensen sätter in.
måndag 8 november 2010
fredag 5 november 2010
The End of History / the End of Art
Essay for Historical & Critical studies
Ever since first getting acquainted with Francis Fukuyama while studying International Relations, the idea of the end of history has intrigued and annoyed me. Over the years I have realized that there are more sides to it than simply an arrogant neo-liberal self-aggrandizement, and some of these aspects have become important themes in my creative work. Hence, I will take this essay as an opportunity to dig more deeply into the theories and try to sort out the relevant parts of them.
The first point to make is that these theories are rarely as dystopic as the most superficial interpretation of the term might suggest. It’s not about the end of time, the end of the world or the end of humanity (except in the case of Lyotard’s Inhuman, but given that it is presented as a vision of the future rather than an analysis of our present situation I allow myself to exclude it). Not even the most radical of these philosophers raise any claim that events will stop taking place, that conflict will be abolished or that change will cease. It is rather to do with a contemporary feeling that we’ve lost our direction; that the sense of progress and of a coherent past is slipping out of our hands. Or, as Niethammer puts it: ”The problematic of posthistory is not the end of the world, but the end of meaning”(Niethammer, 1993: 3) It seems to me that, as so often is the case in philosophy, it is partly a case of semantics; of defining the words. What is history? And what can be implied by claiming the end of it?
A quick look on wiktionary gives us no less than three slightly differing definitions that will be relevant for this essay: ”History as the aggregate of past events”; ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”; and ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. I will come back to the difference between the first and the second definition, but now, hopefully needing no further explanation, I deduce from these definitions that the end of history could mean both an endpoint in history, and an end of history as a concept. Although the line between can be argued to be blurred (as for example in the case of Hegel) I do think there is an important difference, and will try to deal with the theories according to this.
A final stage?
Theories of an endpoint in history rests on reading it as a progressive development; that there is a reachable goal to history. Once that goal is reached events may have impact on individuals, but they will no longer be part of history, as indeed the very definition of history in this case is that development whose endpoint has been reached:
The two most explicit examples in this category are Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama. Marx, to begin with, introduced the materialist conception of history, whereby he meant that all of history is to be read in the tension between forces of production and relations of production, and takes the form of class struggle. In this view, communism, which will abolish the class society and install the perfect harmony between forces and relations, represents the final stage of this development and thus the end of history (although Marx himself preferred to talk about this as pre-history, lending him more credit in my coming argument). While brilliantly analyzing history, his predictions of the future can be said to have proved wrong with the collapse of communist regimes in the 20th century, although it could of course be argued that his analysis of capitalism as the penultimate stage still holds and that past communist revolutions were simply premature. That however, is not the question here.
Francis Fukuyama, while building on the same theoretical framework as Marx, shortcuts it, substitutes class with ideology and asserts that the end of history is the death of major ideological battle. While also a materialist, his emphasis on the development of the market rather than the mode of production leads him to call capitalism (that which in Marx’ theory was the necessary but highly problematic last step before communism) the final stage and liberal democracy the final form of human government. Furthermore he contrasts with Marx in claiming that this end is not only imminent, but with the end of the Cold War and the globalization of neo-liberalism, it’s already upon us. What makes this theory even more problematic than marxism to me, is not only that the age of the great ideologies started as late as the 18th century and therefor must be secondary to other forces in driving a great narrative history, or that arguing the end of ideology is itself an ideological act as Derrida points out (Sim, 2001: 18), but also that it represents a very one-dimensional view of conflict and development. In simply ignoring Marx’ other great concept – dialectics, Fukuyama fails to recognize internal conflict. While I agree that globalization, in making the world into one, deeply interwoven system, represents a geographical end of history that can hardly be reversed (Jameson, 1998: 90-92), I can see no valid argument for claiming that that system would not carry the seeds for its own transformation.
So, while it’s easy to see that, as philosophers with political agendas, both Marx and Fukuyama would be prone to overestimate the present (what Jameson calls ”epochality”(Jameson, 1998: 90)), the main question is not whether or not their particular predictions would turn out to be correct, but whether it is at all fruitful to think of history as one big progressive development with a possible endpoint. Does history have to be progressive? Does it have to be a singular history with capital H? To get closer to such problems I first have to get past Hegel; whom both the former thinkers base their philosophies on.
Indeed Hegel can be said to represent the very blueprint of such narratives, with his Geist going through several stages of ”dialectical revelation of consciousness to itself” (Danto, 2005: 15), with the merging of subject and object in philosophy as the final stage and end of history. Both Marx and Fukuyama have interpreted that endpoint as a concrete, temporal one, and Hegel himself seems to have been convinced that he was living in that very final stage back in the early 1800s. Still, from my very superficial reading of Hegel in secondary sources, I sense that there is another lesson to be drawn, probably contrary to Hegel’s own conclusions, from his ideas. That is; what if the insight that consciousness of consciousness represents an end is not applicable to History, but rather is a way to understand the development of any histories? Which, I believe, brings us to postmodernism.
Metanarratives
I cannot believe in an endpoint in history such as described above, simply because change is the only constant and as Derrida says ”we have no option but to extend history” (Sim, 2001: 63). My sense of loss of direction is not my disbelief in progress from now on but a fundamental scepticism towards developmental progress as a coherent narrative. Thus it has less to do with an arrival at a ”perpetual present” (Jameson, 1998: 20), than the realization that in a sense we’ve aways lived in one. The height of modernism would seem as directionless as our contemporary situation for a truly postmodern thinker. The paradox is of course, as Arthur C. Danto points out, that these very thoughts could not have been thought before our time (Danto, 2005: 105). So, there must be a history in some sense; an order in which, if nothing else, our thoughts evolve.
To go back to semantics: what we have more or less discarded is ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”, or to quote Lyotard: we have equipped ourselves with ”incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 2003: 1122). What we still have left however is ”History as the aggregate of past events”, and since we are aware of those past events also ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. Truly; one of the characteristics of our time is that the past is available to us in an unprecedented degree. It’s just that under our scrutinizing gaze it has lost the uniform character that used to point towards a certain future. Or to in a way agree with Hegel; by becoming aware of itself, history as one big progressive development has met an end. But that constitutes only ”the end of a certain concept of history” (Sim, 2001: 44).
With the risk of overloading this essay with different thinkers the final push to the sum must be to add the point of Oswald Spengler; breaking up our linear perspective of history into different epochs, each with its own definition of progress that could not have been thought of in the preceding epoch. In other words; we are dealing with several histories, not one History.
The end of art?
In few subjects is the loss of historical direction as evident as within art. It is expressed both in a feeling that ”nothing new can be done” which is commented on by various artists who, ironically or not, recycle art history (the Chapman brothers reimagining Goya prints or Ben Kelly exhibiting a parody of Duchamp’s fountain) and in the view that nothing nowadays distinguishes art from non-art; in the case of it becoming part of a broader visual and commercial culture (see Andy Warhols pop art and today’s ”superflat” art of Takashi Murakami) and in the case of calling anything art, even distinctively anti-artistic works such as Maurizio Cattelan taping a gallerist to the wall, stealing another artist’s exhibition or showing the rubble of a destroyed museum in a gallery. Again a distinction may be made between an endpoint in the history of art, and an end of art (or art history) as a concept.
Looking for grand narratives similar to Marx or Fukuyama within art first of course brings us to the history of art as representation of nature, mimesis, which has been more or less taken for granted for centuries. That history, as Danto observes, has an at least theoretically possible end in the perfect imitation of all aspects of the object. However, that definition of art has with the emergence of modernism more or less been abolished. For modernism’s sense of progress instead one of the most important readings must be that of Clement Greenberg who sees the history of art as the strive towards pure form. That is, the emancipation of art from representation of the outside; its final stage being the unmeddled embodiment of its different mediums. In that way, to speak of only one of these mediums, the work of Mondrian with his primary colours and geometry, Pollock with his expressive mark freed from mimesis, and Malevich with his Black Square, could all be said to represent steps of such a purification of painting.
Danto, on the other hand, believes that this preoccupation with the medium of art is but a step towards philosophical self-definition (Danto, 1998: 123). So it’s not a question of neither perfecting nor exhausting a medium but
Danto sees that end of art in Duchamp’s invention of the ready-made: the demonstration that art is defined in it being interpreted as art (Danto, 2005: 39). So Danto sees the current state of art as post-historical, including a pluralism of expressions, of which none implies a direction for art as a whole. I can agree with that analysis, but once again there’s the difference of interpreting this as an arrival at a perpetual present or to attack the concept of art history by claiming that in fact there never was one coherent story of development. Since basing his theory on Hegel, who saw art as one of the stages leading up to the end of History in philosophy, Danto must fit his analysis into this metanarrative, claiming that art once again has to be disenfranchised from philosophy.
But by noting that for example the history of art as representation of nature began much earlier (with cave paintings) than the history of art as a concept (which could be said to begin with Kant), I think it is once more shown that history is not one long narrative, but the overlapping of several histories. In his later writings and his replies to reactions against his theory, Danto acknowledges that he merely ”meant to declare the end of a certain story” (Danto, 1998: 119) and also that ”the future is what we cannot imagine until it is present” (Danto, 1998: 140).
So, there is no death of art, and neither is there a definite endpoint in the History of art, but simply the end of one history of art. It seems to me, that in leaving metanarratives behind, the subject of history could not be about anything else than the aggregate of past events, which, at any given point in time, can be interpreted in regards to several narratives, some not having been possible before. That one of these narratives meets an end through cognition in the Hegelian sense, does not mean that another has won or that the subject (in this case, art) dies. It simply means an opening up of new possibilities.
References:
Burgin, V., 1986, The End of Art Theory, London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Danto, A.C., 1998, ’Art After the End of Art’ in The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the Ends of Taste, Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, pp. 115-128
Danto, A.C., 1998, ’The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’ in History and Theory, vol 37, No. 4, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, pp. 127-143
Danto, A.C., 2005, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: Columbia University Press
Elliott, G., 2008, Ends In Sight, London: Pluto Press
Fukuyama, F., 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press
Jameson, F., 1998, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London: Verso
Kojève, A., 1980, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, London: Cornell University Press
Lillegard, N., 2003, ’Spirit and the End of Art’ published 2003-02-25 at Eurozine
URL: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-02-25-lillegard-en.html
Lyotard, J.F., 2003, ’Introduction to The Postmodern Condition’ in Art In Theory 1900-2000, 2nd ed, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 1122-1123
Niethammer, L., 1993, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London: Verso
Sim, S., 2001, Derrida and the End of History, Royston: Icon Books Ltd.
Ever since first getting acquainted with Francis Fukuyama while studying International Relations, the idea of the end of history has intrigued and annoyed me. Over the years I have realized that there are more sides to it than simply an arrogant neo-liberal self-aggrandizement, and some of these aspects have become important themes in my creative work. Hence, I will take this essay as an opportunity to dig more deeply into the theories and try to sort out the relevant parts of them.
The first point to make is that these theories are rarely as dystopic as the most superficial interpretation of the term might suggest. It’s not about the end of time, the end of the world or the end of humanity (except in the case of Lyotard’s Inhuman, but given that it is presented as a vision of the future rather than an analysis of our present situation I allow myself to exclude it). Not even the most radical of these philosophers raise any claim that events will stop taking place, that conflict will be abolished or that change will cease. It is rather to do with a contemporary feeling that we’ve lost our direction; that the sense of progress and of a coherent past is slipping out of our hands. Or, as Niethammer puts it: ”The problematic of posthistory is not the end of the world, but the end of meaning”(Niethammer, 1993: 3) It seems to me that, as so often is the case in philosophy, it is partly a case of semantics; of defining the words. What is history? And what can be implied by claiming the end of it?
A quick look on wiktionary gives us no less than three slightly differing definitions that will be relevant for this essay: ”History as the aggregate of past events”; ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”; and ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. I will come back to the difference between the first and the second definition, but now, hopefully needing no further explanation, I deduce from these definitions that the end of history could mean both an endpoint in history, and an end of history as a concept. Although the line between can be argued to be blurred (as for example in the case of Hegel) I do think there is an important difference, and will try to deal with the theories according to this.
A final stage?
Theories of an endpoint in history rests on reading it as a progressive development; that there is a reachable goal to history. Once that goal is reached events may have impact on individuals, but they will no longer be part of history, as indeed the very definition of history in this case is that development whose endpoint has been reached:
What I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. (Fukuyama, 1992: xii)
The two most explicit examples in this category are Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama. Marx, to begin with, introduced the materialist conception of history, whereby he meant that all of history is to be read in the tension between forces of production and relations of production, and takes the form of class struggle. In this view, communism, which will abolish the class society and install the perfect harmony between forces and relations, represents the final stage of this development and thus the end of history (although Marx himself preferred to talk about this as pre-history, lending him more credit in my coming argument). While brilliantly analyzing history, his predictions of the future can be said to have proved wrong with the collapse of communist regimes in the 20th century, although it could of course be argued that his analysis of capitalism as the penultimate stage still holds and that past communist revolutions were simply premature. That however, is not the question here.
Francis Fukuyama, while building on the same theoretical framework as Marx, shortcuts it, substitutes class with ideology and asserts that the end of history is the death of major ideological battle. While also a materialist, his emphasis on the development of the market rather than the mode of production leads him to call capitalism (that which in Marx’ theory was the necessary but highly problematic last step before communism) the final stage and liberal democracy the final form of human government. Furthermore he contrasts with Marx in claiming that this end is not only imminent, but with the end of the Cold War and the globalization of neo-liberalism, it’s already upon us. What makes this theory even more problematic than marxism to me, is not only that the age of the great ideologies started as late as the 18th century and therefor must be secondary to other forces in driving a great narrative history, or that arguing the end of ideology is itself an ideological act as Derrida points out (Sim, 2001: 18), but also that it represents a very one-dimensional view of conflict and development. In simply ignoring Marx’ other great concept – dialectics, Fukuyama fails to recognize internal conflict. While I agree that globalization, in making the world into one, deeply interwoven system, represents a geographical end of history that can hardly be reversed (Jameson, 1998: 90-92), I can see no valid argument for claiming that that system would not carry the seeds for its own transformation.
So, while it’s easy to see that, as philosophers with political agendas, both Marx and Fukuyama would be prone to overestimate the present (what Jameson calls ”epochality”(Jameson, 1998: 90)), the main question is not whether or not their particular predictions would turn out to be correct, but whether it is at all fruitful to think of history as one big progressive development with a possible endpoint. Does history have to be progressive? Does it have to be a singular history with capital H? To get closer to such problems I first have to get past Hegel; whom both the former thinkers base their philosophies on.
Indeed Hegel can be said to represent the very blueprint of such narratives, with his Geist going through several stages of ”dialectical revelation of consciousness to itself” (Danto, 2005: 15), with the merging of subject and object in philosophy as the final stage and end of history. Both Marx and Fukuyama have interpreted that endpoint as a concrete, temporal one, and Hegel himself seems to have been convinced that he was living in that very final stage back in the early 1800s. Still, from my very superficial reading of Hegel in secondary sources, I sense that there is another lesson to be drawn, probably contrary to Hegel’s own conclusions, from his ideas. That is; what if the insight that consciousness of consciousness represents an end is not applicable to History, but rather is a way to understand the development of any histories? Which, I believe, brings us to postmodernism.
Metanarratives
I cannot believe in an endpoint in history such as described above, simply because change is the only constant and as Derrida says ”we have no option but to extend history” (Sim, 2001: 63). My sense of loss of direction is not my disbelief in progress from now on but a fundamental scepticism towards developmental progress as a coherent narrative. Thus it has less to do with an arrival at a ”perpetual present” (Jameson, 1998: 20), than the realization that in a sense we’ve aways lived in one. The height of modernism would seem as directionless as our contemporary situation for a truly postmodern thinker. The paradox is of course, as Arthur C. Danto points out, that these very thoughts could not have been thought before our time (Danto, 2005: 105). So, there must be a history in some sense; an order in which, if nothing else, our thoughts evolve.
To go back to semantics: what we have more or less discarded is ”History as a record or narrative description of past events”, or to quote Lyotard: we have equipped ourselves with ”incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 2003: 1122). What we still have left however is ”History as the aggregate of past events”, and since we are aware of those past events also ”History as the branch of knowledge that studies the past”. Truly; one of the characteristics of our time is that the past is available to us in an unprecedented degree. It’s just that under our scrutinizing gaze it has lost the uniform character that used to point towards a certain future. Or to in a way agree with Hegel; by becoming aware of itself, history as one big progressive development has met an end. But that constitutes only ”the end of a certain concept of history” (Sim, 2001: 44).
With the risk of overloading this essay with different thinkers the final push to the sum must be to add the point of Oswald Spengler; breaking up our linear perspective of history into different epochs, each with its own definition of progress that could not have been thought of in the preceding epoch. In other words; we are dealing with several histories, not one History.
The end of art?
In few subjects is the loss of historical direction as evident as within art. It is expressed both in a feeling that ”nothing new can be done” which is commented on by various artists who, ironically or not, recycle art history (the Chapman brothers reimagining Goya prints or Ben Kelly exhibiting a parody of Duchamp’s fountain) and in the view that nothing nowadays distinguishes art from non-art; in the case of it becoming part of a broader visual and commercial culture (see Andy Warhols pop art and today’s ”superflat” art of Takashi Murakami) and in the case of calling anything art, even distinctively anti-artistic works such as Maurizio Cattelan taping a gallerist to the wall, stealing another artist’s exhibition or showing the rubble of a destroyed museum in a gallery. Again a distinction may be made between an endpoint in the history of art, and an end of art (or art history) as a concept.
Looking for grand narratives similar to Marx or Fukuyama within art first of course brings us to the history of art as representation of nature, mimesis, which has been more or less taken for granted for centuries. That history, as Danto observes, has an at least theoretically possible end in the perfect imitation of all aspects of the object. However, that definition of art has with the emergence of modernism more or less been abolished. For modernism’s sense of progress instead one of the most important readings must be that of Clement Greenberg who sees the history of art as the strive towards pure form. That is, the emancipation of art from representation of the outside; its final stage being the unmeddled embodiment of its different mediums. In that way, to speak of only one of these mediums, the work of Mondrian with his primary colours and geometry, Pollock with his expressive mark freed from mimesis, and Malevich with his Black Square, could all be said to represent steps of such a purification of painting.
Danto, on the other hand, believes that this preoccupation with the medium of art is but a step towards philosophical self-definition (Danto, 1998: 123). So it’s not a question of neither perfecting nor exhausting a medium but
The ”end of art” instead is a theory of consciousness – of how a developmental sequence terminates in the consciousness of that sequence as a whole. (Danto, 1998: 137)
Danto sees that end of art in Duchamp’s invention of the ready-made: the demonstration that art is defined in it being interpreted as art (Danto, 2005: 39). So Danto sees the current state of art as post-historical, including a pluralism of expressions, of which none implies a direction for art as a whole. I can agree with that analysis, but once again there’s the difference of interpreting this as an arrival at a perpetual present or to attack the concept of art history by claiming that in fact there never was one coherent story of development. Since basing his theory on Hegel, who saw art as one of the stages leading up to the end of History in philosophy, Danto must fit his analysis into this metanarrative, claiming that art once again has to be disenfranchised from philosophy.
But by noting that for example the history of art as representation of nature began much earlier (with cave paintings) than the history of art as a concept (which could be said to begin with Kant), I think it is once more shown that history is not one long narrative, but the overlapping of several histories. In his later writings and his replies to reactions against his theory, Danto acknowledges that he merely ”meant to declare the end of a certain story” (Danto, 1998: 119) and also that ”the future is what we cannot imagine until it is present” (Danto, 1998: 140).
So, there is no death of art, and neither is there a definite endpoint in the History of art, but simply the end of one history of art. It seems to me, that in leaving metanarratives behind, the subject of history could not be about anything else than the aggregate of past events, which, at any given point in time, can be interpreted in regards to several narratives, some not having been possible before. That one of these narratives meets an end through cognition in the Hegelian sense, does not mean that another has won or that the subject (in this case, art) dies. It simply means an opening up of new possibilities.
References:
Burgin, V., 1986, The End of Art Theory, London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Danto, A.C., 1998, ’Art After the End of Art’ in The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the Ends of Taste, Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, pp. 115-128
Danto, A.C., 1998, ’The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’ in History and Theory, vol 37, No. 4, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, pp. 127-143
Danto, A.C., 2005, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: Columbia University Press
Elliott, G., 2008, Ends In Sight, London: Pluto Press
Fukuyama, F., 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press
Jameson, F., 1998, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London: Verso
Kojève, A., 1980, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, London: Cornell University Press
Lillegard, N., 2003, ’Spirit and the End of Art’ published 2003-02-25 at Eurozine
URL: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-02-25-lillegard-en.html
Lyotard, J.F., 2003, ’Introduction to The Postmodern Condition’ in Art In Theory 1900-2000, 2nd ed, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 1122-1123
Niethammer, L., 1993, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London: Verso
Sim, S., 2001, Derrida and the End of History, Royston: Icon Books Ltd.
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