Читать книгу The Spectacle of Disintegration - Маккензи Уорк - Страница 8

3 Liberty Guiding the People

To follow the times is to lead them.

Baltasar Gracián

Suppose a team of archaeologists from an alien civilization came upon the ruins of the disintegrating spectacle, but all they had with which to understand it, besides some blasted fragments, was one or two books by T. J. Clark. What sort of sense would they make of it? Of course, we are already ourselves those very aliens. Much of what we now think of as what was once modern comes down to us in bits and pieces, as inscrutable as ancient Egyptian funeral art. But Clark’s books might be singularly useful for this unearthed modern, since certain of his books quite consciously read the art of the nineteenth century as intimations for the twentieth century. As Clark reflects in The Sight of Death: “The advantage of the historical allegories in my previous books was that, if I was lucky, a point occurred at which the politics of the present was discovered in the histories—the distant histories—generated out of the object in hand.”¹ These allegories might have further resonance in our own times.

One way to grasp the genesis of the disintegrating spectacle might be to rewind it, back before it sped up, before it flung apart. What Situationist writing might have going for it in this task is that, as Clark puts it: “It was the ‘art’ dimension, to put it crudely—the continual pressure put on the question of representational forms in politics and everyday life, and the refusal to foreclose on the issue of representation versus agency—that made their politics the deadly weapon it was for a while.”² Clark can help us to formulate the problem of thinking aesthetics and politics together, within the vicissitudes of historical time.

Clark was, however briefly, a member of the Situationist International, and while his books are by no means a mere pendant to that fact, they respond to it; and respond, more particularly, to the stresses of a certain kind of political time through which Clark has lived. His writing was for him “a place to shelter from the storm. Doing art history—being an academic—was a compromise. It was as much as I had the nerve to do.”³ (An aside: And who am I, and who are you, dear reader, to ask of anyone anything more? Only those who throw stones can begrudge us our glass houses.)

Clark recalls standing on the edge of a demonstration in the late sixties, on the steps of the National Gallery in London, “discussing the (sad) necessity of iconoclasm in a revolutionary situation with my friend John Barrell, and agreeing that if ever we found ourselves part of a mob storming through the portico we ought to have a clear idea of which picture had to go the way of all flesh; and obviously it had to be the picture we would most miss.”⁴ Which picture would Clark choose? We shall find out later. Suffice now to say that it did not come to that, and perhaps just as well.

It is sometimes lost on readers familiar only with the opening overture of Debord’s infamous book that the spectacle is not just some vast and totalizing shell that secretes itself out of the commodity form and envelopes all around it. While it may be the dominant form of social life, it is not the only one. Clark: “The spectacle is never an image mounted securely and firmly in place; it is always an account of the world competing with others, and meeting the resistance of different, sometimes tenacious forms of social practice.”⁵ Clark enlarges and refines the sense of the struggle over social form, and the role within the struggle played by the making of images. For while society may have become in part disciplinary, it has never ceased to be spectacular in its totality.⁶

If there is a limit to Clark—evident particularly in the later texts—it is in the way the auras of certain images start to become stand-ins for a contest of forces, struggling not just over what images can mean but also over what they can do. Clark: “If I cannot have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan.”⁷ A Satan which art alone is not up to the task of confronting.

There are times when aesthetics and politics appear as discrete and free-standing categories. At other moments they can’t help but fall over each other, which in the French context at least might be telegraphed by the following dates, and from the events that spill forth from them and evaporate into history: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1945, 1968; from the first successful French revolution, via the Paris Commune and the Liberation, to the last failed one. While Clark will have quite a bit to say about epochs of restoration, where art and politics interact only tangentially, of particular interest is the kind of time where they fuse. “Such an age needs explaining, perhaps even defending.”⁸

Modernity is all about beginnings, and it might as well be said to begin with The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). David shows Marat dead in his bath, clutching the letter written to him by his murderer. It’s an image of a secular martyr, but not exactly a secular image. It was first shown at a ritual occasion, contrived by David. Quite a struggle went on over the meaning and ownership of the cult of Marat. While Marat was close to the Jacobin faction, the Enragés—the most radical expression of the most radical class, the sans-culottes—claimed him as one of their own. The image of Marat hovered for a moment, caught between the role of martyr to the state on the one hand, and friend to the sans-culottes and their demand for a thoroughly social revolution on the other.

“Surely never before had the powers-that-be in a state been obliged to improvise a sign language whose very effectiveness depended on its seeming to the People a language they had made up, and that therefore represented their interests.”⁹ The Jacobins had a tenuous grasp on state power. They relied on the sans-culottes for direct action against their enemies to the right, but having moved against the right, the Jacobins turned instead against their erstwhile allies to their left. The sans-culotte passion for direct democracy was a hindrance to the Jacobin claim to the state at a time of war.

The Death of Marat is a remnant of a historical event: the people’s entry into history. For Clark, this is the cause of modernism itself, even if it doesn’t usually know it. Robespierre and the Jacobins claimed to represent a pure and united people, forever to be purged of traitors, but this double act of representation, at once political and aesthetic, required vigilance. As for the people, as Clark put it with a chilling phrase: “It had to be killed in order to be represented, or represented in order to be killed.”¹⁰ Marat dead stood for the people, but the body was not up to the task. Representation as a whole isn’t up to the task, but doesn’t see it. The obsession with the false during the revolution did not lead to a questioning of representation in general.

Not the least extraordinary thing about David’s version of Marat is that the whole top half of the portrait is a vast, blank space, a tissue of empty brushwork. It signals, in part, Marat’s self-sacrificing austerity. For Clark, it is something more. Marat could hardly embody a revolution when nobody could confidently claim possession of its spirit. David’s portrait could not quite work the old magic of the religious image, but nobody was quite ready to let the spiritual charm of images die. “Art had come out (been dragged out) of the Palais de Fontainebleau. That did not mean it was ready to understand its place in the disenchantment of the world. The whole history of modernism could be written in terms of its coming, painfully, to such an understanding.”¹¹

The blank wall behind Marat is “the endless, meaningless objectivity produced by paint not quite finding its objects, symbolic or otherwise, and therefore making do with its own procedures.”¹² The revolution put in place a regime of the image in which for the first time the state was the representative of the people, but the people themselves could hardly be represented. The Jacobin notion of the people was empty, pure opposition to the parasites of the aristocracy. It was a problem that would take a century to resolve, and the name of that solution is the spectacle, but in solving the problem, the spectacle dissolves the people into itself—then itself dissolves.

The people appear on the historical stage in Liberty Guiding the People (1831), by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). It is an image of the myth of a revolution in which the bourgeoisie believed, if only for a little while. In 1830 the bourgeoisie has defeated tyranny and gained a constitution, all in three glorious days at the barricades. Delacroix’s painting both restates and rephrases this myth. It repeats the forms of the popular lithographers, in that the barricade has become a stage, with characters propped on it rather than cowering behind it. Delacroix’s Liberty is a woman, but not quite the conventional symbol. What unadorned Liberty reveals a little too much is the naked power of popular revolt. Delacroix’s contemporary Honoré de Balzac saw in her eyes only “the flames of insurrection.”¹³ This is not exactly the liberty the bourgeois revolutionary bargained for.

Who exactly is Liberty guiding? The bourgeois in his top hat is surrounded by the rabble. If revolution is the door through which the people enter history, then it makes a troubling figure for bourgeois thought. Outnumbered, it might only be a matter of time before the rabble turns against their allies of the moment. And they did: By the time Delacroix’s picture was hanging in the Salon of 1831, a new class war was on in earnest. The people didn’t particularly want a constitution; they wanted bread and work and wages. They wanted a social revolution. The picture was an anachronism. It was quickly spirited out of sight, not to be seen again until the next revolution. What the bourgeoisie wants to remember henceforth is not revolution, but restoration. The revolution through which the people enter history is the revolving door that also spirits them back out if it again.

Delacroix’s picture resurfaced in 1848, but he was not the painter of that revolution. Clark assigns that honor to Gustave Courbet (1817–77). By the 1840s, when Courbet came into his own as an artist, bourgeois power was an established fact. An insecure one, to be sure, but established, and artists could not but wonder “whether bourgeois existence was heroic, or degraded, or somehow conveniently both.”¹⁴ What would come to be known as the artistic and literary avant-garde was already an established part of cultural life, the antechamber of success. Also already in play was the avant-garde gambit of attacking the forms of the dominant order, whilst offering that order, knowingly or not, new forms.

The avant-garde rubs shoulders with, but is not the same as, bohemia. In mid-nineteenth-century Paris, bohemia was not yet a fantasy spun out of the Scenes from Bohemian Life of Henri Murger as La Bohème of Giacomo Puccini, let alone Rent by Jonathan Larson.¹⁵ It was a genuine social class, outside of the ruling order, closer to the dangerous classes than the intellectuals. Clark calls them “the first debris of industrialism.”¹⁶ What bohemia lacked in aesthetic sophistication it made up for in recalcitrance. It was the genuine unassimilated force: “the real history of the avant-garde is the history of those who bypassed, ignored, or rejected it; a history of secrecy and isolation; a history of escape from the avant-garde and even from Paris itself.”¹⁷ Or in short, the only avant-garde worthy of mention is that which was unacceptable even to the avant-garde. Bohemia contains at least some element of the inassimilable waste product of spectacular society, what it pushes on ahead of itself, rather than what it leaves behind.

Clark identifies the bohemian’s game as what Slavoj Žižek would later call over-identification. Clark: “the Bohemian caricatured the claims of bourgeois society. He took the slogans at face-value; if the city was a playground he would play; if individual freedom was sacrosanct then he would celebrate the cult twenty-four hours a day; laissez-faire meant what it said. The Bohemian was the dandy stood on his head.”¹⁸ Such a strategy had its limits. By the 1840s it offered little more than a shopworn romanticism, turned more toward nostalgia for the past that to present exigencies.

For Henri Lefebvre, romanticism is a viable strategy for advancing onto the symbolic terrain within what he calls the total semantic field.¹⁹ It digs into the past to find the figures that still trouble the present. For Clark this is a temptation to be resisted. The promise of transforming everyday life has to be rooted in the materiality of everyday life itself. For Courbet, bohemia nevertheless offered a space within which to make a break with the expectations of the art world. His break from bohemia and its tired romanticism, in turn, would come via a return to his provincial roots.

From the bourgeois point of view, February 1848 was the beautiful revolution, but soon the bloom faded. Karl Marx: “The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown.”²⁰ February was a bourgeois struggle to make again a constitution and secure its own power, with some few concessions made to popular power to secure its support. June was the uprising against bourgeois power when concessions proved not to concede enough. The avant-garde was for the revolution in February but against it in June; bohemia was not so biddable.

With the suppression of the popular forces, Courbet retreated to Ornan, and discovered, in the countryside, the missing element, something bohemian life couldn’t supply—everyday life: “Courbet saw that the commonplace was not the life of other people, but his own life.”²¹ For Clark, the Burial at Ornans (1851) is one of Courbet’s greatest achievements. It is an image of a religious ceremony, but it is not a religious image. It dissociates ritual from belief. It is not explicitly anti-clerical, which makes it all the more effective. Courbet pictures a kind of collective distraction, at once religious and secular, comic and tragic, sentimental and grotesque.

More challenging still is that it pictures the rural bourgeois. It confounds the myth of the unitary character of rural life, and at a time when the bourgeois replaced the aristocrat as the locus of peasant hatred. Courbet pictures the countryside at a time when power within it shifts toward the rural towns, and the countryside as a whole is absorbed within capital. Courbet at his best limns the relation between forces that animate the scene. His is a realism that thwarts art’s supposed mission to imagine the ideal. The working of the canvas doesn’t purify appearances, revealing an essence, but neither is it a fidelity to them.

With the defeat of the Parisian proletariat in June 1848, the role of Paris as center of political contest was for the moment eclipsed. What emerged in the shadow of Red Paris was Red France. The French peasantry had its own issues: land hunger, debts, rights to the commons. In 1848 the French peasantry arrives on the political stage as an actor in its own right. In 2010 the Thai peasantry did the same. After a populist prime minister was deposed in a judicial coup, the so-called Red Shirt movement came down from the countryside to Bangkok to try to force the end to a quasi-feudal political regime in which the monarchy presided over a state and army that represented only shifting compromises among business interests.

Early in March 2010 the Thai army reported the theft of six thousand assault rifles, but who stole them? Was it what the government called terrorist elements in the Red Shirt movement? Or did the army steal them from itself, so it could blame any violence in a coming confrontation on the opposition? When the Red Shirt demonstrations came later that same month, they were the biggest in Thai history, and largely peaceful, apart from a few grenade explosions in which nobody was killed. The Red Shirts poured what they claimed was their own blood on Parliament and called for elections to end the undemocratic rule—of the Democrat Party. Not getting what they wanted, they expanded their occupation from the Phan Fah Bridge to the Rajprasong intersection in the heart of Bangkok’s tourist and commercial zone, and then into the nearby shopping district.

As part of a crackdown on Red Shirt–aligned media, including websites and radio stations, the army tried to shut down a TV station sympathetic to them. The Red Shirts stormed the station and occupied it, restoring broadcasts, at least temporarily. The army tried to retake Phan Fah bridge without success, killing two dozen people. The Red Shirts built bamboo barricades in the Rajprasong district, and held up a train coming from the Northeast carrying military vehicles.

A Red Shirt leader declared at this point that “we do not condone but we cannot control. There is no more control among the followers.” Attempts at a ceasefire negotiation failed. Red Shirts forced their way into Chulanongkorn hospital near their Rajprasong barricades searching for troops, but they did not find any. The government added US$8 million to the Bangkok police budget. Khattiya Sawasdipol, a former army officer advising the Red Shirts, was shot in the head by a sniper while being interviewed by the New York Times.

In May, helicopters dropped leaflets on the demonstrators urging them to decamp, while they fired back with homemade rockets. Their encampment was surrounded, and the army launched an assault with armored cars. There were occasions of mutiny among the government forces, shooting at the army instead of the Red Shirts, but the government prevailed. Red Shirt leaders surrendered in an attempt to prevent further violence, only to be jeered at by an unrepentant rank and file. The stock exchange, banks and shopping centers went up in flames.²² Whether or not one takes 1848 to be the moment when the peasantry enters history, in its own right, with its own demands, let’s not pretend it ever left it.

The French peasantry in 1848 did not have websites or broadcast stations, but it did have its own forms of expression: songs, pictures, almanacs, secret societies meeting in the woods. The urban left would take some time grasping how to ally itself with all this. The party of order was quicker off the mark, casting the ethereal chains of religious devotion over the populace, while enacting laws to suppress traffic in popular almanacs.

This folk art was not as dangerous as it seemed. Far from being a pure expression of autonomous peasant consciousness, popular art had for a long time imitated that of the ruling classes. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a strange amalgam. Popular images included Napoleon and the Wandering Jew, Charles Fourier and the saints. Popular art carries new information but is full of reversals, distortions, exaggerations. Courbet appropriated this system of changes and inversions to make images for a dual public and with doubled meanings. “He exploits the area in which men still think and make images with materials long since falsified by history.”²³

Courbet’s method, Clark claims, is what the Situationists call détournement: “Instead of reverence, a brutal manipulation of one’s sources. Instead of pastiche, confidence in dealing with the past: seizing the essentials … discarding the details, combining very different styles within a single image, knowing what to imitate, what to paraphrase, what to invent.”²⁴ That there is a traffic between high and low art in Courbet is not all that original or notable. What matters is the direction: “Instead of exploiting popular art to revive official culture and titillate its special, isolated audience, Courbet did the exact opposite. He exploited high art—its techniques, its size, and something of its sophistication—in order to revive popular art.”²⁵ Here is the key Situationist tactic avant la lettre.

Courbet confounded the expectations of both left and right: the left wanted a glorification of simple rural life; the right wanted the preservation of the myth of rural harmony. He addressed the possibility of a public that knew itself to be in a state of displacement. “Courbet’s public was exactly this labyrinth, this confusion, this lack of firm outlines and allegiances. It was industrial society in the making, still composed of raw and explosive human materials.”²⁶ His achievement was to appropriate from both high and low culture the means to give expression to the possibility not just of a popular art, but of a popular power with one foot in peasant rebellion and the other in the radical traditions of the urban tradesmen, bohemia and the dispossessed.

Courbet is the artist who both grappled with the most pressing problems of representation in his time and got the furthest with them: “In the middle of the nineteenth century both bourgeois and popular culture were in dissolution: the one shaken and fearful, trying to grapple with the fact of revolution; the other swollen with new themes and threatened by mass production. What might have happened—what Courbet for a while tried to make happen—was a fusion of the two.”²⁷ But it was not to be. The vicissitudes of the art market made themselves felt soon enough, but far from being a failure of Courbet alone, this was a general failure.

The failure of a public, political art sets the stage for the more agreeable avant-garde of Impressionism, which discovers what can be achieved in the restricted space that remains. Impressionism is the art of the moment in which “the circumstances of modernism were not modern, and only became so by being given the form called ‘spectacle.’”²⁸ In short, Impressionism was the art that traced the consequences for representation of the colonization of everyday life by the commodity form, even if it did not quite know it.

Impressionism knew itself to be the art of a Paris transformed by the urban planning of Baron Haussmann, and the moral panics that ensued from it. It was a vague but widespread feeling: “Something had gone from the streets; a set of differences, some density of life, a presence, a use.”²⁹ Part of this feeling mapped a real transformation. Haussmann tried to evict the working class from its old quarters, leaving a Paris divided geographically by class. Bourgeois Paris would be in the west and working class in the north and east. The whole space of the city would be opened up to traffic. The political city, the city of the barricade, gives way to the city of circulation. The city as horizon of collective action has to be erased, but so too the city of distinct quarters, each a microcosm of trade and manufacture. Industry became a city-wide affair, with bigger markets, bigger players, tighter margins. In place of the small shop, the big department store, and with it the deskilling of retail. The shop assistant became a whole social category. One kind of capitalism supersedes another.

It was capital that changed things, but popular discourse blamed the city. In the 1860s people believed Paris was disappearing and being replaced by something unreal. Everyday life is becoming a matter of consumption rather than industry. “Paris was in some sense being put to death, and the ground prepared for the consumer society.”³⁰ The unitary world of the quarter, where everyone knows everyone and everyone can measure their social distance from each other directly, was disappearing.

What was so troubling was the anomie of everyday life, the interactions with so many anonymous strangers, who were not always what they seemed. Everyone seemed to be passing as what they were not. To navigate such a city takes maps, catalogues, field guides. The citizens of such a city can only interact with each other via representations that make its strange and fluctuating appearances legible. The city becomes spectacle, a city made to be looked at—for those on the make.

Not that this was to everybody’s liking. In 1871, the Paris Commune would attempt to divert history onto another path. For the first time, the proletariat had its own revolution. While the representatives of the state retreated to Versailles, the communards became authors of their own history, if not at the level of government, then in everyday life. That the Commune had no real leaders might not be a weakness, and at least it had the wit to arm the people. It may not have understood power, but it understood the city, and intervened in its space. As Marx said, it suffered from too many trying to refight the old revolutions to grasp the originality of its situation. Or as the Situationists put it: “The Paris Commune succumbed less to the force of arms than the force of habit.”³¹

“In our opinion, the Parisian insurrection of 1871 was the grand and highest attempt of the city to stand as the measure and norm of human reality,” writes Henri Lefebvre.³² Product of unique circumstances, and doomed from the start, when the ruling Versaillese return, the Commune closes a whole era of revolutionary politics, and perhaps not just politics. Clark: “After Courbet, is there any more ‘revolutionary art’? After the Commune, and what Courbet did in that particular revolution, is there the possibility of any such thing?”³³ Charged with instigating the destruction of the Vendôme column during the Commune, Courbet faced imprisonment and exile, and became an enduring hero to the left.

The new city becomes the site for the painter who stays with the truth of appearances. But this imagining of the city is a kind of fetishism, an inability to see capital at work. Those workings are too spectral. Clark: “Capitalism was assuredly visible from time to time, in a street of new factories or the theatricals of the bourse; but it was only in the form of the city that it appeared as what it was, a shaping spirit, a force remaking things with ineluctable logic—the argument of freight statistics and double entry book keeping. The city was the sign of capital: it was there one saw the commodity take on flesh—and take up and eviscerate the varieties of social practice, and give them back with ventriloqual precision.”³⁴ The city becomes the figure that both reveals and mystifies capital at work. Modern art becomes the art of this city, and, unknowingly, the keeper of at least a few capital secrets.