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November 6, 2013
Particular New Forms of Realism
Draft | By AK Thompson
Dear PPW,
The following paper is something I’ve been working on for a while and that I’ve been struggling to complete. Through an analysis of two very different postmodern artists—Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—the paper considers the challenges of producing transformative movement-based art in the period of late capitalism. Drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin, my objective was to learn what could be appropriated—not so much aesthetically as epistemologically—from their respective (and contradictory) strategies. I feel like I’m fumbling toward something, but I would appreciate a little push.
Peer review responses thus far have been mixed. Many readers have indicated that they think I’m on to something but find the material too dense; others have cautioned agaisnt my inclination to end on a prescriptive note. Since I’m reluctant to abandon prescription, the challenge seems to be to make it as compelling and actionable as possible.
Ultimate objective: to work up a publishable stand-alone version of this piece (for a journal in social theory, cultural sociology, social movement studies, or elsewhere—suggestions welcome) and to include a version as the conclusion to my forthcoming monograph on Walter Benjamin, social movements, and art.
Comments and feedback most welcome.
Thanks, and see you on November14!
AK Thompson
PS: Some of you may have noticed that this is not the paper I’d promised. Rest assured, however, that I will be sure to submit “A Time for Leaders” at a later date.
Particular New Forms of Realism
Draft | By AK Thompson
According to Walter Benjamin, history decayed into images (2003:476). From this insight, he developed a means of reading images to uncover their historical significance and a strategy for producing images that might shock others into recognizing the dangers and opportunities that marked their historical moment. Gathered together in Convolute N of his uncompleted Arcades Project, Benjamin’s compelling but enigmatic notes on what he called the “dialectical image” are highly suggestive when imagining how social movements might take hold of the visual field today.
In Benjamin’s account, dialectical images arose at the point where everyday social relations crystallized around their point of greatest contradiction. In other words, the dialectical image wasn’t simply an image of struggle with which viewers could identify or an image of misery capable of stimulating outrage. For these reasons, it was not propagandistic in the traditional sense. Instead, the dialectical image condensed all the unrealized promise of the past and all the practical means that such promise might finally be realized to a single, illuminating point. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts,” Benjamin proposed.
Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectal image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. (2003:475)
As with Marx, who noted in an 1843 letter to his friend Arnold Ruge that “the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality,” Benjamin thought that—by exposing the wishful fantasies embodied in everyday artifacts and revealing the precise manner by which these fantasies came to be ensnared within the deadening logic of the commodity form—people could be alerted to the opportunities for revolutionary transformation that lay dormant in every situation.
Once it became clear that their identification with the existing world corresponded to its unrealized promise and not to the hard casing within which it had become trapped, Benjamin imagined that people would embrace forms of action that, in his mind, were the equivalent of “splitting the atom” (2003:463). The phrase was not intended to be metaphorical; by breaking the commodity-encrusted shell and reconnecting with the promise encased therein, Benjamin wagered that could release a tremendous amount of compressed human energy. When coupled with the profane reckoning provoked by the dialectical image (a reckoning that enjoined the viewer to consider how—this time—their dreams of happiness might finally be fulfilled), this energy becomes the motive force for revolution.
To be sure, such an account of the revolutionary process is as enigmatic as it is compelling. To make matters worse, Benjamin himself remained elusive when it came to providing concrete examples of what a dialectical image might actually look like. But while these features of Benjamin’s writing pose challenges to social movement actors interested in operationalizing his insights, a careful reading of Benjamin’s description of the dialectical image’s production and of its anticipated effects provides a useful framework for considering particular cases. Based on this framework, I have argued elsewhere that Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) can be read as coherent visual approximations of the dialectical image.
Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads (1933)
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)
At this point, readers familiar with Benjamin may interject by pointing out that dialectical images do not have to be “images” in the conventional sense at all. Indeed, as Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, such “images” might be extended to include dust, fashion, expositions, and commodities (1991:221). But while considering any of these objects analytically reveals their potentially significant revelatory power, Buck-Morss makes clear that the dialectical image is itself composed of two discrete but interrelated moments—one mediated and analytic, and one immediate and revelatory.
As an immediate, quasi-mystical apprehension, the dialectical image was intuitive. As a philosophical “construction,” it was not. Benjamin’s laborious and detailed study of past texts, his careful inventory of the fragmentary parts he gleaned from them, and the planned use of these in deliberately constructed “constellations” were all sober, self-reflective procedures, which, he believed, were necessary in order to make visible a picture of truth that the fictions of conventional history writing covered over. (1991:220)
For this reason, and especially in the context of social movement struggles to develop effective visual strategies, it’s appropriate to delimit the scope of our investigation in this case to the realm of deliberately constructed images. And though neither Rivera nor Picasso produced the “cessation of happening” that Benjamin had hoped for (1968:263), their analytic proximity to the dialectical image make them important reference points for those concerned with making effective visual interventions today.
Nevertheless, attempts to mimic these images without taking the significant social, historical, and epistemological transformations that have taken place since the 1930s into account are bound to fall short. In order to proceed, it’s therefore necessary to transpose the dialectical image’s epistemic premises into our own contemporary register. Specifically, we must consider how our own endless present has transformed people’s relationship to both images and to history.
In his pioneering analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, Frederic Jameson acknowledged that—despite the evident connections between postmodern sensibilities and those that occasionally found expression in the high modernist (and even the Romantic) period—we are now divided from these prior moments by a kind of epochal break. For Jameson, this break arises from the dramatic transformations that multinational capitalism produced in the relationship between culture and economy starting in the early 1960s (1991:5). If, in the past, culture—and, in particular, visual culture—was at least formally distinguishable from the market (and if this position allowed it to formulate critical responses to dynamics within the economic base), the same cannot be easily said today.
Coinciding with the integration of culture into the commodity cycle has been a transposition of history into the register of style.[i] As Jameson recounts, the relation to the past fostered by postmodernism becomes increasingly concerned with the “imitation of dead styles” (1991:18). Here, the past is approached “through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’” (1991:19). Consequently, “the past is … itself modified” and “the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future” is reduced to a “multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (1991:18). Written more than twenty years ago, contemporary developments suggest that (even as postmodernism falls into decline as a self-conscious cultural and intellectual project) Jameson’s assessment has become more—and not less—relevant.
Although culture’s subsumption within the economy did not automatically make every postmodernist a willing participant in the new order, Jameson cautions that—even at its most defiant—postmodern culture could not escape the fact that its excesses were now actively sought by a market desperate to revitalize the waning magic of the commodity form. Acknowledging the spirit of refusal that sometimes found expression in postmodern art, Jameson nevertheless concludes that postmodernism’s
own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society. (1991:4)
Corroborating this perspective, art critic Hal Foster has suggested that today’s critical artists are best understood as being “as much a subcontractor” to late capitalism as they are “an antagonist” (1996:60). Social movement actors and radical cultural producers will recognize this dynamic. In a brave new world partitioned into niche markets, defiance has become a hot commodity. The music of rebellion becomes top-40 bubblegum, and renegade street artists like Shepard Fairey help clear a path to the White House.
Although Benjamin had anticipated the subsumption of culture to the commodity form, he only witnessed the process in its germinal—high modernist—phase.[ii] Now that the process is complete (or nearly complete), it’s evident that one of the central premises upon which the dialectical image relies has become less stable. If, in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s goal was to read images to uncover “the expression of the economy in its culture” (2003:460), the challenge today is reading the “expression” of one sphere in another when the distinction between them has become—at best—purely formal.
It’s in the context of this transformation that we can understand Jameson’s contention that “Benjamin’s account” is today “both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated” (1991:45). In order to address this challenge, Jameson advances some provisional claims about what would be required to produce a “cognitive map” suitable to the new terrain. Similar to the dialectical image, the cognitive map’s purpose is to “enable a situational representation [of] that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is … society’s structures as a whole” (1991:51).
Confronted with this challenge, Jameson notes that postmodern cultural products—though often clearly apologias for global exploitation—can also be read as “particular new forms of realism” (1991:49). From this vantage, grasping the depth of an apparently depthless situation means “becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (1991:25). In other words, while that which is signified can no longer be accessed directly, its dimensions—its spatial and temporal coordinates—can still be read off of its signifying trace. In this way, the phenomenal experience of social depthlessness can be impelled to reveal its own “deep” conditions of possibility.
Practically speaking, the collapse of the distinction between culture and economy requires that we elaborate epistemic habits and visual strategies that do not rely—as all previous aesthetic avant-gardes have done—on the critical distance afforded by their prior separation. In other words, since it’s impossible to “return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours” (Jameson, 1991:50), we must find ways of updating—and thus “completing”—our high-modernist strategies of visual critique by tempering them in the crucible of the endless present.
Jameson does not get much further than calling for such a project. Instead of concrete propositions, we are given useful but overly-general guidelines: “the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital.” But while Jameson is short on specifics, he does not fail to convey the extent to which such a project is needed. Since an art capable of holding to the truth of multinational capital would allow us to “begin to grasp our positioning … and regain a capacity to act and struggle” in a context that continues to be marked by “confusion” (1991:54), the stakes are very, very high.
How, then, might the dialectical image be transformed to address the cultural logic of late capitalism? How can Benjamin’s concept—which emphasized “shock” as though it had self-evident revelatory power—be reconfigured to work at a moment in which shock is no longer shocking? In what follows, I propose that the dialectical image might be salvaged by supplementing shock with an aesthetic-epistemological seduction capable of reconnecting viewers to the now-lost referent. In order to do so, I consider the work of two contemporary artists—Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—who, in struggling with the epistemic coordinates of the postmodern scene, produced images that seem to connect aspects of Benjamin’s conception to novel forms of seduction capable of addressing the historical lacunae we now confront.
Like Benjamin, New York-based neo-conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was preoccupied with collecting and organizing information. Between 1994 and his death by suicide in 2000, he developed a novel representational strategy that stands as an intriguing visual approximation of Jameson’s aesthetic of cognitive mapping. After a career that saw him shuffle between stints as a reference librarian, a curator, and a researcher (Hertney, 2006:85), Lombardi began producing works in which data collection and the analysis of social relations congeal into flow charts, maps, or “narrative structures.” Taking financial scandals, business deals, and shady connections between corporate and political interests as his starting point, he produced “delicate filigree drawings that map … the flow of global capital” (Hertney, 2006:83).
Mark Lombardi, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984-86 (4th Version) (1999)
In an artist statement released in 1997, Lombardi described how he assembled his “narrative structures” by using “a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event … like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house.” Motivated by the desire to “explore the interaction of political, social and economic forces in contemporary affairs,” Lombardi adopted an approach strongly reminiscent of Benjamin’s own method:
Working from syndicated news items and other published accounts, I begin each drawing by compiling large amounts of information about a specific bank, financial group or set of individuals. After a careful review of the literature I then condense the essential points into an assortment of notations and other brief statements of fact, out of which an image begins to emerge.
My purpose throughout is to interpret the material by juxtaposing and assembling the notations into a unified, coherent whole… Hierarchical relationships, the flow of money and other key details are then indicated by a system of radiating arrows, broken lines and so forth… Every statement of fact and connection depicted in the work is true and based on information culled entirely from the public record. (1997)
Like Benjamin, Lombardi strove to make the scattered fragments of daily life intelligible through the process of assemblage. After his death, his holdings were found to include “14,500 index cards with information on the subjects of his investigations, all drawn from publicly available sources” (Heartney 2006:85). This compulsive collecting echoed Benjamin’s own habits while struggling to illuminate the Paris arcades.
But while there are many intriguing biographical connections between Lombardi and Benjamin (connections that culminate in their respective deaths by suicide), their methodological connection is still more significant. To give but one example: in his unpublished manuscript about the history of panoramic painting (a Benjamin favorite), Lombardi recounts how, in struggling to give an account of the world, “the historian is reduced to random glimmerings obtained via shards, scraps and bits of ephemera to begin the reconstruction” (Bigge, 2005:133). Although Lombardi does not cite Benjamin directly in this context, his sentiment clearly echoes Benjamin’s note in The Arcades Project in which he proposed to allow the “rags, the refuse” of everyday life “to come into their own … by making use of them” (2003:460)
Lombardi curator Robert Hobbs was also prone to describing the artist’s work in Benjaminian terms. According to Hertney, Hobbs was “immediately impressed” with the “sheer beauty” of Lombardi’s work, which used “the delicacy of the curving lines” to delineate “abstract force fields created by the global movement of money.” Hobbs described these works “variously as webs, rhizomes, and constellations” But alongside these revealing characterizations, he also declared Lombardi’s creations to be nothing short of a “mental and visual seduction” (2006:84).
For his part, cultural journalist Ryan Bigge also became intrigued by the simultaneity of analytic clarity and seduction in Lombardi’s work. For Bigge, the artist’s curved lines recalled “the simple yet seductive contours of latitude and longitude” even as they revealed the “self-described vicious circles” of global capitalism (2005:128). In these formulations, it’s possible to see how seduction might pave the way for the shock of recognition.