Essay
“Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; In order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothin; the new comes from the old, but that is why is is new.”1
“Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; In order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothin; the new comes from the old, but that is why is is new.”1
(Bertold Brecht, “Popularity and Realism”)
(I am careful to posit that movement here does not imply better. One must view with extreme suspicion any claim with the pretense of progress, which is often an excuse for a distinct lack of imagination. )
This essay is about the role of contemporary aesthetics as a dominant mode of cultural production.
I will attempt to analyse and situate agents of cultural interpretation and change stemming from the period modernity and the rise of conspicuous class differences and post-modernity with its mode of consumption. This will be done through an analysis of the related texts from each period with an emphasis on their polemics and the modes of their representation and interpreted through a western-centric lens.
There is an Outside?! (or, how water feels to the fishes)
Debord’s polemical rhetoric, “A Report on the Construction of Situations”, written in 1973, follows and extends the effects rising bourgeoisie aspirations and a culture of consumption and the resulting frictions from the period, also illustrated in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend.
These contradictions can be interpreted within the traffic jam scene of the film, where one is exposed to a literal cross section of society: children playing by the road, an old couple having a picnic, people in various cars and modes of dress, “the consumerist fragmentation of society”2 and at the heart of this, the petit-bourgeoisie embodied by Roland and Claire, who, oblivious to the “rules”, attempt to jump to the front of the traffic jam.
Situation-ism is an attempt at re-writing the syntax of the city, through tactics of derive, psychogeographical mapping, detournement and the construction of situations- what Debord regards as a “reactionary tendency toward exclusion”3 toward all the different segments of society. By situating these practices explicitly within the urban realm, Debord also acknowledges the city itself as an active agent that produces, defines and limits cultural production. This is predominantly negotiated by the ideology of the dominant class.
Architecturally, these tendencies toward exclusion were partially embodied within the effects of post-war reconstruction and the CIAM, imagining “a rational perfect world, rationally perfect, and perfectly rational.” Modernist functionalism and zoned urban planning are the logical consequences of this paradigm, which, in a catch-22, by defining what can happen within a space, also defines what cannot.
The proposed alternative, Constant’s New Babylon, an endless derive solidified into matter and partially realized in modern casinos, reveals that the allure of psychogeographies, like dadaist found objects, is in the tension they hold in opposition to the planned city and not in their solitary realization. These layered contradictions provide ruptures - difference - to the individuals dominant experience of reality.
This illumination of difference rests upon a principle of insufficiency, meaning that “no being is ever complete, ever sufficient, and that because of this insufficiency every being is in an open relation to others”4. Constants Babylon and Debords construction of situations attempts at “capturing the effects of disorientation caused by insufficiency, but at the same time the labyrinth is never sufficient and is always in relation to an exterior which cannot be completely specified in advance”5. The flaneur is exposed to new and unexplored geographies and is in a constant state of disorientation. The metaphorical exterior is a constantly expanding horizon which is a version of freedom that “proposes some intimation of what can be”6.
Freedom... to do what?
Dick Hebdige’s “Subculture, The Meaning of Style” provides another insight into changing cultural realities and their consumption through a case study of the difference between Skinheads and Punks: two subcultures cultivated in the petri-dish of 1970’s London, where pivotal shifts in the nations economy resulted in widespread unemployment.
“Rather, they (subcultures) manifest culture in the broader sense, as systems of communication, forms of expression and representation. They conform to the structural anthropologists definition of culture as ‘coded exchanges of reciprocal messages.” In the same way, sub-cultural styles do indeed qualify as art but as art in (and out of) particular contexts; not as timeless objects, judged by immutable criteria of traditional aesthetics, but as ‘appropriations’, ‘thefts’ and subversive transformations, as movement.”7
(I am careful to posit that movement here does not imply better. One must view with extreme suspicion any claim with the pretense of progress, which is often an excuse for a distinct lack of imagination. )
Despite the working-class objectives of the Skinhead sub-culture, embedded within their coded exchanges of reciprocal messages is a “neo-” aesthetic, which, similar to the Soviet’s use of neo-classical forms for their connotative associations to empires of grandeur, relies upon a history that has been played out and is thus ultimately regressive in its stance. The means of representation (2- or 3- grade buzzcut, Harrington jackets, Trilby hats) used by the subculture of Skinheads, with its strongly anchored8 associations, prefigured its future possibilities of organizing life. It thus surrenders itself to be judged by “immutable criteria of traditional aesthetics that is aligned with history”9.
Contrasting this, by co-opting surrealist techniques of collage through a language of bricolage, the Punks launched an “assault on the syntax of everyday life”10. By exorcising any and all connotative meaning from mundane everyday objects by their irreverent juxtapositions, the punks critically deconstructed the embedded texts of a consumer-based society. It was a form of “revolutionary political action behind the development of modern possibilities of production consumption”11 (note: strike-through and replacement of text intentional). Not even the humble safety pin was spared.
The use of a multitude of contemporary cultural filters - fashion, music, magazines - by the punks allowed them to reconstruct an immersive alternate culture. The democratization of these technologies of dissemination empowered the punks with a “do-it-yourself”112 attitude that aggressively challenged their prevailing cultural norms as something that is given or to be accepted. The revolution is no longer about storming the Bastille but playing a three-chord riff.
Wittingly or unwittingly, the subculture of Punks revealed and dismantled the semiotic tools of cultural production within their period. In doing so, their lack of an absolute manifesto also gave them the agility to adapt to a changing cultural landscape. However, by defining their identity through active opposition as opposed to proposing any alternatives, the Punks implicitly acknowledged a mute reliance on the very values they were against: by acknowledging the center without an alternative, they were condemning themselves to the periphery. Without explicit content, their form was easily co-opted for sale at the local hot-topic. (This can be contrasted with the Hippie movement, which, driven by a strong alternative ideology, had to be severely repackaged before it could be sold and consumed as “green”.)
Look there... where?!, or, have you ever lost your glasses and went looking around the house and after an hour you realize it was perched on your head all the while? yeap. thats art for you.
In the preceeding examples, the lens of contemporary aesthetics served to “elaborate, produce, and intensify affects and percepts as its mode of response to and contamination by chaos”13 - the chaos that is the accumulated effects of the human condition, increasingly one that is a constructed simulacra, a form of auto-cannibalism.
In one of his speeches Zygmunt Bauman (1925-), a modern sociologist with an acute eye toward modes of modernity, concludes with the following:
Marx said that people are making history but not under
conditions of their own choice. What I am suggesting to you is that
the knowledge of these conditions is a tremendously important factor
in making history. The way you are making history depends on what
image you have of the conditions under which you are acting.
It is the hubris of each culture to claim theirs to be at a maximum velocity, where there can be no progress beyond what has already been achieved. And in every instance, there is always an unexpected paradigmatic shift. In every shift, there is a rupture: an opportunity for change - not necessarily for better or worse, but just as difference.
It is the hubris of our culture to claim a state of transition toward an informational society. Extending the ethos of the punks, our modes of production have been further democratized through digitization, software and on-demand knowledge sharing. Acknowledging the methods of the Situationists, our tools of detourement and spectacle are increasingly plastic with material innovation and new production and manufacturing technologies. The ether of information, bits and bytes freed from the laws of physics, lands itself squarely in the lens of contemporary designers.
As a society predominantly driven by desire masquerading as need, it would be a shame to apply our contemporary models of design and production to merely reproduce known forms of consumption. /* No longer concerned with the appreciation of beauty, it is now the role of contemporary aesthetics to interpret and present in popular14 form, with a nuanced eloquence that would match Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and the hyper-linked agility of the punks, the realistic15 truths of our age. */ placeholder for formulation of neo-baroque and contemporary forms of agency with or against it. to be researched: what is the nature of the spectacle?
Notes
1. Brecht, Bertolt. “Popularity and Realism.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 539-549. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002: 492
2. Debord, Guy. “A Report on the Construction of Situations,” Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006: 26
3. Ibid, 26
4. Bataille, Georges. “A Critical Introduction” edited by Benjamin Noys. Introduction, Pluto Press, 2000: 14
5. Ibid, 15
6. Breton, André. “From the First Manifesto of Surrealism.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 447-453. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002: 3
7. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, Routledge. 1979: 129
8. Barthes, Roland. "Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 32-51. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
9. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, Routledge. 1979: 129
10. Ibid: 105
11. Debord, Guy. “A Report on the Construction of Situations,” by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006: 25
12. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, Routledge. 1979: 112
13. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Vibration. Animal. Sex, Music.” Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. 2008: 27
14. Brecht, Bertolt. “Popularity and Realism.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 539-549. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002: 491
15. Ibid: 491
Bibliography
• Bataille, Georges. “A Critical Introduction” edited by Benjamin Noys. Introduction, Pluto Press, 2000.
• Barthes, Roland. "Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 32-51. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
• Brecht, Bertolt. “Popularity and Realism.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 539-549. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
• Breton, André. “From the First Manifesto of Surrealism.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 447-453. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
• Constant, “Another City for Another Life.” Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 71-73. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
• Debord, Guy. “A Report on the Construction of Situations,” 25-29, 38-43; “Theory of the Dérive,” 62-66; “Détournement As Negation And Prelude,” 67-68. Situationist International Anthology, by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
• Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 539-549. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. “Vibration. Animal. Sex, Music.” Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. 2008. 25-62.
• Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, Routledge. 1979. (selections)