Friday, September 23, 2022

The peculiarity of capitalism

is that it is a system of production and consumption that has no equilibrium point. It is either expanding or in crisis. The regime of representation that the bourgeoisie instituted once it achieved power shares this instability.

Modernism, like capitalism, is self-subverting and novelty-obsessed. Contrary to what Clement Greenberg claimed, modernism was not an artistic refuge from the vulgarity of capitalism. It was faithful reproduction in art of the alienating process that created the coommodity fetish by detaching value from labor and the set of social relations within which labor produces value. In the case of modernism, this process created the fiction of the autonomous work of art, which like the commodity fetish imbues the art object with magical "aesthetic" qualities derived entirely from within. 

More boadly, modernism supplied a bourgeoisie eager to burnish its progressive pretense a theatrical staging of nonconformity. It inaugurated an accelerated instability of style, the fetishization of unconventionality, the absolutism of fashion.

The impetus toward realism that we observe in early modernism is a naive effort at a democratic reform of the mimetic sign. The hope was that a more empirical, more democratic type of representation would escape the limitations of the old one. It was a short-lived hope that did not take into account the shallowness of the bourgeoisie’s purely pragmatic commitment to democracy and the fickleness of its tastes. Thus, as art became a commodity, realism gave way to a succession of other fugitive artistic trends, for the allure of the commodity requires the incessant refurbishment of its imaginary newness

The development of modernist abstraction is a product of the demystification of the sign. Once the sign is grasped as a convention, it is irreparably fissured and the signifier achieves independence. This is what the notion of “art for art’s sake” attempts to articulate. The material signifier (sound, color, mark, texture, gesture, etc.) is liberated from “meaning.” It is disburdened of its denotational (use) value and like the commodity becomes purely connotative, a screen for the projection of fantasies. Initially, it was indexical and symbolic signifiers that most readily lent themselves to this process of abstraction. However, the readymade and Pop art revealed that even the most iconic signs can be removed from denotational use and re-presented as pure, floating signifiers.

Modernism’s undoing, perhaps prophetic of the undoing of capitalism itself, is that the demolition of the sign pulverizes all difference and all possibility of aesthetic discrimination. Signifiers without meaning and without an assigned place in a symbolic hierarchy become “floating” signifiers, essentially floating wreckage. Modernism inaugurates a psychotic unquilting of the signifier. Liberal ideology tries to hide this impoverishment of the sign by repurposing signs into markers of identity. So Warhol’s Elvises and Marilyns are read as signs of their maker’s (and his complicit audience’s) "queerness." The old phallic signifiers are replaced by their inversions: one learns to idolize failure, flaccidity, and shabbiness as marks of a “transgressive” heroicized anti-heroism. In its fetishized form (as "identity") queerness hides from view the emptiness of a culture no longer capable of articulating any distinction save a distinction between jerry-rigged self-applied pronouns.

Identity is a flimsy peg on which to hang a sign because identity is always out of step with itself. Contemporary identities are never more than the hope of their own achievement and their declaration is also at the same time a declaration of the distance from their achievement. Thus, every self-applied identity replicates rather than resolves the fatal gap that modernity opened between the signifier and the signified.

In its terminal “postmodernist” phase, cultural production oscillates between a psychotic emptying of the sign (i.e. the production of froth) and delusional efforts to recodify the signt by turning it into a token of some transient identity. The figure that seems to me to best represent this moment is the shape-shifting cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day after  he/it falls into the pool of molten steel. As he liquefies, he frantically attempts to recompose himself, mutating rapidly through the forms he had at one time or another assumed until, finally, he is overcome, vomits himself, and dissolves. His special power had been the ability to metamorphose into anything. At the end, he metamorphoses into nothing. This is the immediate future of a desacralized Western culture.

Monday, September 5, 2022

The distinction between

premodern, modern, and postmodern can be expressed semiotically in terms of the relative stability of the sign.

As long as knowledge is grounded in sacred revelation, the sign is a sacred symbol.

After the post-Renaissance triumph of humanism, there follows a modern interregnum during which the signifier is dislocated from its metaphysical referent and the sign is reduced to a convention. In visual art this is most pointedly evident in Cubism and what  descends from it, collage in particular.  Symbolism, and later on, surrealism, discover the “poetic” potentiality of this semiotic disarray. The most banal, ubiquitous signifiers encountered in everyday life are then found to be charged with myriad repressed meanings. Signs become symptoms.

Postmodernity marks the full disintegration of the sign, a semiotic psychosis. The sign is reduced to the concrete signifier, at once hyperreal and mesmerizing but, like the glittering mirror panels that clad postmodern buildings, lacking depth or interiority. The signifier becomes a “floating signifier,” which as Frederic Jameson noted, absorbs rather than bestows meaning. It is stupefyingly blank, brazen in its banality, unsettling in its aggressive shallowness. In place of the modernist investment in the sign’s excessive meaning, postmodernism emphasizes the sign’s abject poverty. The violent contrasts that define the surrealist marvelous are replaced by an undifferentiated aggregation of dead signifiers. Henceforth, anything can mingle with anything else. This is heralded as a democratizing of the image, a demolition of the distinction between “high” and “low.” In reality, this levelling project is a means to give the banal its mirrored surface, turning emptiness into fulness. This is how the readymade becomes the paradigmatic postmodernist invention.

Current woke virtue signaling is a desperate effort to reinvest the sign with unambiguous meaning. Dead traditions are turned on their head and reinvented as liberal pieties. Lameness and imaginary blasphemy (directed at canons and traditions long extinct) become cherished signs of hallowed marginality.  This is not a novel phenomenon. In the words of Sophocles “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction."