I
want to start with a loaded question, a provocative suggestion: did
Godard abandon film for TVideo in order to ally himself with the philistine?
What
is the likelihood that a director as lauded as Godard might risk being
associated with cultural imbecility? Godard, the intellectual film critic
turned film-making darling of 70s counter-culture, is by no means a
philistine in the usual sense of the term. And yet, the turn from cinema
to broadcasting, from the arthouse to the home, poses the question of
Godard's relationship with the philistine. Or rather, Godard's preference
for TVideo is a rare opportunity for me to discuss philistinism in the
province of ambitious, self-reflexive culture that might shed light
on my longstanding interest in philistinism. What's more, Godard shouldn't
come out of this discussion unscathed.
First,
a word about the philistine and popular pleasures. It has been largely
assumed in recent years that the philistine is merely a lover of popular
pleasures. If this were the case, then clearly, Godard would not be
among the philistines. There is, however, a more interesting - more
dialectical - way of thinking about the philistine's relation to popular
pleasures. Taken uncritically the philistine is a sort of absence, defined
negatively as a person who lacks cultivation, education, sophistication
and whatnot. When the lack is given agency, the philistine is seen as
the negation of art, aesthetics, cultivation and so forth. Thus, if
both concepts are merged, the philistine is thought of as someone who
lacks culture and therefore resents or attacks art. Mayor Guiliani's
threatening public pronouncements at the occasion of the opening of
the Sensation exhibition in New York is a good example of a conventional
view of philistinism: having no understanding of contemporary art, Guiliani
calls for the withdrawal of public funds. Such a violation possibly
deserves the intended insult implied by calling Guiliani a philistine,
but the short-term effect would not be worth it, I want to argue, and
we would do better to examine the conceptual schema that is being ventriloquised
by the use of the term.
Since the
emergence the professional discipline of Cultural Studies, art has been
involved in a violent dance with popular culture. This has resulted
in the widespread belief that art's immediate or main rival is popular
culture. Philosophically speaking, however, the opposite of art is non-art.
If popular culture is non-art, it is only a small section of all possible
non-art. As a synecdoche of non-art (if that is a workable alibi for
its overuse) popular culture is, at best, misleading. This is because
it is a form of non-art that is, at the same time, a rival form of culture.
Non-art is not generally thought of as philistine because philistinism
implies a shortfall, whereas non-art tends to have no relation to art.
Medicine is not philistine if it is unartistic; it is simply non-art.
The most famous instance of non-art's potential philistinism is Duchamp's
Readymades, in which he took articles of non-art and presented them
as art. Initially, such as during the selection of the first exhibition
of the American Society of Independent Artists in April 1917, these
anti-art pieces were regarded as indecent, unaesthetic, unacceptable,
in a word, philistine. And it is likely that Duchamp expected nothing
more. To expect more is to hope that the dialectical relationship between
art and non-art be recognised in the anti-art gesture. If anti-art transforms
art through its conversion of non-art into art, then the opposition
between art and philistinism takes a serious blow or a dialectical twist.
It may be stretching the imagination to suggest that Duchamp be considered
a philistine (not that stretching the imagination is to be scoffed at),
but surely if anti-art undoes the conservative and connoisseurish division
between art and non-art (as well as artist and non-artist), then it
is feasible that Duchamp was at least invoking the subject position
of the philistine as a critical standpoint against art's cloistered
self-images. The result would certainly be a counter-intuitive conception
of the philistine, but it is no less dialectical for that.
The conception
of philistinism as a component of art's avantgarde self-emancipation
is counter-intuitive because it upturns the assumption that the philistine's
attack on art could never be a valuable contribution to the history
of art. Ordinarily, philistinism is not merely art's 'other' it is a
devalued other, which means that its negation of art is inconsequential.
The counter-intuitive philistine, on the other hand, turns its lack
of cultivation and low esteem to its own advantage. Philistinism, in
this understanding, is a stain on art's good reputation. There is no
philistinism without hierarchy, privilege, power, exclusion, division,
rivalry, dispute and violation - and this is what the counter-intuitive
conception of philistinism counts on when it interrupts the sanguine
functioning of an untroubled art. The antagonism between art and philistinism
is invariably blamed on philistinism's brutish tendencies. The counter-intuitive
philistine, on the contrary, holds a mirror up to the imperious gaze
and makes it impossible for art to remain pure and untouched by its
relationship with a debased 'other'. In effect, if the term 'philistine'
always implies cultural contestation and hierarchy, then the counter-intuitive
philistine insists that the term 'art' have the very same implications.
Or, better still, if anti-art is not merely self-defeating but defeats
the operations of power by undoing congealed resistance, sanctioned
deviance, co-opted revolt, authorized disaffirmation and so forth (i.e.
anti-art negates the negation), then philistinism's negation of art
is an agent of art's autonomy. If so, we are getting closer to the idea
that the philistine might be a category that includes Godard, rather
than Guiliani.
If we now
find ourselves in a better position to think legitimately (not merely
mischievously) of Godard as philistine (despite himself), we have made
it more difficult to make this claim on the basis of his shift from
film to TVideo. To be precise: the counter-intuitive conception of the
philistine - which creates the opportunity to consider Godard under
the heading of the philistine - militates against the untroubled use
of the conventional conception of the philistine, thus putting a question-mark
over the orthodox judgement of TV as philistine. Strictly speaking,
of course, TV is not philistine at all; it is, for the most part, simply
non-art that is simultaneously one of art's cultural rivals. The strength
of TV's rivalry to art has made it the unfortunate target of high-minded
cultural insults, and a prime instance of the conventional conception
of philistinism, along with mainstream cinema, genre literature, pop
and dance music, high street fashion and, now, the web. TV may well
be art's debased or devalued 'other' (among others); it is not, however,
art's philistine 'other'. The dialectical relationship between art and
philistinism means that the cultivated can't make accusations about
philistinism without reflecting (badly) on the symbolic violence meted
out on art's behalf (including the cultural, social and aesthetic grounds
on which they make their accusations). In other words, the concept of
the philistine remains negative - originally meaning the absence of
cultivation, now something closer to the spectral 'other' of art's self-validating
discourses - but it has returned from exile to threaten art with its
secrets.
Art under
threat has been the sign of business-as-usual in the cultures of capitalist
history. Radicals fight one another for the privilege of beating art
with a bit of shtick, while conservatives and traditionalists want art
preserved from radical ideas and threaten art with their deathly Midas
touch. Perhaps, here, we see Godard in one camp and Guiliani in the
other? And, if Godard's threat to art can, at a stretch, be regarded
as philistine, what of the art-baiting Mayor? Is Guiliani an old-fashioned
kind of philistine? Is he a naïve lover of popular pleasures for whom
art speaks a foreign language and therefore elicits his resentment and
censure? Guiliani's condemnation of the Sensation exhibition was not,
however, on the side of popular pleasures. Pleasure may not have come
into it at all. He condemned the Sensation exhibition primarily because
of Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary, which the Mayor imagined
(unseen, it was said) to be an attack on fine religious sentiment. At
no point, at least that I am aware of, did Guiliani have a go at art
as such. It might be, for instance, that Guiliani is not a philistine
at all, and that he condemns young British art represented in the Sensation
exhibition on the grounds that that art is itself philistine. Having
the accusation turned round in this way could be an instructive reminder
of the difficulties - possibly, even, the criterionlessness - that the
conventional conception of the philistine suffers. It might also lead
to the tempting possibility of accepting the accusation in order to
dismantle its conservative cultural scaffolding. The opportunity never
arose, however, because while the Mayor's attack on the Sensation exhibition
strikes me as a case study for the rearticulation of the concept of
philistinism, the debate in the media turned on the argument between
the freedom of expression and the proper use of public funds.
Deploying
the counter-intuitive conception of the philistine, Guiliani's heavy-handed
protest comes into focus. We don't need to know whether the Mayor is
sensitive to contemporary art's sensibilities; the point of the matter
concerns his attitude to art's dialectical relationship with its 'others'.
Does Guiliani seek to maintain art's cultural privileges and secure
its distinctness from non-art (e.g. popular pleasures, everyday life,
commercial culture)? Do his actions betray a resistance to the tendency
to merge art with non-art, preferring instead to promote the idea of
art as a special realm that is high, valuable and civic? Indeed, Guiliani's
problem with the Sensation exhibition might well be that contemporary
artists don't have the same respect for art and society that he would
like artists to display. If so, Guiliani is no philistine. Not the sort
of philistine I'm interested in, anyway. Guiliani is neither a conventional
philistine (he is a defender of art's civility), nor a counter-intuitive
philistine (he has no interest in negating art or calling attention
to the hierarchies and privileges that art requires to maintain itself);
he is an opportunist purveyor of populist politics against an unpopular
culture without, however, making any claims on behalf of popular pleasures.
In fact, if many of the artists in the Sensation exhibition could be
described as enjoying near philistine proximity to popular pleasures
in their art, then Guiliani's populist politics could be said to be
hostile to the popular pleasures he finds there. This brings in a cognate
hierarchy, related to the vertical relationship between art and philistinism:
politics is higher than pleasure. If you're busy at the moment, you
can deconstruct it at your leisure.
Ken Livingstone,
London's leftwing Mayor, has called for the removal of two statues in
Trafalgar Square commemorating the lives of two forgotten Victorian
Generals. He has not been accused of philistinism; he has been attacked
for 'betraying' Britain's military past. I'd like to think that Livingstone
was being deliberately and provocatively philistine, however. My preferred
interpretation goes even further. Just a few months before Livingstone
suggested that the statues be removed, Mark Wallinger placed a sculpture
on the empty plinth on the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square. It
was a life-size cast of a technician naked except for a towel around
his waist and crown on its head. The title, Ecce Homo, gave the impression
that this all-too-human figure represented Jesus, and so its unmonumental
scale was counter-balanced by another kind of grandeur. My fantasy is
that Livingstone was spurred on to bring down dozens of Imperialistic
statues by the example of Wallinger's passionate anti-monument. If this
shaped his actions, then Livingstone, like Wallinger, could be seen
to have taken the side of the philistine against the hubris and pretension
of official culture. Wallinger's human-scale statue rewired the public
monument as continuous with the spaces and personages of the everyday;
Livingstone's challenge to the remnants of Victorian military conquests
reopens the question of the relationship between public sculpture and
the actual lives, pleasures, wishes and history of the public. In both
cases, it is the challenge to cultural authority that counts. If Livingstone
succeeds in removing the forgotten generals only to replace them with
monumental statues of a different political hue, that challenge would
not have amounted to anything deserving of the name philistine. Let's
see if Godard has what it takes.
What pressures
artists into making about-faces, Adorno once said, is the realization
that their works are overloaded with elements of organization and control.
It is certainly true that Godard halted film production at a time when
his success was legendary. TV production gave him the opportunity to
shake off the accumulation of 'organization and control' that had attached
itself to his iconic status as a filmmaker and the eager reception of
his work in the culture of counter-cinema. What's more, TV is the poor
cousin of the cinema, not only in financial terms but culturally. TV
found its auters much later than cinema, and the stigma of corporate
culture has stuck faster to TV than cinema, especially since the waning
of the big studios. Movies may have once been the exemplary form of
mass culture, but TV broadcasting cemented mass culture to daily routines
of everyday life. Leaving the cinema for TV involves adjusting to the
pervasively domestic, while at the same time the issues of the authorial
voice of the filmmaker are exacerbated by the multiplication of reception.
In short, you can't make TV without acknowledging the centralization
of its production, the dispersal of its distribution and the infelicitous
condition of its reception. Cinemagoers are concentrated viewers who
volunteer their time, whereas TV viewers are often distracted onlookers
whose time you are sharing. Typical forms of attention of the TV viewer,
then, will be almost the exact inverse of the ideal art lover (that
instructive figment of the imagination who Richard Wollheim has accurately
summed up as 'an adequately informed and sensitive spectator'). If we
were going to depict an old-fashioned conception of the philistine,
the TV watcher (or, households of them, to be more precise) would be
a pretty good likeness. Godard, however, shows no sign of cosying up
to the philistine in his TVideo works. In fact, he seems to relish the
opportunity to disappoint the philistine watcher of TV by presenting
everything that s/he does not typically want.
For example,
consider the farmer in Godard's Six Fois Deux. The onscreen interview
gives us a pretty thorough economic analysis of his position as a farmer
and he goes into detail about how he has to mortgage himself for thirty
years, and exploit himself in order to do that because to pay himself
a full wage he has to pay a certain amount back to the credit company.
The interview turns out to be a pretty longwinded sub-Marxist analysis
of the farmer's social and economic position. Godard is on the side
of the farmer and sub-Marxist analysis is Godard's form of alliance:
Marxist analysis applies to himself as a TVideo maker and to the farmer
as an agricultural worker and a mortgage payer. The two worker-producers
are brought into mutuality by a system of exchange that violates the
differences between the material particularities of their work in the
quantifying concept of labour. This is not enough to question the extent
of their agreement. Considering that they are meeting on Godard's home
turf, indeed within the material of his own work, however, does put
a significant question-mark over their alliance. Godard produces culture
that allies itself to the economic interests of other workers but has
no apparent interest in their cultural interests. Godard does not explicitly
reject the farmer's cultural preferences; he omits those sorts of detail
from the picture. The farmer's inner life seems to be irrelevant to
Godard's community with him; there is no attempt whatsoever by Godard
to demonstrate that he loves what the farmer loves. If we think of philistinism
as a version of low-down populism then Godard is not its highest form
but its sharpest critic.
I don't
want to confirm the conventional idea that philistinism is coterminous
with populism; I want to pursue the implications that this moment of
anti-populism in Godard's film has for an understanding of philistinism.
I want to make two observations and combine them. First, that Godard
is addressing the farmer and the film viewer in specific ways. Second,
that his choices of forms of address are linked to hierarchies. In other
words, there is a hierarchy of forms of address at work in Godard's
film. Of course, we wouldn't expect anything else, for this is another
way of saying that he makes judgements. What would be interesting for
the question of philistinism, though, is if the hierarchies of forms
of address embedded in his judgements dovetail with the hierarchies
of cultural division. If we are interested in questions of cultural
hierarchy, we're interested in cultural values: we need to ask which
forms of address and corresponding forms of attention are given value.
Just as an indication of what I'm thinking about, let's agree that philosophy
has more cultural value than gossip, or that self-reflexive documentary
is a more prestigious form of culture than, say, the quiz show. I realise
that these hierarchies are contentious and even that the existence of
hierarchies has itself become contentious since postmodern relativism
set in. The category of the philistine seeks to reintroduce questions
of cultural violation within a culture of differences that can retain
its hierarchies only by passing them off as dehierarchized. So, I am
dwelling on philistinism and not letting Godard's judgments off the
hook because the forms of address and attention within his TVideo are
indexed to the violations of cultural division that I want to interrogate.
The original
question that I set myself to ask, here, was whether Godard turned to
TVideo in order to become more philistine? Did he turn to TVideo because
it was a philistine form? I think I'm coming out on the side that he
didn't. In fact, I think that he turned to TVideo without any consideration
whatsoever for the kind of question I'm asking. Instead, I think it
is more likely that Godard opted for TVideo, rather than cinema, to
position his work economically and politically. That is to say, it was
economic and political issues that primarily informed Godard's cultural
choice. The questions he was asking were not cultural ones, at least,
not in the way I think of the questions I'm asking as cultural ones.
Simply, it was not the culture of TV and video that Godard was after,
it was the forms of distribution and consumption that Godard was drawn
to. In a word, Godard preferred the politics and economics of broadcasting
to those of film distribution. TVideo was not Godard's alibi to embrace
philistinism. It is possible to imagine that Godard turned to TVideo
for the exact opposite reason, to combat philistinism. And maybe to
combat philistinism in its heartland. If so, then such an analysis of
Godard in relation to philistinism is being played out with an entirely
conventional conception of the philistine, and one that equates philistinism
with popular pleasures and mass culture. I want to finish by tracing
the possibility of a Godardian philistinism, of Godard as an anti-populist
philistine. First, I need to explain something about anti-art.
Anti-art,
especially in its Duchampian variety, has not been short of commentary.
Analysis, however, has always tended to leave an opaque core. Untroubled
modernist accounts referred anti-art to a justified response to the
horrors of WWI, thus excusing its artlessness with a reasonable explanation
of its antipathy to art. The result was to call anti-art's works mere
gestures. To be precise, anti-art's modernist commentators regarded
its works as inarticulate rejections of an articulate but culpable tradition.
Theories of the avantgarde since the 1960s complexified this picture,
but establishing that anti-art's gestures were aimed at the precise
target of art's institutions did nothing to rearticulate anti-art's
technical means of negating art. What are we to make of Tristan Tzara's
obliteration of simultaneous poetry readings with constant bell ringing?
Is he merely negating art (poetry) with non-art, and if so, is anti-art
that simple, that easily achieved? If we think of anti-art as violent
gesture or institutional critique then it is enough to regard Tzara's
bell ringing as an abstract negation of art, as a violation of the poetry
reading by intervening between the reader and the audience. However,
if we consider the hierarchies of forms of address and attention that
are highlighted by the counter-intuitive conception of the philistine,
then Tzara's anti-art is not a general and inarticulate negation of
poetry but a specific negation of poeticness and the forms of attention
that it requires. In a sense, Tzara retains the institution of poetry
by re-enacting the poetry reading but does violence to the object and
its reception by annihilating the poetic qualities of the poem and preventing
poetic sensibilities from being deployed.
If poetry
without poetic qualities is conventionally regarded as philistine, then
the specific negation of the poetic in Tzara's anti-art can tell us
something important about philistinism. For one thing, Tzara's bell
ringing does not amount to a retreat from art into the realm of popular
pleasures. Anti-art is not the presentation of popular culture in the
place of art. It is often as anti-popular as it is anti-art. Popular
culture is not the solution to the cultural division that the counter-intuitive
conception of the philistine interrogates. Nor, it has to be said, is
art. Anti-art is not the abolition of art in general but the negation
of what has become accepted as artistic. As such, one thing that anti-art
has to be is philistine. It is more important that anti-art is philistine
than it is shocking because the category under question is art and its
supposed qualities not art's audience and their conservatism. If a work
of anti-art does away with antecedent forms of artistic attention and
yet is immediately or almost immediately accepted as a major contribution
to art, it is not thereby neutralised as anti-art. It might in such
circumstances have been neutralised as institution critique or anti-bourgeois
gesture, but its negation of artistic value would remain. Tzara's anti-art
would, then, be an example of non-popular philistinism, as would Duchamp's
readymades (nominations that systematically ablute art of its artistic
qualities and deny the artist access to any learned or innate artistic
talents), among other things. I think it is worth something to think
of Godard's TVideo as non-popular philistinism, too.
As an artist
on the lookout for articulate forms of challenging the established lexicon
of cultivated forms of attention, Godard has been a rich resource for
me. Certainly, many of the techniques at Godard's disposal have found
their place within the realm of prestigious culture, confirming the
post-Greenbergian conception of the artist as someone who prefers to
display knowledge than taste, and so forth. Godard doesn't have to be
marginalized by cultivated culture in order to be useful for the philistine
artist. Like the Conceptualists of the late-60s and early-70s who introduced
philosophical texts into their works and the reception of them, Godard
confronts aesthetic and cultivated forms of attention with unsympathetic
material. The Marxist analyses in Godard's documentaries, for example,
may not exactly be populist but they certainly import forms of attention
found outside the institutions and discourses of art. And not only art.
Invoking the philistine as that which is outside of art is not reducible
to the strategic contamination of modernism by certain postmodernists.
Mixing popular imagery into high concept paintings does not add up to
a philistine intervention in the smooth-running of aesthetic and intellectual
cultural priorities; offering previously despised objects for cultivated
eyes and minds is not enough. It is their forms of attention that have
to be interrupted. Godard's TVideo is replete with examples of material
that resists the self-conceits of artistic culture. Visual and verbal
equivalents of Tzara's bell are set off time and again, not only announcing
the chance to think differently, but protesting against the most prestigious
forms of cultural exchange. Announcing the lurking, threatening presence
of the philistine. Godard is no populist but his philistinism shines
out.