In
our 'The Spectres of the Aesthetic' (1996) and 'Tolerating Impurities'
(1997), we set out to develop a conception of the philistine that
would counter its conventional usage in philosophical aesthetics,
cultural traditions of the left and the use of the term generally.
As is evident from the initial replies and to the contributions
in this volume, it has appeared to present some difficulties of
affiliation and interpretation. If we are discomforted at its apparent
intractability, we are not surprised at the resistance. We have
always insisted that its explanatory power and disaffirming perceptions
rest on the concept's violated and violating content. In this sense
we see the disruptive and disidentifactory content of the philistine
as a way of countermanding and challenging certain insistent cultural
commonplaces and closures. By transforming the philistine into an
explicit concept of social and cultural division our advocacy of
it from the position of the counter-intuitive seeks to expose the
occlusions and disavowals of, say, postmodern cultural pluralism,
and to unblock the theoretical and political stagnation of cultural
studies. This is why the theorization of the philistine is not a
post-Deleuzian theory of the perverse or a kind of 'third-way' postmodernism.
Just as it is neither - as some critics have suggested - a Marxist
theory of cultural 'dumbing down'. On the contrary, philistinism
reflects on such identifications - leaving none of them intact in
the constellational rivalries of cultural division. In other words,
the perverse, the 'primitive', the unschooled, the 'dumbed down'
and so forth, are not in themselves philistine; rather, they appear
to be philistine - or related to philistinism - only when they come
into contact with the issues of cultural division which confer on
the term its controversy. For this reason, philistinism may even
deploy certain materials related to perversity, hysteria and so
on, but only on the basis that a deployment of this kind has consequences
for questions of cultural division. As we have continued to insist,
philistinism rests on a far broader philosophical, artistic and
political project than our detractors would suggest: no less, than
the reinvigoration, within cultural theory, of a Marxist tradition
of dialectical negation. Adorno, Roy Bhaskar and Slavoj Zizek have
provided a lineage of sorts. Indeed, it is Adorno's acknowledgement
of the critical role of the philistine in Aesthetic Theory, and
yet his unwillingness to spell out its implications, that has underwritten
our philosophical ambitions for the concept. In this respect it
has been the failure of an Adornian negative dialectics to live
up to its own disaffirmative promise - a promise invariably circumscribed
in the work of Adorno's interpreters - that has focused our concerns;
in this way our philistine is the site where the failure of this
promise is opened up to its problematization. If our theory of the
philistine has explanatory power, then, what our work has sought
to recover is the emancipatory negation at the heart of Adorno's
philistine as the spectre of art and aesthetics. This is why to
talk of the philistine as a spectre is already to acknowledge its
counter-intuitive content, for such content is demonstrably at odds
with the philistine as the inferior and downcast cultural other
of art's authority. What we have been urging all along is that the
philistine's otherness be transposed into a challenge to art's identity;
the counter-intuitive philistine thus converts its violated otherness
into a critique (and violation) of art's failed totality.
Historically,
there has been very little opportunity to employ counter-intuitive
notions of the philistine, because, as our critics have consistently
reminded us, the weight of history against the resignification of
the concept gives it slim chance of success. The occlusions of Adorno's
interpretors, and the long imposing history of the philistine as
a derogatory term, has left it bereft of any friends - hence the
uniformly pejorative use of the concept within political philosophy
and theory on the left in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
For example, the near consistent identification in the early communist
movement and late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates
on culture and art between the philistine and the aggressive, unfeeling
bourgeoisie and the uncultured lumpen proletariat - although in
Ludwig Fuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, (1886)
Engels does put another spin on this by identifying the German philistine
(in particular) with the followers of Schiller, that is, with the
purveyors of "unrealizable ideals" and the denouncers of materialism
(sensuous pleasure). The identifications of these traditions (and
modifications) have been very powerful, as we outlined in our genealogy
of the concept of the philistine in late nineteenth century debates
on aesthetics and culture in Britain. But if these traditions are
powerful, their power does not explain why the concept of the philistine
has become culturally available today. This is why our use of the
philistine is conditional upon the institutional arrangement of
modern culture and art, and not upon an historicist recovery of
the philistine's 'lost content' or 'lost moment' of agency, because
the counter-intuitive philistine does not exist as an historical
category. Quite simply our philistine was not available to Engels
or Matthew Arnold. Engels used the concept of the philistine by
aiming it vituperatively it at conservative political targets, but
he was in no position to politicize the concept of the philistine,
to direct its violations against those social and cultural divisions
which brought into being. Modernists, likewise, deployed the conventional
conception of the philistine for the benefit and development of
art's emancipation from tradition and institutionalization; they
had neither the opportunity, nor the motivation, during their campaign
to save art from its past, to reconfigure the dialectics of art
and philistinism. Postmodernists, too, built their critique of cultural
exclusion on the prohibition of the notion of philistinism, refusing
to endorse its use and thus preserving its conventional conception.
The historical opportunity for a counter-intuitive conception of
the philistine may have not opened up at all, therefore, without
postmodernism's suppression of philistinism in the name of cultural
inclusion and the critique of earlier forms of cultural division.
In other words, the apparent redundancy of the philistine in postmodernism
was both a provocation ( given that it implied that philistinism
might test postmodernism's claims) and a license to reformulate
the concept (its erosion of the customary cultural and intellectual
prejudices against the philistine presented us the chance to rethink
it, for the first time). However, by this erosion of the prejudice
against the philistine we don't mean that the philistine is now
free of its traditional uses - far from it, as we have indicated
- but that the intellectual and cultural traditions that have been
arraigned against it are no longer so easily available to support
the attack on modern art and its institutions. A defining moment
in this process is the postmodern reception of Clement Greenberg's
Modernism. Postmodernists were quite happy to chastise Greenberg
for his denigration of kitsch and the popular in order not to legislate
against what they held to be Greenberg's elitism. However, they
were wholly neglectful of philistinism on the grounds that it had
been remaindered as a category for the new and democratic discourses
of art. The postmodernists may have theorized the necessity for
popular pleasures and the vulgar in the light of Modernism's would-be
elitism, but in refusing to use the term philistinism they preserved
modernism's conventional conception of the philistine as a cultural
stooge and therefore failed to convert the high-minded violation
of the popular and the vulgar into the more fundamental negation
of cultural and social division. Hence too many postmodernists believed
that the problems of cultural and social division were reducible
to the historical conflict between popular culture and high culture,
that is to objects and their signs. In fact, the pervasive use of
irony in the postmodernist relationship to popular culture would
act as the perfect buffer for the continued prejudice against philistinism
in the absence of its legitimation.
In
the heat of debates between modernism and postmodernism, aesthetic
value and populism, art's mourning and cultural exclusion, it was
always likely that the philistine would appear as either a postmodernist
cultural subject or as the precise failure to understand postmodernism's
cultural mission. Philistinism in its conventional forms may well
have dovetailed with such arguments, and this is why we have been
insistent in proposing a counter-intuitive use of the concept. This
failure to understand the philistine as a counter-intuitive concept
has led Andrew Bowie, Jay Bernstein, and others, then, to confuse
philistinism with postmodernism, or at least with some substantive
aspects of it. If this has been convenient for shoring up the professional
boundaries of philosophical aesthetics against art criticism and
the sociology of art it has also meant that the critics of the concept
have severely narrowed their options in understanding the contemporary
dynamics of cultural and social division and of contemporary art.
Our counter-intuitive concept of the philistine has been developed,
therefore, on the basis of postmodernism's blindness to the dynamics
of cultural exclusion. The New Aestheticists, as we dubbed them,
were as keenly aware of postmodernism's failure as we were, but
took action against postmodernism by coming to art's defence. Such
a defence was already built in to postmodernist notions of their
adversaries, and therefore could seem to be nothing more than a
'return' to modernist positions. The philistine, however, took the
postmodernists on where they were most vulnerable, asking serious
questions about the extent of their cultural inclusiveness, and
discovering the implicit exclusions at work in them. Philistinism
was not defined by its relations to either postmodernism or New
Aestheticism but by its detachment from what they share, namely
a lacklustre commitment to the negations of art. Postmodernism challenges
art's elitism by permitting the traffic between art and popular
culture, thus leaving art under no threat from its former rival;
the New Aestheticism, on the other hand, preserves art's negation
but only on the condition that art be severed from the forces of
popular culture, thus internalising art's negation by loading the
dialectical relation between art and its negating others in favour
of Art. A counter-intuitive philistinism does not compete with modernism
and postmodernism on equal terms; it is not the name of a new epoch
or a new movement, it is the name of what modernism and postmodernism
hides: the spectre of art's vulnerability to its own traumatic self-formation.
The Violation of the Violation
Modernism
regarded other cultures as violated and a threat to its own integrity;
postmodernism relativised cultural difference so that none would
appear violated and therefore excluded. Counter-intuitive philistinism
argues that all cultures are violated, irrespective of their 'included'
or 'excluded' status. In this respect our commitment to the concept
of the philistine has been grounded in a post-Kantian distrust of
aesthetic ideology as a domestication of the violation and self-violation
inherent to art's production and reception. With Adorno, we have
always stressed the reproduction of cultural and social division
within individual cultural practices. Accordingly our counter-intuitive
philistine is neither coterminous with a defence of popular culture
nor with the affirmation of the 'otherly cultured'. We have never
suggested that popular culture was ever a solution to cultural violation.
It is true that our dialectical formulation of the relationship
between art and popular culture ascribes more value and power to
popular culture than the old, hierarchical relationship between
popular culture and high culture, but that does not amount to an
uncritical celebration of popular pleasures. On the contrary, the
counter-intuitive conception of the philistine highlights the violations
bound up with the popular and its industries. It does so, however,
on one important condition: that art's own violations are taken
into account. This is why the counter-intuitive philistine does
not regard art or aesthetics as possible solutions to cultural violation.
The counter-intuitive philistine is a significantly different proposition
from, say, Adorno's infrequent and qualified stratagem of invoking
popular culture as a healthy antidote to bourgeois good taste. Importing
popular culture into aesthetic debate may well disturb middle-brow
sensibilities and the self-conceit of art's modernist autonomy but
the challenge hardly adds up to a full sublation. Indeed, we would
argue that whereas the complete or partial valorization of popular
culture is a bad sublation of cultural division; the counter-intuitive
philistine is a good sublation because it opens out the popular
and its 'others' to their violated and violating co-formation. In
other words, bad sublation uses the derogated cultural rival to
cancel the delusions of the legitimated culture; good sublation
deploys the derogated cultural other to cancel the divisions of
alienated culture. Bad sublation is the violation of the delusion
of non-violation; good sublation the violation of the violation.
It
is important, therefore, to distinguish the primary and structural
violations of cultural division over and above the secondary mediations
of such divisions in the experience of violation in specific cultural
forms and traditions. We can see these two types of violation at
work, for example, in the theories developed around the 'counter-cinema'
and popular culture by writers in Screen in the early 1970s. These
writers were articulately aware of the violations of conventional
Hollywood cinema and systematically opposed those violations, challenging
and subverting the subject positions orchestrated by commercial
cinema through concepts and practices that reinstated attentive,
politicized forms of viewing. Now, what we want to point out here
is not the falsity of their claim that Hollywood cinema is violating,
only that the 'counter-cinema's' conception of violation is not
primary and structural. We can agree with the counter-cinema writers
that Hollywood is violating, but it does not follow that counter-cinema
has any chance of escaping from or subverting cultural violation
itself. This is because the primary structural violation emanates
from the distinctions and divisions between Hollywood cinema and
counter-cinema (or, more generally, between mass culture and minority
culture). Counter-cinema does nothing to subvert the violation of
cultural division, but in fact re-stages its violence through the
conceit that it is Hollywood cinema, not the counter cinema, that
is violated and violating. So, we have no interest in chastising
the counter-cinema for failing to love Hollywood or for refusing
to admonish the avant-garde. On the contrary, our commitment to
philistinism is based on the indexing of cultural rivalries to cultural
division. Which means that the counter-intuitive philistine challenges
the counter-cinema and other neo-avant-gardes to recognise the primacy
of the violations of cultural division, rather than allowing such
violations to be circumvented through 'resolving' disputes between
divided cultures symbolically. In principle, any culture can be
recruited in the negation of another, producing secondary violations
which are reversible and interminable. What matters here is not
the first-order choice of one culture or another, but rather, the
negation of the structural division that predetermines cultural
choice. Therefore philistinism refers to the primary structural
violation of cultural division as the space out of which secondary
mediations are produced and reproduced. Our rough distinction between
good sublation and bad sublation can now be refined: good sublation
is the violation of primary violation; bad sublation is the violation
of secondary violation.
This
distinction has important consequences for understanding art's relationship
between negation and autonomy in art. When we talk about the traumatic
self-formation of art, we are talking essentially about how the
'counter-intuitive' philistine allows us to place art's violations
and self-violations at the centre, and not as that which stands
formally opposed to, art's autonomy. The 'counter-intuitive' philistine
as Good sublation is another way of insisting, therefore, on the
foolishness of the idea that value in art ought to be preserved
by separating it from 'everything else' or everything else that
it seems not to be. The lessons of twentieth century art are unforgiving
on this score. Art's autonomy is maintained through its relations
with what it seems not to be and not through what it imagines and
believes it already is.
Their
Autonomy and Ours
The
disappointment with postmodernism has recently produced a reassessment
of the issue of autonomy in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.
Some of this writing has returned to conservative modernist accounts
of autonomy against what it judges to be the dissolution of form
into technological effect in critical postmodernism. Autonomy is
defined as those painterly and sculptural practices - out of modernism
- which retain a sensuous commitment to surface and the expressive
mark. Other writing, in contrast, seeks to establish a possible
place of art's independence from within the technological and popular,
arguing that autonomy is the space where art negotiates its predetermined
relationship to the forces of cultural modernity. This position,
invariably, defines itself by its democratic appropriation of vernacular
or pastoral modes of attention those 'lower genres' and popular
forms which constitute mass cultural experience. If autonomy is
figured as a distance from popular forms and modes of attention
in the first account in the second it is construed as mediation
of the popular as such. It is no surprise then, that this position
has found a certain popular favour itself, in as much as it allows
art to find a 'democratic' place in the new multiculturalism. Yet
for all its talk of art's trafficking with the popular, this argument
flattens out the territory of cultural division by conflating the
migration of objects (into an expanded media) with the dissolution
of the borders which identify them. There is a crude positivism
lurking within this radicalism of cultural mix and match.
Our
concept of autonomy, however, does not turn on the revival or refusal
of an established map of the borderline between art and popular
culture or art and the everyday. The point is neither to shore up
the division between art and non-art, low-culture and high-culture,
nor to tear down the false wall between them. Rather, the first
condition of any theory of art's autonomy is to establish that which
is intrinsic to art even if it is external to it. Because if art's
autonomy is not another name for art's isolation, then art is intrinsically
permeated by non-art and the anti-aesthetic. Consequently, our argument
for art's permeated autonomy is not an alibi for bringing non-art
into the arena of art. Permeation is not meant to denote a hole
in the wall of cultural division through which we might pass contraband.
It is a figure for the interrelationality of art and non-art. Yet
'permeation' itself is perhaps too decorous and formal description
of the passage between art and non-art, the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic.
Why is violation and self-violation important for the debate on
aesthetics and the philistine? In the critique of post-Kantian aesthetics,
it is generally argued, that the appeal to aesthetic judgement has
produced a naturalization of the aesthetic subject as a self-transparent
unity. Kant's determination to bring the disruptive, aporitic function
of the Imagimation under the sway of the Understanding, produces
an aesthetic subject whose autonomy and rationality is based on
the appeal of the object of perception to the subject's intutitive
recognition of the beautiful. This is why post-Kantian aesthetics
feels like a guarantee of full subjectivity or the forced complicity
of the individual in a rational order. Violation and self-violation
are either ruled out or pushed out. It is the power of Hegel and
the Hegelian tradition to reconnect the Imagination with the Understanding,
to link violation and self-violations with the processes of reason.
Hegel's famous critique of Kant's Third Critique, then is precisely
to do with the way that Kant's notion of the Imagination passes
over its 'violent', negative content. Adorno reworks Hegel's theory
of truth-in-dismemberment in his aporitic defence of modernism.
Paul de Man's critique of post-Kantianism, provides a similar, if
problematically, anti-Hegelian logic. In this respect the achievement
of Adorno and De Man was to reintroduce the logics of violation
and self-violation into philosophical aesthetics. The theory of
the philistine extends this work into the relations of culture,
the conception of the cultural subject and the study of modes of
attention.
In
this sense our earlier development of the notion of autonomy, failed
to distinguish adequately enough between violating and non-violating
relations. Our account of the internal relations of permeation were
insufficiently differentiated. Simply, permeation includes both
violating and non-violating relations couched in a metaphor that
stresses non-violation. In this way any adequate account of permeation
must recognise its position in, and determination by, both relations
of violation and non-violation. What characterizes our counter-intuitive
understanding of the philistine is that it allows us to position
the notion of permeated autonomy through an ontological account
of violation and self-violation, in a way that far exceeds the debate
on cultural 'exclusion' and 'inclusion' in cultural studies and
art history, notions of symbolic violence in sociology, and the
concept of 'false happiness' in philosophical aesthetics.
Violation
does not figure prominently in either the standard or critical accounts
of art, aesthetics and cultural resistance. When it does appear,
such as in the early writing of cultural studies in which dominant
culture is seen as violating the lives and meanings of subjugated
groups, the theoretical mission is to protect the subjects under
question from this violation. What we are advocating, however, is
to theorize this violation as a primary condition of cultural subjectivity
and therefore to criticise the disavowal of violation as an act
of historical and political suppression. Art history, aesthetic
philosophy and cultural studies have each, in their own way, suppressed
the violation of the cultural subject to such an extent that violation
and self-violation have no place within 'proper' cultural debate.
Indeed, the antipathy to violation is a point of agreement for conservatives
and radicals alike, the difference between them being merely a matter
of timing - cultural conservatives want to preserve a state of existing
and possible non-violation, whereas cultural radicals want to make
way for a future without violation. What this means, however, is
that cultural subjectivity has been theoretically developed in opposition
to violation and self-violation almost across the board, suppressing
violation completely or reducing its effects to manageable formalities
that leave no trace on the conduct of the cultural subject. What
happens to all this suppressed violation? Where does it go? Cultural
violation does not wander aimlessly around the byways of cultural
life, it has a home and modes of attention of its own. And the container
of all the violation that culture's discourses suppress is, we have
argued, the philistine. Hence it is to the philistine that we must
turn in order to reintroduce violation and self-violation into the
formulation of cultural relations, the cultural subject and its
modes of attention.
Violation,
autonomy and the institution
Tony
Bennett argues that some forms of what we are calling cultural violation
and self-violation (what he calls, more positivistically, 'regulation'
and 'self-regulation') are pivotal in the formation of culture,
cultural subjects and the national museum of art. In his book, Culture:
A Reformer's Science (1998), Bennett examines the "role of culture
in the organisation and regulation of different fields of conduct".
A major element of this study therefore involves the governmental
and institutional construction of the conditions under which individuals
and groups would conduct themselves in the 'proper' manner inside
the newly established public galleries and museums in the second
half of the nineteenth century. The historical and social mission
of the reformist bourgeoisie can be summed up in the notion of the
'multiplication of culture's utility', which argues that art on
public display will not be seen by a few dozen each year, but enjoyed
by hundreds of thousands. That this multiplication does not occur
all by itself through the provision of public venues is clear as
soon as we notice that 'multiplication' is not the same as 'diversification'.
What regulators require, accordingly, is the means for maintaining
and monitoring the uses of culture, to ensure that those new to
art conduct themselves in a manner suitable to the provision of
such cultural institutions. The question of regulation and self-regulation
is given a contentious interpretation in the remarkable 'Report
of the National Gallery Site Commission' (1850). John Ruskin, the
author of the report, radically modifies the idea of multiplication
by advocating a two-tier system for the museum. Alarmed by the possibility
that great works of art might be despoiled or damaged by the new
museum-going working class audience, Ruskin argues that lesser works
of artists should be on permanent display, the more significant
and ambitious works should only be available to those with professional
or connoisseurial interest in the arts. This unembarrassed attempt
to define what or what was not appropriate behaviour in front of
the artwork - an 1841 commission was particularly disturbed by working
class families picnicking in museums - provides us with more than
a familiar narrative of working-class 'misbehaviour' from within
the prudential realm of the aesthetic. It provides us with a palpable
link at the moment of Victorian self-confidence, with the history
of the involvement of state and Church in the issue of art's autonomy
and the boundaries of correct aesthetic behaviour.
Indeed
the fear of the appetitive 'uncultured' beholder as someone who
disturbs the would-be harmonious world of aesthetic reason, characterizes
the development of the theory of art's autonomy during the Enlightenment.
The rise of protestant iconoclasm in the 15th and 16th centuries,
during and after the Reformation, produced a harsh culture of ecclesiastical
judgement around devotional works of art that was characterized
by the actual destruction and damage of the devotional object. The
potential profanity and sensuous immorality of art were seen as
legitimate sources of grievance. When Luther argued that images
were not in themselves responsible for the uses to which they were
put, he was, in a sense, questioning, the virtue of such violent
partisanship as the basis for individual religious conscience. This
dissension from the broad popular sweep of Reformation iconoclasm,
forms one of the tributaries of early Romanticism. Thus when Schiller
formulates his Aesthetic Education of Man, it is written essentially
as a polemic against the whole partisan religious culture that had
hitherto disfigured and consumed the life of the artwork in Europe.
The theorization of autonomy as a break with the disfiguring violence
of the religious iconoclast was, then, undoubtedly progressive,
in as much as it set out to break the connections between judgements
of value and 'corporate' interests. There could be no reflection
back on the category of art without its disconnection from religion
and state. However, this disconnection didn't so much dissolve art's
relationship to the appetitive and partisan spectator of art , as
displace and suppress it in the bourgeois notion of the disembodied
beholder.
Bennett
reflects on how this disembodied beholder in the 19th century was
formed by focusing on the policies that shaped the forms of conduct
instituted by the emerging public art galleries. There were definite
political, social and economic advantages to be had from the cultural
production of a prudential subject. One thing on the mind of legislators,
for instance, was the inculcation of restraint to keep population
growth under control. Developing mechanisms that would produce restrained
behaviour in galleries was not merely a matter of policing public
spaces; it was an historical task of refining the working class
from the inside, of softening manners, humanising brutal men, and
purifying their thoughts. The value of Bennett's book is that it
is not satisfied to identify the institutional mechanisms by which
art's outsiders are recruited by bourgeois taste; he indexes the
philanthropic aspiration to 'improve' the working class and render
it docile to the formation of the cultural subject. Bennett is at
pains to analyse the details of the ways in which cultural imperatives
stand in for properly political ones. The formation of the civil
subject is the ruling partner to the formation of the aesthetic
subject in his account. His argument is that the formation of the
civil subject is produced through the formation of the cultural
subject, but in doing so he gives less attention to this primary
formation of the cultural subject. How is this done?
Apart
from telling us that the Romantic philosophers were very influential
in suggesting that aesthetic experience was a form of work on the
self, Bennett describes some important moments in the governmental
inquiry into the proper running of the National Gallery in Trafalgar
Square. What emerged was a model of gallery going that would relinquish
direct, institutional regulation of activity (tours, lectures, and
so forth) for the sake of a combination of freedom of movement.
The choice between direct institutional control and regulation on
the one hand, and the self-regulation of gallery visitors on the
other, was the choice between, in the Foucauldian terms that Bennett
prefers, a disciplinary regime and the formation of a self-disciplining
subject. Regulation does not promote sobriety and prudence, so self-regulation
was preferred. Bennett's aim is to present culture as an arm of
government, "as a field of social management in which culture is
deployed as a resource intended to help 'lift' the population by
making it self-civilising". As such, Bennett's analysis always converts
cultural issues into administrative ones, and we are left at arms
length from the cultural issues that set this study in motion.
Culturally,
is the governmental monitoring of the public galleries the primal
scene of the exclusion of the philistine from art's institutions?
Maybe, instead, it is possible to think of this great episode of
cultural proprietorialism as an epic lost opportunity not just for
the democratization of art, but its identification with ordinary
modes of attention. The first condition of this lost opportunity
is the assumption that the multiplication of cultural utility through
the implementation of public access to art would be formed on the
model of replication, whereby the working class would replicate
the behaviour of the aesthete and his (invariably) bourgeois 'betters'.
What was lost, then, was the historical convergence of this nascent
public sphere for art and the emergence of ordinary modes of attention.
What happened instead was that activities such as teaching your
baby to walk or having a family picnic (culture in the broadest
sense) were ousted from the gallery (culture in the narrow sense),
and instead of the emergence of culture as ordinary, culture is
separated from the exigencies of the everyday. In other words, cultural
division is regarded as having more social utility by the legislators
and administrators who established the condition of art's public
sphere and lay the ground for art's modern autonomy. Whatever is
excluded from the formation of the content of art's autonomy at
this historical juncture will inevitably be counted among the contents
of philistinism. What is excluded from the public gallery, however,
is not something called 'working class culture' - as if that had
its own full identity in place - but a wide range of forms of attention
and types of subjectivity (many of which, incidentally, have been
finding their way back into galleries through the objects, performances
and installations of artists critical of the gallery's modus operandi
over the last 30 years). We should not regard as merely predictable,
then, the fact that the administrators of a new public sphere for
art did not bother to consult its new public. Even if it was considered
perfectly reasonable that the working class should not be consulted,
on the grounds that, like children, they were not in a rational
position to know what they wanted or valued, it is clear that the
'harmony' sought within the public gallery was the result of the
violence of an imposed false universalism. Today the reaching out
to non-gallery goers functions within a publicity drive for the
aesthetic arm of the tourist industry, because now it is a matter
of some political importance that art's audiences are given the
voice to challenge the established values, categories and meanings
of art, even if the petitioning of the working-class as a class
has long dropped out of view for today's administrators.
Instead
of self-regulating civility, the formation of the public sphere
for art might have produced a reckoning with the violation of the
violation. As such, speculating about the lost opportunity of a
public sphere for art with a voice for the philistine, is not a
retroactive utopianism; it is the point of departure for a systematic
critique of the development of art's autonomy under bourgeois culture.
It decouples art's subjectivization from its given, historical social
relations, asking questions about the complicity between art, galleries,
administration, government and social utility. The violation of
the violation does not bring about a restitution of well-being,
like the cancellation of a debt or the cure of an infection. On
the contrary, the settlement of a false universalism produces a
deceptive balm that induces calm in divisive conditions. The violation
of the violation, therefore, is politicization. The concept of philistinism
that we have been using is political and politicising to the extent
that it violates the false universalization of art by universalizing
violation. The universalization of violation we have in mind is
not merely the violations of the philistine writ large; the violations
of art and aesthetics are opened up by this universalization.
In
'Tolerating Impurities' we asserted that the philistine was not
reducible to any positivistic notion of the excluded 'other'. Nevertheless,
our critics insisted on challenging our arguments on the basis that
we inadequately described the culture of the philistine 'other'.
The cultural exclusions that seem to shape the concept of the philistine
understood positivistically, are not the point, however, for they
are invariably the symptoms of violation. The philistine is not
what is fundamentally other to art and aesthetics in advance. Rather
it is what inhabits and infects art's and aesthetics' violation.
And one of the main symptoms of violation in aesthetics and art
is the exclusion (or repression) of violation itself. This is the
civic utility of the philistine. The philistine is the waste disposal
unit of art and aesthetics. Its violations do not issue from the
philistine itself; the philistine's violations belong to the primary
violations of art and aesthetics. In fact, the philistine is an
aggregate of violations, all of which are excluded or repressed
by art's civil subjectivities and their institutions. If we speak
of the universalization of cultural violation, then, we are not
generalizing the particular content of the philistine's 'otherness'
but identifying the violations of culture tout court, those of art
and aesthetics among them. The philistine is theoretically valuable
in this way because its irritabilities are a guide to the intolerances
of those cultures, subjectivities, forms of attention and administrations
that endeavour to rid themselves of violations and self-violation.
The implications of cultural division have preoccupied a number
of social historians of art recently, in the aftermath of the New
Art History of the late seventies and early eighties. One such historian
is Tom Crow, whose Modern Art in the Common Culture, is an attempt
to resituate the determinate and structuring influence of popular
visual practices and modes of attention on the production of post-50s
art. His argument focuses on what he sees as the extended passage
of the traditionally despised lower genres of art - still life and
the portrait in particular - into a position of cultural prominence.
Indeed, this assimilation of what he calls the "pastoral" into art
(after William Empson) defines a new kind of settlement for art
after modernism: an art that incorporates the cultural division
of late capitalism into its relations of production and reception
- and in its modes of attention. By this he means that art has come
increasingly to understand and accept that what late modernism took
to define art's autonomy - its suspicion of metaphor and representation
- was in fact the possible source of art's public renewal and revivification.
Crow, then, like a number of historians who came to intellectual
maturity at the time of critical postmodernism, looks to the "pastoral"
or popular modes of attention, as a way of incorporating the non-specialist
spectator into art as a way of necessarily expanding the public
of art. In fact, he argues, this process of assimilation is both
essential to art's renewal and defines or structures the very crisis
of art's modernity this century and last. Our concept of the philistine,
would seem, superficially, to share some of Crow's history and cultural
reference points: we would not dispute the increasing incorporation
of the lower genres into the production of the most serious and
most assiduous art of the last thirty years. But, Crow's position
exhibits many of the problems of theorizing art's other in terms
of positivistic exclusions. A case in point is his brief discussion
of Jim Shaw's collection (and display) of 'Dime Store Paintings'.
Crow
refers to a review of Shaw's exhibition of Dime Store Paintings
that describes the paintings as "essentially worthless" and "dreadful,
abject and shabby". As well as countering this in advance by asserting
that these painters are "the genuine underground of art", Crow is
well aware that judgements about the paintings are not transferable
to judgements about the exhibitions mounted by Shaw. There is, undoubtedly,
a gesture taking place that overrides the qualities and attributes
of the paintings themselves. Shaw's Dime Store Paintings exhibitions
are unavoidably pictorial but they are indebted, conceptually, to
the Duchampian tradition of the readymade: their qualities are not
what singles them out as art; the processes by which they are singled
out are housed in the activities of the artist. Crow is interested
in Shaw's choice of dime store paintings because it crosses aesthetic
boundaries, visiting the "lumpen-suburban hinterland" and retrieving
it for the post- conceptual culture of contemporary art. It is a
vivid example of modern art in the common culture because it brings
common culture into the field of modern art. One is faced with a
deliberate and possibly unnerving reversal: the inclusion of the
excluded. Crow thrives on such exchanges. What is missing from Crow's
account, however, is any articulation of the differentiation of
critical acts of sabotage and negation from, say, the 'normal' activities
of scholarly attention to the inclusions and exclusions of the canon.
The renewal of art's resources, the generation of formal innovation
and discovery, and the question of what legitimately counts as art
- these are forms of trafficking between art and non-art that are
completely consistent with both (1) notions of questioning exclusion
and the inclusion of the excluded, and (2) preserving art's non-violated,
non-violating status even as it comes into contact with violated
culture. In short, these exchanges are done on art's terms. Violation
and self-violation are not brought into play by the 'normal' processes
of inclusion. Thus, the inclusion of the excluded does not amount
to the violation of the violation. Violation requires negation;
inclusion merely expands, broadens and extends the boundaries of
the accepted order.
In
contrast, the philistine does not extend the reception of art's
assimilation of its 'impure' 'others' in order to enliven a democratic
universalism of the popular. Rather, it treats the 'impure' as the
site of a series of violations that are, in a fundamental sense,
unamenable to cultural approbation. Crow's 'toleration' of impurity
is a disinfecting enterprise. Mutation and disputation are disavowed
and the crisis or trauma that is encountered with the impure is
repressed. With no trace of rupture and discontinuity in Crow's
account of art's housing of dime store paintings, politicization
is held off, along with the promise of violating the primary violations
of art and aesthetics. Cultural exchanges in Crow's framework are
always absorptions of 'low' into 'high'. He may be aware of what
this unidirectional account of cultural exchange has meant for definitions
of the popular in conservative accounts of modernism, but his writing
on Shaw can be subjected to the same critique - and more. Shaw's
Dime Store paintings leave no subjective remainder for Crow: they
are never the outcome of resistance, struggle and painful failure,
merely a Diaspora of unauthored amateurism. Art remains culturally
universal throughout, and impurities are incorporated into its universality
without a chance that the universal might speak through the impure
as symptom.
In
fact, what both Crow and Shaw fail to notice about the Dime Store
paintings is that are largely antipathetic to the democratic universalism
of popular culture and therefore are weak candidates for cultural
exclusion. The model of cultural exclusion, with art excluding popular
culture, is not adequate for understanding the dance between Shaw
and his anonymous painters. Crow and Shaw's interest in dime store
paintings not only extends art's scope but also extends the range
of the common culture. Dime store paintings are an excluded sub-genre
of popular culture - a kind of uber-exclusion. However, dime store
paintings are non-art without being popular; if they are engaged
in philistine forms of attention and subjectivity, if they exhibit
elements of the everyday and non-art couched in the unashamed language
of violation and self-violation, then they are a nonpopular philistinism.
Their failure to understand or recognise the terms of modern artistic
ambition and competence, does not so much produce a surrogate popular
art or folky groundswell, but a chilling and uncanny failure of
the popular. The work is too desperate, so to speak, too excruciatingly
self-violated to carry any real and authentic popular pleasures
and collective desires. So, Crow is wrong to criticise the description
of these paintings as 'essentially worthless', for that is precisely
what they are. Dime store paintings are like the autographs of people
nobody has heard of: Shaw collects them because nobody else does.
The point we are concerned to address here, therefore, is that the
supposed link between philistine modes of attention and popular
modes of attention is not stable. They are not identical. The concept
of the philistine does not rely on a fixed relationship that identifies
it with the popular and art with the unpopular. On the contrary,
nonpopular philistinisms are both more typical and more theoretically
promising.
Non-Populist
Philistines
Consider
Dada. The negation of art pursued by Dada artists during WWI has
no place on Crow's map of modern art in common culture. Its version
of modern art is a militantly uncommon anti-art. Striking up a relationship
with popular forms was not on the Dada agenda. Dada's negation of
art was not based on the affirmation of art's cultural others. Tristan
Tzara's multiple-voiced poetry readings accompanied by the deafening
sound of ringing bells neither promotes the universality of aesthetic
experience nor interrupts artistic conventions with the invocation
of popular culture. Negating and violating his own poetry, Tzara
did not seek to make friends beyond the small circle of the artworld
by trading in their pleasures. What he 'included' in his work had
not so much been 'excluded' by art's minority regime, as simply
regarded as senseless. What was philistine about Dada was not its
immersion in popular pleasures but its systematic negation of art
and aesthetic values. There is no better illustration of Dada's
unpopular negation of art than Francis Picabia's 'performance' in
which he created a picture before an audience only to have it erased
simultaneously by a colleague. Here the audience is faced with artistic
activity that results in nothing, neither the refined pleasures
of modern painting, nor the familiar pleasures of popular culture.
Picabia's empty painting let's everybody down. Having no available
other culture to draw on, in the wake of cubism's absorption of
African sculpture, Dada artists turned art's critique onto itself
and systematically negated art and the artistic by eliminating all
familiar traces of skill, sensitivity and taste. This is why it
is crucial not only that Duchamp did not himself fashion the urinal
that he chose to exhibit, but that he also made this choice, so
he said at the time, without any consideration of the objects visual
qualities: he was not exercising his taste, he was eliminating it
by choosing something to which he had no attachment whatsoever.
In these examples, Duchamp negates art by reducing the artist to
an arbitrary decision; Picabia negates art by annihilating it; and,
Tzara negates art by violating its familiar modes of reception.
Anti-art is not the inarticulate gesture of auto-destruction that
it is often made out to be by conventional art historians, rather,
it drains art of its artistic qualities so as to expose the trauma
of art's self-formation. Art drained of artisticness is a model
of philistinism that invariably produces the nonpopular - unpopular,
even - because it is based on self-violation and violation, not
on the inclusion or assimilation of the culturally 'other'.
We
are building an argument that claims Dada for philistinism but this
can not be founded on the empirical basis of Dada scholarship. Dada
is not the execrable other of modern art, its nihilistic sundering,
but the point where the violations of the avant-garde are pushed
unerringly into self-mutilating display. Dada is the anti-art of
the avant-garde made intolerable. On this basis the Dadaist is close
to the intolerability of the philistine. However, the only conception
of the philistine that Dada artists understood was unutterably derogatory,
as it was for their avant-garde peers and predecessors. We are not
suggesting, therefore, that the Dada movement introduced a new notion
of the philistine. Dada artists always regarded their rivals as
philistine, not themselves. Our argument that Dada is, in important
respects, philistine comes out of an extension of the concept of
philistinism - the concept of the counter intuitive philistine -
that was unavailable to the movement itself. In fact, the concept
of philistinism that Dada might be allied to doesn't just happen
to be unavailable to the early avantgarde, but is available to us
only because its crisis turned into our traumatic heritage. In other
words, we can now reinterpret Dada as philistine because anti-art
was not the termination of art they imagined it to be, but the emergence
of a new set of cultural disputes that continue to be played out
today. Philistinism is the corner that Dada's anti-art backed itself
into. In this sense, the best way to judge whether Dada failed to
meet its manifesto pledges of destroying art is not to search vainly
for examples of vandalised paintings and sculptures but to scrutinise
the forms of attention operating within Dada artworks themselves.
Dada's anti-art was not analogous to Nazi bannings and burnings;
it was, rather, a virus carried by the properties of their works
and the forms of attention they elicited.
How
are anti-art modes of attention to be construed as philistine? Anti-art
negates art through non-art. In Dada, violations of sensuous form,
principally through strategies of subtraction, disruption and deflation,
invokes the counter-intuitive philistine through its introduction
of non-art as art. This is the key to Dada's philistinism: it subtracts
art from art. It should be noted, however, that the introduction
of non-art within art does not produce the same effect. We can see
this at work on the level of the object, the artist and the viewer.
Dada anti-artworks contain no artistic properties at all. That is
to say, there is no material difference between, say, a readymade
and other examples of the found object still in everyday circulation.
If there is a difference between an anti-art object and objects
of everyday life, it is not by virtue of the material properties
of the anti-art object. This sets Dada against the entire history
of artistic practice and the accumulated wisdom of aesthetic philosophy.
The artist suffers the same suspicion as the object. Dada anti-artists
systematically rid their practices of artistic qualities and skills
in order to cut out the disease of art at source. It is imperative
for the anti-artist to put in place systems of violation that will
prevent any of his training or sensitivity to play any part in the
choices and making of artistic objects. This is why self-violation
is central to Dada's anti-art destruction of art. Art is put through
the sado-masochistic ring. The systematic and comprehensive subtraction
of the artist from the artist (hence, anti-artist) leaves the Dada
individual with no artistic resources to draw on - turning the Dada
anti-artist, in our use of the term, into a philistine. This violating
transformation has a knock-on effect on the art lover, too. When
the conservative hurls the insult at the anti-artist that 'anyone
can do this' or 'a child of eight could do this' s/he is correct
- up to a point. The subtraction, in the conservative idiom, is
read inversely, so that negation appears to be nothing more than
lack, critique is misconstrued as incompetence. Inverting the logic
of anti-art is necessary for the conservative critic if the critic
is not to suffer from the implications of anti-art. For, the abolition
of the artist in Dada entails the abolition of the artistic onlooker.
Artistic modes of attention are redundant in anti-art, and not only
is the artist placed in the position of the philistine, so, importantly,
is the connoisseur.
The
value of anti-art is discovered by turning over the assertion 'anybody
can do it' to reveal, on its underside, the anxiety that 'anybody
can attend to it'. Aesthetes and the like might contend that, on
the contrary, nobody can attend to it because there is nothing to
attend to - but this is yet another revelation of the aesthete's
dogmatic heuristic. For, what the assertion that there is nothing
to attend to can only refer to in this context is the absence of
the special qualities of art and the concomitant modes of artistic
attention. Anti-art's radical philistinism is confirmed by the complaint
that it is not properly art at all. Which is why it is no good to
come to anti-art's defence by asserting that it is, in fact, art
and that those who regard it as other to art are themselves mistaken.
Anti-art would be neither art nor anti-art without its non-art moment
- without, in our terms, its radical philistinism.
In
both traditional and New Art Historical accounts of the early avant-garde
Dada is historicized as an aberration and anomaly, it is seen as
the place where art burns itself out. Treated as outré and infantile
Dada is the dumping ground of art's negation. One of the effects
of this treatment is that the negation and violation in mainstream
modernism, in Expressionism or Cubism, say, is diluted by comparison,
so that Dada is confirmed as a cipher of unrefined negation and
all other modernist practices are confirmed as something more than
negations. Thus Dada's subtraction of art from art would appear
to fit this description only if its negations are seen as discontinuous
with the place of the philistine in the work of art's autonomy.
Dada is invariably taken to be the moment when art's autonomy is
lost, defeated, made mad, rather than reconstituted. Dada, then,
is a vivid place to examine the logic of anti-art and art, because
it throws into relief the burden and trauma of the negation of art
under modern art's technologically transformed relations of production.
Another key moment is conceptual art. Like Dada, Conceptual Art
has also been dismissed as a moment where art fails itself, rather
than the place where the dialectic of philistinism and anti-art
reconstitute the boundaries of art's autonomy. What concerns us
here, therefore, is the way in which Dada and Conceptual art have
been themselves subtracted, or put in cognitive quarantine from,
the art historical account of avant-garde of negation, on the grounds
that their violations destroy art, leaving the relations between
anti-art and autonomy cognitively and culturally stranded. Instead
of rounding up Dada and Conceptualism within the fenced in territories
of positivised art, the theory of the philistine allows us to rethink
their negations and violations as practices that steal art from
the lovers of art in order to defend a deeper sense of art's autonomy.
On
this score Dada stands out in art history as the representative
of an unfettered counter-intuitive philistine. However, what marks
out Conceptual art is that its philistine modes of attention are
produced out of materials which owe little to Dadaist and post-Dadaist
anti-art artistic identities. In Conceptual art the non-populist
content of philistine modes of attention derive not from a delinquent
refusal of bourgeois reason and culture through various anti-formal
strategies, but from a philosophical and theoretical expansion of
the artist as thinker and writer. By incorporating philosophical
and theoretical reflection directly into relations of art's production,
conceptual art not only put texts where pictures ought to be and
scruffy snapshots and graphics where paintings and fine art photographs
should be, but expanded the range of the artist's intellectual and
professional competences. This radically transformed how artists
thought of themselves. Rather than treating philosophical and theoretical
competence as external or marginal to the business of being an artist
- artists were somehow held to be exempt from, or 'not in the business'
of, abstract thinking - conceptual artists saw theoretical-learning
as the conversational, daily activity of the studio and its cognates.
In this transformation there was an obvious polemical attack on
Modernism's positivization of the artist as 'emoter' and 'expressor'
and the whole post-war bourgeois artistic culture of 'self-expression'.
However, this wasn't simply a reinvention of the artist as intellectual,
as if artists were furiously studying philosophy and quoting W.V.O
Quine in order to be thought of as serious and academically trustworthy
or budding Leonardo Da Vincis. On the contrary the recourse to philosophical
study and exposition and writing was disruption in the transmission
of knowledge, both within the art academy (the art schools) and
in the Academy of Sciences and Humanities - a disruption into what
constituted knowledge in the institutions of art and the humanities
and how such knowledge was disseminated (from 'expert' to passive
student). Thus, there was no pretence at trying to be philosophers;
rather what preoccupied conceptual artists was the nature, character
and form of what artists were supposed to know and the social relations
through which this knowledge was to be produced and transmitted.
This is why the communal nature of theoretical learning and debate
in early Conceptual art has the critical and self-distancing aspect
of working class autodidacticism. It was important for those artists
involved in theorizing the "new spectator requirements" of conceptual
art's critique of Modernism, that what got learnt and said was learnt
and said within a critically autonomous community of practitioners,
and not in response to external and bourgeois academic criteria
of competence and success. Consequently conceptual art's philosophical
autodidacticism, generates its own form of Dadaesque delinquency.
By placing philosophical texts or philosophical inflected snapshots,
where pictures should be, it radically deflated the aesthetic expectations
and sensitivities of the Modernist and conservative spectator and
the critical judgements of the academician and philosophical specialist.
If the Modernist and traditionalist art spectator felt overwhelmingly
cheated by conceptual art's draining, or better, ghosting, of the
sensuous surface of the art object, then the philosophical beholder
- if he or she was looking at all, that is - experienced bemusement,
when not fighting off condescension. Such thinking, by the philosophical
spectator, was not philosophy as they understood philosophy to be.
But if conceptual art's accusers talked of 'elitism', 'bureaucratic
elitism' or worse, conceptual artists talked of open-enquiry. Indeed
despite the intractable content of much textual analytic conceptual
art, conceptual art achieved its deflation of Modernist sensibility
through encouraging a discursive reciprocity between artwork and
spectator. In transforming the artwork into a temporal and readerly
experience, the liberatory notion of the spectator as intellectual
possessor of the object- in Hegel's sense - is given expanded form.
Hence it is no surprise that Modernism found this both threatening
and baffling. Because it did so in the name of Art, treating Conceptual
art simply as an egregious attack on aesthetic value and, therefore,
as evidence of a failure to trade in art's essential structure of
meaning. Accordingly, Modernists eventually suppressed their own
painful bafflement with the judgement that the Conceptualists were
themselves baffled about what art is. This is why when Modernism,
in effect, identified Conceptual art as philistine, they did so
in the belief that Conceptual artists were really incompetent or
gratuitously bad. Conceptual art was treated as an incorrigible
act of vandalism and false hubris, the result, fundamentally of
poor judgement: texts and scruffy snapshots were not art and could
never be art; Conceptual art was just misguided. Indeed it was a
monstrous aberration. By not recognizing proper disciplinary boundaries
Conceptual Art betrayed the sensuous form and empirical experience
of art.
The
Risk of Self-Violation
This
identification of conceptual art with the monstrous or aberrant
is crucial to understanding both the non-populist philistine content
of conceptual art and popular modes of philistine attention generally.
In 'Tolerating Impurities' we elaborated on the dynamics of self-estrangement
as a way of understanding the social content of philistine modes
of attention, with particularly reference to everyday pastimes,
distractions and indulgences. In matters of art, the question of
self-estrangement needs to mediated through the active agency of
the artist confronted with the practices and traditions of the modern
art institution. This is because, what we might call the non-artistic
philistine is confronted with a struggle over the sign-in-consumption
in the absence of any direct involvement in sensuous cultural practice,
whereas the artist-philistine confronts the struggle over the sign-in-consumption
in cultural practice. This fundamental difference, therefore, captures
a very different sense of the performative aspects of the philistine
- or what we have previously called the non-empirical status of
the philistine - at work in the philistine's labour of negation.
Both
artistic and non-artistic philistines risk philistinism. Philistinism
is a risk because it is a screen for the culturally grotesque and
outcast. Risking the philistine means allowing yourself to be a
target for the disgust or authority of others. But there is another
sense in which philistinism is a risk. We might speak of the risk
of philistinism as a wager, an aim, an opening. A risk, in this
instance, is the opposite of an appropriation. And the risk of philistinism,
therefore, does not fully anticipate what philistinism is or might
be. The open, unfinished identity of the philistine is a risk because
it is not predictable or under control and, so, the outcome is not
assured. Philistinism, essentially, is the risk of self-debasement
in which the power invested in culture and art is subject to a performative
'self-disfigurement'.
For
both the artist-philistine and the non-artistic philistine, the
subject risks and accepts the violation of his or her 'best' interests
by identifying autonomy with the negation of authoritative value.
In the first category this risk is identified by the subject's withdrawal
of consent from one false universal (high culture) and the embrace
of another( the popular). In the second category the risk of violation
is based on the identification of the official tastes and practices
of the prevailing culture as a false universal, and the conscious
disturbance and ruination of their manifest unities. But, significantly
this cannot be achieved simply through the incorporation of the
'culturally other', 'culturally despised', or 'culturally remaindered'
into the space of art. As we have stressed, philistine modes of
attention are not equivalent to the incorporation of the cultural
'other'. For a qualitative transformation in cognitive values to
take place the risk of disfigurement must involves the derogation
of artist and spectator alike, insofar as the symbolic 'excess'
of the work must involve a transformation in art's relations of
production and reception.
The
philistine is a grotesque figure. It does not belong to the cast
of heroic characters that stand-in for the agency of human self-emancipation.
Rather than exhibiting the traits of wholeness, self-transparency,
truth and strength, the philistine is self-inconsistent, alienated,
scarred and uncertain. The philistine is not a portrait of who he
or she wants to be, or who we want to be. But, in the labour of
negation that constitutes emancipation, self-disfigurement is a
necessary moment. And , if self-disfigurement is another name for
autonomy, the always already disfigured category of the philistine
is a pivot of cultural negation and self-violation. Autonomy has
to be won through the negation of the actual. Negation, though,
is not merely a logical or formal relation, it is made up of absences,
erasures, rejections, insubordinations, cancellations and splits
. In a sense, the grotesque is a naturalisation of negation, so
that the popular ( its pleasures, and forms of attention) can be
regarded as grotesque by art lovers without ever recognising that
the grotesque is a sign of negation. What we have sought to do in
this essay is to draw out the negations and violations of a category
that are too easily suppressed by the tropes of grotesquerie. What's
more, the grotesque plays down the vital distinction between popular
and nonpopular philistinisms by abstracting the specificity of the
negations they deploy. Our categories of the popular and nonpopular
philistine deliberately cut diagonally across the cultural categories
of the Left cultural theory derived from Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams et al, in which a space for the counter-popular is secured
through a two-sided critique of official and commercial modes of
attention. The 'scandal' of theorising the philistine, then, is
due to the failure to affirm an alternative, positive culture, of
a counter-popular that is neither the culture of authority nor the
culture of the market place. Philistinism is grotesque because its
negations are signalled in its dismemberments, instead of translated,
in advance, into the safe harbours of cultural critique.
Why
has it been necessary to dig deep into the negative dialectics of
Adorno and Bhaskar to overcome the intellectual routines of cultural
studies and postmodernism and avoid the glutinous layering over
of cultural debate with the various kinds of nostalgia for the early
avantgarde, American Modernism and 80s HighTheory? One reason, at
least, is clear: the style of the politicisation of culture prevalent
in cultural studies and postmodernism evaded issues of dismemberment
and violation in favour of a choreography of difference, positionality
and symbolic intervention. In other words, we want to reinstate
the internal moments of violation that result from the external
continuum of violation in the social relations of cultural division.
Negation is the grounding and explication of the philistine in a
continuum of violation and derogation, of actual and symbolic violence.
In this way to risk violation and self-violation is, as Hegel argues,
is to insist on practice winning its "truth only when, in complete
dismemberment, it finds itself." Relationality and constellationality
must be meshed with absence, impurity, violation, dismemberment,
or else we lose the force of the rivalries, hierarchies and struggles
that the structures of alterity and emergence entail. If negation
and dismemberment are not given full weight in our accounts of culture,
the brutality and alienation of division is held off by its theory
and the antagonists are magically freed from the antagonisms that
set them against one another. The philistine is the figuration of
the impossibility of a positive, unmolested culture, and a positive,
unmolested cultural subject. The identity of any given culture or
cultural subject is hampered from within by the antagonistic relationship
to its others and rivals which prevent its full actualization. Consequently,
each culture and cultural subject functions as the inherent obstacle
on account of which its others and rivals are never fully themselves.
Philistinism
accepts the rage of art and aesthetics against itself as a symptom
of a failed totality, and therefore, a false universal, and turns
its derogated position as art's 'other' to the disadvantage of art's
identity. In this way, the philistine doesn't invent art's negations;
the self-violations within the concept of the philistine conspicuously
invert art's false affirmations. Philistinism steals art from itself
through a labour of cognition that puts dismemberment in the place
of unity and new unities in the place of necessary dismemberment.
Negation is not an aberration but a marker of universal truth in
hegemonic struggle with false universality. Rejecting the philistine,
therefore, as the rejection of an unsightly injury amounts to a
forced choice between false universals and the admittance of a greater
injury: the capitulation to the divisions that hold thought and
practice in their allotted place.