A Zarathustra in rhinestones: why Wichita Lineman is a great work of art

Following on from my claim in the debate (see last post) that “Wichita Lineman” is a great work of art some folk had asked why I think so. I’m inclined to think that anyone who had heard it would know why, surely?

 Jimmy Webb is a genius, I think, and the Glen Campbell version is the definitive one.

Most obviously it’s a beautiful song which is beautifully arranged and beautifully performed; a micro-opera with an obvious narrative – a beginning, middle and end - which condenses all that it needs to into its 3 minutes (and I'm convinced that there's something about a chiming chord change from G Major to Minor which captures a fundamental truth about the human condition.)

It’s a love song, of course, but one that struggles against the constraints of the pop idiom. This is something that all the very best pop does: to offer the promise of transcendence from within the parameters of a medium that will thwart and undermine those ambitions.

Contained within those three minutes there is an existential allegory: “I need you more than want you; and I want you for all time.” Those lines just floor me every time. Just there you have a perfect expression of the human-all-too-human plea for contact with another human in a world in which we are, essentially, alone. This is more than a desire for love; it is a need, a basic and perhaps destructive compulsion. It’s a thirst for communion that can never be slaked. Yet the Lineman must continue to do so; and his isolation in the sun bleached prairie is relentless. There doesn’t seem to be any respite to his Sisyphean task: “you know I need a small vacation; but it don’t look like rain”. So still the hard and cleansing and cooling rains don’t fall. When we leave the song we leave him “still on the line”; he’s still there now; still searching.

We are all like him; all “searching in the sun” for another “overload”. This is the song of both a solitary everyman and a Zarathustra in rhinestones. He is alone in a solitary quest for meaning in an essentially meaningless and indifferent world that constantly overwhelms (“overloads”) him. His world is one that is relentlessly teetering on the edge of collapse: “And if it snows that stretch down south, won't ever stand the strain” but one that never reaches the redemption that collapse and chaos might bring.

The pay off, though, is that this is a song about communication sung by someone who is utterly alone with no-one to communicate to. The character is a line-man. His job is to maintain the operation of telegraph lines so that people can communicate. The telegraph itself is an odd, mute form of communication that is inherently modern and inherently alienating (or at least must have seemed so to The Lineman): it happens silently and bloodlessly over a distance through the abstract dots and dashes of morse code.

 The art historian and iconographer of The Weird Aby Warburg noticed this effect of distance and finishes his distinctly odd essay on the serpent rituals of the Pueblo Indians with his strange nostalgic requiem:

“Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking strive to form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into space required for devotion and reflection: the distance undone by the instantaneous electric connection.”

The Lineman's fate is ruled by instantaneous electric connection. He must monitor the “overloads” and power outages that arise when there is too much, communication; a surfeit, a glut that threatens the system. But he himself is denied it. He hears the melody of his lover’s voice not via the code but “singing in the wire” and “through the whine” of the wind in the desert of the real. His own song, then, matches that of his lover and the whistling of indifferent nature; the song of the wind that blows through the wires above his head.

These dots and dashes of indifferent communication are then mimicked in the recurring motif in the song (the flute-like sound going “da da dada…”). In the end the world of the Line Man and our own world begin to mesh. We too begin to hear the morse code that he monitors and the whistling of the wind. Through the aeolian harp of the telegraph wire we too can hear the singing that he hears in his exquisite isolation. Ultimately, then, he does communicate; but not with his lover, but with us the listeners, with those outside of his world who listen on and on, only just able to stand the beauty of the strain.

Debate on Socially Engaged Art

This was a bit of fun (although nerve wracking at first).

Yesterday I was involved in a debate on the motion that “This House Feels that the Most Valuable Art is Socially Engaged” in Trinity College. It was organized by Hannah Oellinger, Kamil Markiewicz and Thomas Hayes of NCAD, and hosted by The Hist.  The other speakers were Declan Long, Kevin Atherton (NCAD), Conor O’Malley (Culture Ireland) and Ursula Ni Choill, William Dunne, Cat Una O’Shea and Liam O Neill (TCD).

I’ve put the text of my 7 minute presentation below. There might be a video of the event floating around too as there were cameras. It was part of the students' involvement with CREATE so there might be a follow on.

Anway, well done to all involved for a stimulating and enjoyable debate.

Opposing the Motion: The House Feels that the Most Valuable Art is Socially Engaged

(i)

When it comes to tackling concrete social issues art is of no use at all.

Actually, it is worse than useless.

It’s worse than useless because people still cling on to this hopeless idea that the job of art is politics. It’s not.

If my toilet is blocked, I’ll call a plumber.

If I’m sick, I’ll go to a doctor.

If there’s a crime being committed, I’ll call the police.

But when, when, would I ever look to an artist to solve a problem?

Never.

If I want a better society should I make go to artists, singers, songwriters, jugglers, potters clowns and – god forbid – poets for the answers?

No, of course not.

If I want a better society I myself have a responsibility to act in a certain way towards those around me. And if I want society to change I should make specific, concrete demands on those politicians, bureaucrats, legislators and educators who can make these changes.

When it comes to real things that real people can do to make the real world a better place art is not going to help us.

Art is useless; but of course, that is its great strength, and that is what makes it so valuable.

(ii)

The artist has one responsibility when making art – and I should stress this is when they are making art; it does not resolve them of social responsibility in general – and that is to make things that can be aesthetically judged. All the artistic act need concern itself with is making good art.

We don’t ask chefs to make socially aware soufflés – the contestants of masterchef are not penalized if they don’t make a veloute sauce that is a biting satire of late capitalism.

We don’t expect footballers to say in their post-match interviews that the winning goal they scored in the 72 minute was a protest against the military regime in Burma. 

Food dishes, plays in sport, musical motifs, dance positions, pictures and all other forms of art are beautiful because they are autonomnous – they are separated out from the everyday run of events. Artforms are beautiful precisely because they exist in a context in which responsibility is suspended.

(iii)

Take a moment to think about what you think are some truly great works of art.

[Pause]

Here are some of mine:

The Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece

Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

Welles’ Citizen Kane

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman

What you’ll find is that what makes them great is NOT their empirical truth, their didacticism, or their moral properness; in short their responsibility to society.

Instead what makes great works of art great is their greatness, and it’s the same for what makes works of art, good, mediocre or bad. It’s as simple as that.

The most valuable art (and obviously I don’t mean that which is most expensive) is art which is NOT socially engaged. It is, instead, art that challenges its audience to transcend its particular social situation. The best art is not bound by social responsibility but, instead, revels in a glorious irresponsibility.

“Good taste is the enemy of creativity”, Picasso said, and isn’t there something so very tasteful about thinking that you’re doing the right thing?

(iv)

At its best the call for artistic responsibility is a self-righteous distraction. A harmless enough irrelevance that could be easily brushed off the stage or out of the studio before the real work begins.

More seriously -  the call for social responsibility can used as a lazy get out clause for bad artists more interested in making friends, clearing their conscience or securing funding for social inclusion. “It’s not bad – its non-elitist. It’s inclusive” they’ll say.

We only need look at the flabby, bloated, pompous farce that was Dublin Contemporary to see how several million Euro can be so badly mismanaged in the name of using – and I quote:

“art’s underused potential for commenting symbolically on the world’s societal, cultural and economic triumphs and ills.”

What rubbish.

(V)

Art is brilliant, we just should be careful what we expect from it.

Art is brilliant and it does come with responsibilities: the responsibly to be freely produced; and our own responsibility to take it seriously.

Of course art can make the world a better place. I can’t and don't want to imagine a world without it.

And so can good food, and music and gymnastics and sex. Especially if you can do them all at once.

Picasso on the Radio

My contribution to a discussion on Picasso on Newstalk is now available to listen to.  This was the first time I've done something like this but I found myself enjoying it in the end.

Today's Class on Harman and Aesthetics

It was a lively and enjoyable session today with the MFA group on Harman, Speculative Realism and aesthetics.

Bits of what I said have appeared on this blog in various forms, and I've also presented this material at SEP/ FEP in York (summer 2011) and at the Portrait of Space project run by Theresa Gillespie and Rose LeJeune in Sept. where you'll also find a video of the talk.

As a few people asked I've put the text up here for a while with a view to continuing the conversation via the blog should anyone want to.

A magical theory of reference?

This is a reply to Alan's response to the last post.

If one takes Realism according Michael Devitt who says: “The general doctrine of realism about the external world is committed not only to the existence of this world but also to its ‘mind independence’: it is not made up of ‘ideas’ or ‘sense data’ and does not depend for its existence and nature on the cognitive activities and capacities of our minds. Scientific realism is committed to the unobservable world enjoying this independence.” [‘Scientific Realism’]

Then the challenge for any such Realism (epistemic, ontological etc.) comes not only in the affirmation of a mind-independent reality but also the claim that that reality is knowable in itself; that is that true statements can be made about elements of reality.

 This seems to necessitate taking one of two, intertwined positions; neither of which is satisfactory to me.

First: Certain forms of Realism necessitate skepticism. This is because if there is a world of which we are part then this world obviously precedes and exceeds us. It transcends us and hence our access to it and knowledge of it must be partial. The transcendental project in both Kant and Phenomenology is a way out of this skepticism and (late) Husserl is quite clear that his phenomenology is realist: "There can be no stronger realism than this, if by this word nothing more is meant than: "'I am certain of being a human being who lives in this world, etc. and I doubt it not in the least'" [Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences... - quoted by Zahavi who makes a strong case for Husserl as a realist.] But it is a different type of realism to Devitt's.

Second: epistemic and ontological realism require reference in order to have meaning. This seems to require some form of abduction to support the knowable existence of a reality that we might have unmediated access to. This is what Putnam meant when he said: “believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference.”

And Putnam’s position (in Reason Truth and History at least) is to argue that this requires the claim that a ‘god’s eye view’ of the world is possible in principle. He rejects such a position as incoherent because we can never grasp the world in its totality. Descartes recognized this; hence his need for a 3^rd entity – God – to triangulate between Res Extensa (corporeal substance) and Res Cogitans (consciousness) Without God his system would have been incoherent.

Now; this is relevant to the last post because this is also what Luhmann also claims; namely that to have a world in-itself then this world needs a correlate observer with a view from nowhere. Luhmann then historicizes this saying that whilst we used to use God to perform this function (of position-less observation) this god-function has been replaced in the functionally differentiated social systems of modernity and the possibility of a position-less observation of the totality of everything has, necessarily, evaporated.

Also, and there’s so much more to be said on this than the following few lines, I think this points to the role of aesthetics in gesturing toward this totality. I take this to be what Bateson means when he draws together epistemology and aesthetics in grasping totality and claims that: "the loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake."

It’s also how I read Graham Harman’s claims that aesthetics is first philosophy and that aesthetics is a branch of metaphysics. Perhaps, then, only certain forms of magical thinking can help us speculate about the world beyond our prison house of language and reference.

"Our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity is an epistemological mistake"

I’ve been thinking about Luhmann and religion at the moment and I have an idea that is probably heretical in terms of rigorous Luhmann scholarship. This is to consider “system” in quasi-religious terms; perhaps as comparable to God.

This is a reading that would require swimming against the stream of interpretation that has Luhmann’s account of Modernity as a sociological one that describes The System of Religion in relation to an increasing secularization of society. That is as a turning away from religion as a means by which to describe the world to forms of social systems that are self-observing and self-describing. Luhmann himself says that the purpose of religion was to deal with the problem of observing the indeterminate complexity of the world and to “transform indeterminable into determinable contingency” (Function of Religion, 1977, pg. 189) and that this function disappears in the functional differentiation of society in Modernity.

However; I’m sure that there is something weird and occult about Luhmann’s “system.” And that his thinking is infused with a form of occult spirituality (albeit a post-human spirituality, perhaps akin to that of Norbert Wiener, who, by the way, was also a pretty weird thinker, as anyone who has read God and Golem Inc. will know.)

There are 3 dimensions to this occult flavour to Luhmann’s work.

One thinks through how Hegelian Geist, or spirit is replaced by “system” in Luhmann’s own account of the development of modern society.

Two concerns how auto-poesis (self-organization) functions as an animating, first cause in his systems (in the later Luhmann at least when he’s drawing on the biological theories of Bateson, Maturana, Varela et al). A spirit, or life-force perhaps inhabits his systems. This is, after all, what Habermas recognized in his critique of Luhmann’s systems theory as meta-biological; that is as relying on a principle of irrational “life” as an organizing principle.

Three follows on from Luhmann’s own enigmatic statements about God such as:

“The partner for radical constructivism is therefore not traditional epistemology, but traditional theology… One then easily sees that one still has to distinguish the distinguishing of the distinctions with which observers work and which can be observed in the observations of observers from the indistinct which was once called God and today, if one distinguishes system and environment, is called world, or, if one distinguishes object and cognition reality… This also means that the form of a theory described on the basis of its ability to resolve paradoxes allows for the question about functional equivalents, or, if it presents the paradox of observation as the observer, the question about God,” (from The Society of Society, translated in Moeller, Luhmann Explained.)

Now – I’m not really sure, if I’m honest, if I know what all that means and where I might go with it. But it does seem to mesh with something that Bateson has to say about an aesthetic unity in complex systems (which I’ve quoted below) in relation to spirituality. And this also seems to underwrite my own hunch that at the heart of Luhmann’s own system building is an aesthetic project; and that his is an aesthetic theory.

“We have lost the core of Christianity. We have lost Shiva, the dancer of Hinduism whose dance at the trivial level is both creation and destruction but in whole is beauty. We have lost Abraxas, the terrible and beautiful god of both day and night in Gnosticism. We have lost totemism, the sense of parallelism between man’s organization and that of the animals and plants. We have lost even the Dying God.

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these ideas into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are.

Observe, however, that there have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious that all the minor insanities that characterize those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity.” (Bateson – Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, Intro.)

Almost not there and almost not art

This is due to appear in Critical Bastards: http://criticalbastards.wordpress.com/ but as I’ve not posted anything for a bit I thought I’d put this up here until I have time to write some more. It’s a review of Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (Nov. 2011 – Feb. 2012)

There are mysterious mucky circles on the lower floor of the New Galleries in IMMA that are easy to walk over and easy to miss. They’re almost not there and they’re almost not art. They lie there patiently and silently recording the visitors to the space in the dirt that sticks to their tacky surfaces. It’s a simple enough idea, to put glue circles on the floor. But in that slight gesture beneath your feet you can see both an aesthetics and a philosophy begin to take shape.

Rivane Neueuschwander’s work gives form to relations; be they between people, objects or spaces. What these forms do, quite beautifully, is allow us to see that space is not a neutral vacant nothing but rather a site of potentiality that emerges from systems of subjects and objects. Space is not a void but rather something that is constantly renewed through complex interrelations between things and people. Space is something to be achieved.

Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts) is a collection of motley objects made by people during conversations in bars and restaurants. It’s an odd array of micro-sculptures made from torn beer mats, toothpicks, napkins, bottletops and so on; twisted by a haphazard origami. Their precariousness betrays the absent minded process of their construction and they run the risk of toppling into inconsequentiality. Yet these ersatz records of now unknowable encounters are the residue that’s left behind after the gentle collisions of things and people.

A whole room is given over to the ribbons of I Wish Your Wish which hang in scruffy lines on the walls. We’re invited to take one and wear it around our wrist; this is a reference to the tradition at the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonhim in Salvador, Bahia (in Neueuschwander’s native Brazil) where it’s said that the wish will come true when the ribbon falls off. Each ribbon has a wish printed on it taken from what other visitors have written. Every desire (to speak better English, to have more money, to recover from a fatal disease) gives only the slightest glimpse into whole other spaces where complex networks of intentions, and expectations fizzle and pop.

What all these works do, then, is open up the gallery as another space of possibility where relations may be given some form. This happens quite literally in the drawings of First Love (2005) that were created when a police sketch artist tried to capture the image of visitors’ descriptions of their first love. Here the gallery becomes a space where intimate liaisons are made public.

Yet to claim that these gestures and things are a form of philosophy could suggest that this is a serious, dry and perhaps precious exhibition. Far from it. Its beauty lies in the lightness by which these relations are handled and spaces nurtured. And as I watched the bubble in the film The Tenant (2010) bob around the environment of a vacant house like a furtive intruder I couldn’t control my body as splutters and laughs irrupted from it. It was only then that I noticed the woman who’d walked in behind me and just then caught my eye with a look that I couldn’t quite place. This was a look of recognition; but an uncertain one. Was it one that was disapproving or flirtatious? What nascent relationship was taking form here? I didn’t know. And, ashamed at my awkwardness and ignorance, left the space behind.