Some notes on my reading of an early Marx – edited version

Zero Draft
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. “The German Ideology: Part 1.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C Tucker. NY: Norton, 1972. 110-64.

Overview
The project of this essay is to critique the ideology of German philosophy of the mid-nineteenth century going in the direction he considers as extreme idealism with no bearing in the material world. German philosophy at that time was under the sway of the Hegel-Young nexus, with philosophers and ideologues steeped in what Marx refers to as “parochial narrowness, (111)” through their uncritical appropriations and expropriations of the Hegelian framework when critiquing the problematics of political and social economy of Germany. Marx argues that the Idealistic mode of philosophizing was insufficient when dealing with real economic and class issues in Germany, especially after the rise of the bourgeois class and issues arising from the formation of its capitalistic system of production and market. He also blames the failure of the German philosophical tradition in answering the conundrums of economic pragmatism in their tendency towards metaphysical obfuscation (112). The general philosophical climate then consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, and the moral into a class of religious or theological conceptions, which meant pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man – “man” in the last resort – as religious” (112). Marx argues that the confinement of epistemological and ontological developments to Hegelian logical category did not take into account the “connection of German philosophy with German reality” (113). Together with Engels, he works to dismantle the particular intellectual investments of the idealists he perceives as ignoring material influence in the role of the body in their preoccupation with cognition as separate from the body. Many of the sections are repetitive and over-lapping. However, Marx re-uses some of the same examples in different sections to demonstrate the inextricable entanglement between the material and the ideal.

Major Premises –
1. Marx reads human history as embodiment of living individuals. In other words, human history is about the physical organization of these individuals and their relationships to nature, regardless of whether it is actual physical nature or natural conditions where the human finds him/herself in such as conditions of the “geographical, orohydrographical or climatic.”(113).
2. Humans are distinguished from animals by way of consciousness and cultural structures. However, even prior to that level of distinction, men are considered as different from animals from the moment the former could produce their means of subsistence. It is this ability to produce the means that presupposes the ability to express their mode of life, and thus to have consciousness (114).
3. The relationships between different nation-states are dependant on the level of their productive forces, the level of division in labor and internal intercourse (114).
4. The various stages of the development of the division of labor are informed by the different divisions of ownership, ranging from tribal ownership, “ancient communal” and state ownership, and finally feudal ownership and estate property. Marx provides the history of the social and political development in Europe beginning from the Middle Ages until the present as empirical evidence about the emergence of the capitalist division of labor. (115)
5. The production of ideas, conceptions and consciousness are considered as outgrowths of the material activity and intercourse of men, “…we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.” (118)

Critical Itinerary
A. In the section called “Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular,” Marx interrogates the meaning of history and its relation to the production of consciousness. It is also here that he begins an interrogation into the meaning of labor (both material and immaterial) and the role of the division of labor within a larger world-system.

1. History
• Firstly, Marx places history squarely in the lived lives of humans. And the lives of humans are marked by their economic activities. The first level of economic activity is the production of subsistence. As humans are able to fulfill their most primary needs, they create new needs. Production of material needs is coincided with the reproduction of the self and of one’s progenies through procreation (120). The acts of production-reproduction in groups of individuals are called productive forces. Productive forces then give rise to collective consciousness. Marx describes human consciousness as beginning from the affective (immediate level of sensuousness) to that stemming from the inter-personal relationships between members of the society (120-121). The rise of this consciousness leads to the division of manual and mental labors as humans go from subsistence production to production of cultures and commodities (123). This division of labor leads to contradiction between the interests of an individual/individual family with that of the state. The state plays the role of a disinterested party. Such contradictions of interests and divisions then lead to alienation that is the basis of class struggle.
• Secondly, Marx places communism within a world-historical context because communism is developed through the universal development of productive forces that establish universal intercourse. “Communism is only possible as the act of dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.” (126) Marx seems to be suggesting that communism as a practice is only possible if men are already existing on equal terms, rather than as an attempt to create those equal terms within an existing order. Communism is a movement that abolishes the present state of things and replaces it with a new order based on universal equity.

2. Section 2:Production of Consciousness (127-139)
• After providing the reader with the overview of socio-economic material history, he now moves into a more detailed explanation of how consciousness arises from material forces as a derivation from material practices. For Marx, the production of consciousness stems from the “substance” that is the sum-total of productive forces (as discussed in the previous section), capital funds and social intercourse. Marx also begins to separate out between “primeval history”, which is that linked to the production of life and nature, with the history of productive forces that he calls “extra-superterrestrial” due to the latter’s separateness from the actual reproduction of life. He critiques how the real history of man is not written as it should be but is a construction of “literary gossip.” The historical is instead substituted with high-falutin discussion of “self-consciousness” and emphasis on abstract ideation that does not provide the lesson for man’s liberation. For Marx, the conception of history stems from our understanding of the “real process of production” (128) which explains how ideas are actually formed through material practices rather than vice-versa.
• The structure of different social classes is determined by the modes of production and exchange, of industry and commerce. Marx critiques Feuerbach’s inability to understand this conception, which made the latter a pseudo-communist despite his avowal towards materialism. Marx claims that the latter took refuge in idealism when he was not able to face the need for actual transformation of the social structure. For Marx, Feuerbach’s inability to understand the link between material production and history caused the latter to fail to perceive the need for the overthrowing of existing economic structures in order for communism to work.
• For Marx, world-history is produced through an intercourse and division of labor between different nations – separate spheres that can be extended to the dichotomy between the intellectual force and material force ruling society. This division of labor is manifested in the ruling class as a division between mental and material labor – the thinkers and the receptors – and there is possibility that there would develop a tension (hostility) between these two. The hegemony of the spirit of theory in history are separated into three efforts as outlined below:
1) separation of the ideas of those ruling from the actual rulers;
2) ordering the ideas through a “mystical” connection of the successive ruling ideas;
3) removal of the mystical appearance of this “self-determination concept” through the materialistic conception by looking at them as the manufacturers of history.

B. In “The Real Basis of Ideology”, Marx spends more time talking about the productive forces that provided the material for the formation of intercourse and thus theoretical discourse. This section is where Marx expands on the socio-economic physicalities that form the material origins of the existing productive forces discussed in A.

Section 1. Intercourse and Productive Forces (140 -151)
• Marx traces the division between material and mental labor to the beginning of separation between towns and the country-side. This separation is co-constitutive of the gradual transition and evolution from a tribe to a State even if locality co-exists within the larger nexus of the nation-state. The towns, since the Middle Ages, were formed by free-serfs who escaped from their former master’s land into the town to ply their respective services and trade. Henceforth, the towns became “associations” that were set up to provide for the protection of property through the multiplication of means of production, protection of private property, and defense of individuals. Marx also detours into the history of guild as a way of illustrating the pre-history of big industries that came about in his time.
• Marx argues that the separation of production from commerce in the division of labor leads to the creation of a new class. He uses the long history of class formation as described above to illustrate the origin and rise of the bourgeoisie class. It also allows him to show the evolution of priority in the transformation of cottage industries into manufacturing entities. From there, he is able to show how the rise of industrialization takes on a global context as nations entered into competition with one another. Industrialization and competition of capital through the abovementioned separation also parallels the rise of empirical sciences, and the channeling of the natural science as a tool to serve the needs of the industrialist.

Section 2: The relation of state and law to property (150-152)
• Here, Marx discusses the movement from tribal to feudal landed property in the pre-industrialized world, and the movement from corporative movable property and manufacturing capital to modern day capital in the industrialized world to illustrate how the laws were developed to cater to the evolution from communal to private property. This way, he attempts demonstrate how the growth of a nation-state is implicated in the disintegration of natural communities by encouraging the development of civil society with private property.
• Marx argues that private property is independent of community. With the illusion that private property is based on independent will, in the case when income from the land is lost due to competition, the proprietor with legal title to the land has the right to arbitrarily dispose of the land. This of course may have impact on the workers who working on that land or property (e.g. manufacturing plants, big farms etc).

Section 3: Natural and Civilized Instruments of Production and Forms of Property (153-157)
• In this section, Marx attempts to demonstrate how the rise of private property influences the capital system around which the productive forces are shaped, and thus the latter’s impact on man’s labor. He argues that exchange between man and nature can happen in two instances. The first being when physical activity is not yet separated from mental activity (this is prior to the rise of accumulation of private property) and the second relates to the division between the physical and mental labor (in the aftermath of the rise of private property). In the first instance, the domination of the propertied over the propertyless is based on a personal relationship, whereas in the second case, the domination is mediated through a currency of exchange such as money. The accumulation of private property is seen as necessary consequence of the existing instruments of production. Private property is formed in opposition to labor and evolves out of the necessity of accumulation.
• With the rise of class consciousness and the dichotomy between the propertied and propertyless, productive forces begin to appear as a world for themselves, independent of and divorced from the individuals, as well as alongside individuals. These forces become real only in the intercourse and association of individuals. According to Marx, “appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. “ (155)
• Masses of individuals become subservient to a single instrument of production. In the process of appropriation by the proletariats, a mass of instruments have to be made subject to each individual proletariat. “Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all (155).” It is through the development of this universal intercourse that the universal energy and character of the proletariat is developed.

C. Communism. The production of the form of intercourse itself (157-164)
In this final section of the essay, Marx attempts to sum up how communism is different from all the other existing social movements by overturning the relations between production and intercourse, by taking into account economic and material productions as a way of performing the conditions of unity among all men.

• According to Marx, practicing communists treat the conditions created by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions. Marx perceives the difference between the individual person and that accidental to him as a historical fact rather than conceptual difference.
• Marx relates productive forces as forms of intercourse (material as the source of ideation) to the occupation and activity of the individuals. The various conditions of the individual human would appear first as conditions of self-activity before evolving into “fetters.” Through this chain, it forms a coherent series of intercourse.
• Marx argues that the imperialist must follow the stage of development of the productive forces they find to exist in their colony and thus adjust themselves to the productive forces of the communities of their colony (160).
• An “illusory community” constituting a collective of individuals seems to have an independent existence in relation to them and is made up of a combination of one class over and against that of another. This “illusory community” is described as a fetter, keeping the proletariat in the cogwheel of increasingly alienated labor. (161)
• Marx claims that individuals have to build upon themselves within their historical conditions and relationships for a revolution to take place. This is necessary for the freeing of the fetters. Otherwise, the proletariat will always be separated from his/her labor and become alienated, thus leading to social discontent and opposition.

In Conclusion
The conditions of the proletariats in terms of their existence in modern society and their labor have become incidental to the evolution of a State that seeks to alienate their labor from them for maximal capital gain. Marx argues that that it is only by a revolution that would dismantle a State that is nothing but a natural evolution from a feudal system that individuals can regain control over themselves. However, before this can take place, there is a need for proper comprehension of the material conditions by tracing the history and preconditions of the material forces of production and the elements that make up these forces, as Marx has tried to do in this essay.

Haiti, the one in the spotlight

Here are some interesting noteworthy reads regarding a land that has always been in the media spot light for all the wrong reasons, as we take heart of a major disaster that has landed there and what can be learnt from all these. Today is also the day when the American nation celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King, the man who fought for equality for all under one nation. What do all these mean?

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Haiti/White_Curse.html

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/15-11

http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/2009-09-25-voa2.cfm

http://www.brooklynron.com/2010/01/western-world-cancel-haitis-debt-now.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6281614.ece

For Malaysia, what lesson can be gleaned from all these? What debt does the government owe to the people and what do the people owe for their sovereignty?

what does it mean for me to enter this new year

Two of the most challenging years I’ve ever faced were 2007 and 2009, at a personal and professional level. The first half of 2008 was about wrapping up all the issues and problems I’d faced in 2007. Of course, some of the issues I’d had began much earlier. However, I wasn’t forced to confront with them head on until 2007. Later, 2008 held many promises but also brough with it its own set of problems. Perhaps the problems were caused by my own inability to understand many of the events that happened, and the long term purpose to them all. But, I’ve learnt that, even if I am not the happiest person on Earth, I will pick through each mistake made and never repeat them.

My long-coming resolutions, in hindsight of all that had taken place, even if I am still overcoming some of the splashes from that period that have not quite dried, will be as outlined below. Some would take more time to get at but I am confident, with patience, resolve and determination, I will achieve them all, and then look back at this year as an important turning point of my life, because it is through the experience I have gained in the past that would become the seed by which I can grow creatively and in strength as a person. I am finally a real adult, not so much in age but in the way in which I handle myself. I hold on to my dignity and name and never allowing others to trample on them. I owe that to myself as much as to the line in which I came from. I have taken risks with my life in ways that none of my more immediate family members have; whether in ambition, intellectual ideals, dreams of a better world or even in love. I have done what no one in my more immediate family has done in all respect. Of course, that would mean I would have to suffer through more storms since each of these endeavour do not come without a price but in the end, when I look back at all these, I will realize how much more a richer person I am for it. How much more life means to me, and how much more, when the time comes, I will fully appreciate the reward that is meant for me.

Here are my resolutions

Nota 1

Dinihari
mata berontak untuk pejam

benak putar ligat persis roda sirkus
bayangan silam silang kini bertebar
dua menghiba, dua memintal harapan yang terkubur
selagi revolusi enggan muncul membuang kelupukan mencengkam,
pembawa janji kebencian dan kebejatan maruah yang telah digadai dalam percaturan pyrrhic dan kelemasan dalam keugalan
taklid tanpa arahan, susuk tanpa kepalanya
berdegung kugiran berlegar di ruang kedengkian
dari mereka yang tidak akan mengenal kata “maaf”
atau “sayang”

Subur
mata meminta untuk pejam
lena dalam tafakur kebinasaan sekerat tubuh dungu

Jan 9, 2009 Durham, North Carolina

Not quite a Hallmark Post: Love

Love is a world that cushions your fall even as you make your callous way;
Love looks into you and tells you when it is alright to be wrong;
Love tells you that nothing is impossible without a little ingenuity;
Love makes no excuses; it respects you and makes subtle inquiries into your well-being;
Love asks not to possess but only for a little access into your interior;
Love is not about obsessing over the other, or obsessing over jealous possession of the other;
Love asks for a quiet intra-action of two individuated persons, a communion of kindred spirits;
Love is not about denying that the other may never love you as you want, nor to live in denial of the truth;
Love is not about satiating the ego or arrogant strutting that you’ve won in the battle of love;
Love is about knowing when it’s time to let go and let it washes over you;
Love is about forgiving and moving on even if the memory remains imprinted to one’s dying breathe;
Love is to tell the truth, and overcoming one’s fear when faced with unpleasant possibilities;
Love is when the people in the presence of each other awe the others by the intensity that emanates from their silent togetherness;
Love is about striving to understand the core of one’s essence, the intention of one’s destiny and the fraternal twin of burden and beauty that one carries through life;
Love means enjoying the beauty of each day, but never for a selfish purpose;
Love is about knowing that emotions are transient, and that hatred only darkens the psyche;
Love is knowing when sometimes one has to call it quits because to go on will only further wound the other, and corner the other into a chasm that excludes you; and you will never understand why;
Love is not about being your Venus or Coppelia, but being who I am, to be so very comfortable in me but never excusing my faults.
Finally, love, when stripped off all its pretenses and posturings, may be the only true thing that exists in our ontology. This is because love is not about romance or a happily ever after. Love is a work in progress, except that you are working with a subject of unknown quantity.

Hectic week and at least a ‘creative’ prototype is up and running

I’ve been laboring like crazy over the weekend, trying to refresh my memory of the less rudimentary aspects of xhtml as well as learn how to code css and a bit of javascript (both of which I still do not know a lot about) to fulfill the technical demands of a class digital project. Of course, doing that project gave me a chance to explore in greater detail another topic that I’ve been thinking a lot about and which I hope to make a part of my larger dissertation project. It’s still very much work in progress though for the part meant for the purpose of the class, is more or less done, except for the critical statement which I still need to make. You can read the critical statement of my collaborator first, and mine should be up by this Fri, the latest ,as I’ll need to work on my other seminar papers real soon, on top of working through another deadline unrelated to the seminar papers. Check out our work here at http://www.duke.edu/~cal33/index.html. This project stops here for my collaborator but is the beginning of bigger things for me, so I am always on a look out for someone who is willing to think through a lot of the ideas with me. More of it would be added to the site, particularly under the “Future Expansion” when I have more time to sit down and think through where I will be moving to next from there. Certainly, the website would require a thorough redesign at some point as I move towards realizing the prototype and blueprint.

Last weekend, I’ve been been attending a conference organized by a few students from my academic program which also featured Stanley Aronowitz as the keynote speaker. I’ve made notes here and there, and am unfortunately a little distracted at times with my need to multitask as I work on conceptualizing the webdesign for the abovementioned prototype. But I will blog about some of the points which I find to be interesting and in relation to some of the areas of interest to me, as well as which pose food for thought, when I have a chance to recover from my minor illness.

Beleaguered and thinking about history of the book

I can’t believe how I have to dedicate my entire days and nights to trying to catch up with work. I can’t believe how much I am forever always over-committing myself. On top of my homework and papers, I still have some stuff to copy-edit for a journal. There is a conference going on this weekend sponsored by my dept and I doubt I can make most of it, seeing that I need to prep for big time presentation on Monday. I am behind my reading for a lot of stuff and I won’t even think more about catching up. It’s just about a month more before I get to go away to tropical land for winter and I am not even excited. In fact, I dread each passing day as it means nearer and nearer to deadline. Trying to juggle things I need to do and am supposed to do. I think I am becoming socially maladapted. Do I have time for humans? Not really. I suppose I am wiling to give up all pretense of sociability just so I can get through coursework stage as soon as I can and then spend all my time working on my projects and interests without further ‘course requirements’. Inspite of what some may say, dissertation writing is more fun, especially when you are working on something you are really passionate about.

I think for one of my papers, I would like to write about the history of the book as a form of the history of the text as a form of history of media studies as a form of history of consciousness. How human affective relations with intellectual culture has shaped the history of knowledge across generations, across geographies and civilizational histories. But I am not sure if it is feasible to do so now, or perhaps later.

new media and new technology

From the discussions that had taken place in the new media classes I’ve been taking (and there also seems to be a conflation between digital humanities and new media), I can’t help wondering if the direction of their practices seem in some instances to be papering over existing superstructures rather than enact any transformative effect. In fact, there is a possible fear that technology is used to turn a particularly traumatic and emotionally explosive event into a spectacle that may undermine, deride, and render it more traumatic. Cyber forums, chatrooms, blog comments sections (though that can now be policed through the painstaking moderation by the blog administrator) and all form of digital public spaces have become the new site of offensive remarks and obnoxious ‘graffiti’, and their very accessibility, in that you need not go to that particular physical space to witness it, make them a more vexing problem for ethicists and those concern with codes of behavior on the Internet (I am sure some of you have read the now very old piece “Rape in Cyberspace” by Julian Dibbell).

But at this juncture, I am more concern as to the very meaning of ‘new’ media and how revolutionary is it; how has it changed our civilizational mental models from their destructive, repressive and oppresive tendencies. Though I am aware of the transformative conditions of new media in its ability to connect people, I am also move to wonder if it may also further reify, codify and even allow the possibility for people to remain firmly entrenched in their own comfort zones, as they are able to select and connect with people who meet their standards of criterion. Moreover, they have the tool to do this pre-selection of whom they want to include or exclude, and this is more easily done. Of course, this includes beastly side of new media such as propagation of horrific forms of pornography and greater seamlessness for the perpetuation of evil. Also, would greater convenience thus bring out in fullforce the hidden variable of sociopathy in us? We begin to use the tools to keep track of and try to control (another explosive term) others within our circle; our family members, partners, exes, friends, enemies, rivals, competitors, friends of friends. The moment of the panopticon takes a devious turn when all of Lacan’s categories of the schizophrenic, obssessive, psychotic and neurotic individuals come out in this playground of legitimized sociopathy. I am reminded by a very effective and interesting performance of the sociopathic engine at the SLSA by a professor at Duke, Casey Alt.

However, at the same time, the tools in digital media (I use this interchangeably with new media) also allows those curious to search for information inaccessible to them and to open the ways they see the world by chanced encounters. But then, how much of what you do in new media is chanced and how much is already predetermined by the way you think, the way you are enfolded into the world and the investments you’ve already made in something. After all, it seems that the argument for technological advancement in new media is about convenience and ease. In writing in a new language or confronting a different narrative (contentious noun here) or sets of events, one is never set at ease nor is convenience ever the keyword. In fact, if technology is about making it ‘easier’ and more ‘convenient’ and more ’seamless’ for us to do everything, how can we then choose to effect a new paradigm that requires a certain level of discomfort to be effected? Hence, how new is new media if it does not revolutionize our mindsets, change the way we do our pollitics (in a transformative sense) and also when we are held hostage by the technologies we personally possess (do you have a Mac, a PC, a Geforce, a supercomputer; what’s your bandwidth like?) and can access. If totalitarian goverments refuse to regulate new media, it’s merely for the reason of opportunism and capitalist greed that does not necessarily benefit its citizens in large. In fact, governments can still make internet viable to businesses coming to their countries but inaccessible to its ordinary citizens by outlawing its access. Myanmar (Burma) is a case in point. It is interesting for me, as a netizen and global citizen straddling both worlds, being located at the site of privileged now after having navigated between access and disadvantaged (all determined by the different economic circumstances I have had the ‘privilege’ to encounter through my years growing up and as a young adult), I find it ironic that developed countries are thinking of how to make technology more modularly(?) and functionally integrated (more intuitive?) to its users, the very users who reside in the site of privileged (and this I come more and more to believe as I navigate through my classes) while poorer citizens of poorer countries are struggling to even get their share of bandwidth and the most basic of computers, a desktop. I do not know how I can unhypocritically wrestle with the wow factor of technological advancements and utopian possibilities that enable me to do the kind of research and inquiry I could now do from my site of privilege that I could never have done without a lot of struggle from the site in which i was formerly located, where material and immaterial access are never easily obtainable, and pirating of available intellectual materials have become an artform as this becomes the only viable mode of dissemination and empowerment for the relatively impoverised though by no means starving populace. However, I am open to the interjection that piracy is also another site of capitalistic opportunism and blackmarket-fuelled greed.

Quality of production in digital humanities, as in any other scholarly endeavour, is fuelled firstly by the quality of work. And for quality to be achieved, the numbers involved must be sufficient for the stochastic to compute; which is that with more than an n-amount of contribution from n-x number of people, it is possible to have a big enough sampling size to measure the efficacy of producing effective, transformative and revolutionary (or more modestly, just decently excellent work) through the methodology that draws the boundaries of digital humanities. But as Jonathan Harris, himself a new media artist, argues, which I have highlighted before and am iterating here, one then has to try to think of a powerful concept and then look around to see what are the best tools to realize that rather than be too enamoured with the possibilities of the tools. But if ,as one of the classes I’ve been in have discussed, the worry of obsolescence is very real and this is even more real for media artists/writers in developing worlds who try to operate outside the budgets of the commercial world. But for digital humanities not to become another fad nor to become a thin genre with a flat and impoverished intellectual history, it is necessary that those who set the standardmakers in the industry actually is serious about democratizing the tools to the world at large. Otherwise, those who utilize these tools, the creative practitioners of the digital field, will have to find a way to operate outside the standard OS or run the risk of having their independence and desire to share their ideas with the world be curtailed by proprietary standards. Such curtailment have the effect of turning the users of these tools into propagators of particular hegemonies (be they Windows or Mac Os, and the proprietary softwares used to create the work will soon turn the work into a product with its own set of proprietary rules), whereby their fans, readers or audiences would have to subscribe to particular technology just to be able to see their work (which therefore makes the medium more limiting than that of the book or painting, for instance). What can we do so that the revolution that made books and prints (and photography) accessible to the general public in the previous centuries (though this is questionable as economic inequities also made these very same public medium expensive to certain segments of societies in certain parts of the world) can also be considered for today’s ‘new medium’?

Also, there is talk that new media makes more external that which had for a long time remained in the precinct of the interior. This is made manifest in a film I managed to catch yesterday, Sleep Dealer by Alex Riviera, when the two characters in the film, Luz and Memo, connect to each other through the nodal implants in their bodies, and were able to ’see the inside’ of the other literally during their love-making. The visual of the film seem to presuppose a notion of a solid, tangible visuality which I may find a little problematic. However, it redeems itself through its resistance to adhere to particular modes of narrative structure in its visual re-enactment of memoryscapes and of the fragments of the self being performed. However,to return to the question of externalizing the interior, could there be a possible over-confidence in that claim since it presupposes an ability for control of the effect/outcome as well as a reductive notion of interiority.

My final observation is to do with the role of affect in new media, and its relationship to politics. I am still in the process of reading more on this, as I believe it would have important use-value (and also ludic/even-value) to my work, but in talking about the politics of alienation and defamiliarization that is sometimes needed for the transformative effect to be enacted in any particular medium, by making tht which we are familiar alienating in order for us to complicate the pre-existing order of things, how would affect than navigate and negotiate through such a situation? Or do we have to do away with affect in this case? I leave this for someone more knowledgeable than myself to comment.

Hence, the sum up this winding, discursive and dialectical move which I have made here, I can point to my wish to find a way of empowering the individual and the society at large through the kinds of transformation that can be enacted through new media and finding the most fruitful way to engage this medium that is neither new nor old. I am sure I will hare more thoughts as I read, think and observe the various ideas in this domain.

Reading Carrington as Art and Artist

Ok, my professor had a bit of issue with it in terms of the critical perspective in which it takes, as well as what he sees as too much emphasis on Carrington rather than her art and drawing more on the relationality between both. He is right. It fails somewhat as an academic piece but works for me as a manifesto of a female artist in trying times.
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Being a woman with its inescapable social obligation while attempting to dedicate oneself to the demands of one’s art usually means a difficult existence since these two aspects are usually incompatible. Born towards the latter end of the Victorian era and came of age during the Edwardian period, Carrington worked very hard to be accepted as a professional artist at a time when the very term woman artist is considered an oxymoron and not given the same due consideration as their male counterparts, even if they might be equal in training, talent, and their quality of work produced, if not better. Attending Slade at a time when art schools were beginning to open their doors to female students, Carrington went through the same rigors of practicum and lectures, and was a winner of many prizes, proving that she was highly gifted and very serious about her chosen vocation. In fact, she was a highly committed student, clocking in more hours at the studio than a majority of the students. However, going to art school for a woman was equated to attending a finishing school. There was little expectation that the female student would continue as a professional artist upon graduation since she was expected to marry and turn her mind to domestic matters, dabbling in art only as a hobby. Hence, male students received more encouragement for their work, whether in the prominent location given to their pieces when student works were exhibited, or in the form of patronage they were able to obtain from moneyed connoisseurs. Moreover, male artists found it easier to move around to work as they were not subjected to the constraints that their female counterparts faced, restricting the movements of the latter.
While she saw herself as first and foremost a painter, Carrington had produced a large variety of high quality work in the plastic arts, ranging from print-making, wood-block cuts, painting of furniture, painting on glass, to the execution of life-size murals. In later life (she led a very short life as she committed suicide at the age of thirty-eight), she became adept at using scraps and everyday materials to make utilitarian art such as letter holders, ornamental jewelry boxes, quilts and even in painting on canvasses. She worked in the same manner as the modern fashion photographer today, dressing up and styling her human subjects before they sat for her. Fortunately for us, her artistic production could still be seen in the many decorative art ventures she produced for her friends (as well as for her last home at Ham Spray). Since her Slade school days, she had been very interested in the theatrical arts, and was adept at creating props and costumes for staged performances.

Unfortunately though, many more of her works were lost rather than preserved for posterity due to careless mishandling and her seeming lack of interest in preserving her legacy (especially works that she did not sell or give away). Moreover, her continuous diffidence and preference for anonymity meant that many of her work were not signed or exhibited, especially after she left art school. She had a mother’s protective instinct towards her pieces and did not like to display them like ‘wares’ to the scrutinizing eyes of a less-than-discerning and ‘uncultured’ public who most probably bought art because it was fashionable to do so, rather than because of true appreciation. One can problematize the role and position of the public as consumers of art. There are buyers who would prefer to have their acquisition dictated by the advice (and tastes) of influential art critics, and this may mean leaving some potentially interesting and influential artwork out cold just because such works did not have the right currency in that particular era.

In discussing Carrington, the question of taste arises constantly. She was certainly reputed among her peers as a woman of impeccable but quixotic tastes, from the manner in which she styled her hair to the kind of clothes she chose to wear (neither of which were conventional, the former particularly invited hostile responses). As an artist Carrington is not easily pigeon-holed into any particular school or movement, even if she had been trained in the academic style of painting during her Slade years. Despite being linked to the Bloomsbury group due to her personal attachments to Lytton Strachey, who was then a leading member of that group, she was more English in her tastes and sensibilities compared to the Francophilic tendencies of the Bloomsbury. I will not attempt here to examine the personal relationship between Carrington and Strachey but merely to note in passing that theirs was a relationship formed of unconditional love. Strachey was a homosexual while Carrington’s sexuality was more ambiguous.

Carrington is art personified incarnate in the way she led her life, from the way she made her houses examples of ‘living art,’ to the manner in which she corresponded with her friends. However, Carrington considered only canvas painting to be ‘serious’ art. It was unfortunate that her attitude was such as to lead her to considerable depression, especially after the death of Strachey. She felt she had not succeeded in becoming the artist she wanted to be, notwithstanding her prolificness and the recognized quality and originality of her work.

What I hope to accomplish in this paper is to show that even if the woman artist is equal to the male artist in every way, including in the style of their work, the way she approaches her work would be different due to social circumstances and her personal attitude to her work and creativity. However, what I would like to do is to concentrate on Carrington’s period of artistic production rather than make vast claims. One has to remember that most women artists in Carrington’s days worked independently without the support of patrons. They might take up commissioned works. If they did not have their own private income or a supportive husband, they would have to work hard to make ends meet by doing the kind of commercial and utilitarian art work that is seldom recognized as being art under the definitions and prerogatives of the philosopher I have drawn on to look at Carrington. What I intend to do in this paper is twofold; firstly, to examine the art of Carrington in light of the definitions of art and theories of aesthetics as found in the philosophies of art in Hegel, Kant, Schelling, Schiller, and Baudelaire, not in any particular order. Secondly, I intend to look at the social circumstances of Carrington’s artistic production and also the manner in which she creates and relates to her artistic production. I chose Carrington and her art as my objects of study due to their respective iconoclasm. Her love for all things English, particularly English folk-art, tempered by an analytical temperament, had led her to create art forms and art work that are simultaneously symbolic, naturalistic and psychological. For Carrington, the medium in which she chose to work in, whether commissioned pieces or self-initiated projects, is as important as the subject matter that she selected as the focus of her pieces, whether paintings or tactile art. Carrington saw art less as a manifestation of her ego than as an act of creation that flowed through her due to an external stimulus or inspiration, not unlike Monsieur G in Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life.” In fact, there are certain characteristics of the artist delineated by Baudelaire that were personified by Carrington. One of it was her insistent on anonymity, her engagement with the subjects of her artistic work and the inseparability between her passion and her profession. Moreover, Carrington personified the form of modernity defined by Baudelaire as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (Baudelaire 12). This other half of the art is Carrington’s fixation in achieving the ultimate perfection in her art, in becoming a true artist. Despite Carrington’s refusal to conform to the expectations that the men in her life had of her (an emotionally-wrenching process) and her refusal to compromise her artistic and personal independence; despite having been married to one and been in love with different men, including Strachey, she was still trapped in the rigid mould set by the artistic establishment that look to the old masters as the epitome of artistic perfection. These are the form of art that would have been approved by the philosophers of art whose critique I am drawing upon here. Hence, Carrington did not view herself as a serious artist when she performed commercial or ephemeral work, whether to fulfill a commission or as favors to her friends. By the time she was in her late thirties, she felt that she had failed as an artist and her life ended tragically just before she could completely mature and hold her own as one of the great artists of her generation.

As aforementioned, Carrington was trained in Slade where they had such lessons as “Drawing from Antique and Life; Sculpture; Painting from Antique and Life; Composition; Perspective and Lectures” (Hill 12). While Slade tried to move away from the complacency of the Royal Academy, the structure of its pedagogy was still very much old-schooled in that the students were obliged to successfully imitate works from the old masters (such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci) before they could progress to drawing from real-life models. One may presume that the purpose of such an exercise was to develop in these budding artists a critical sense of judgment for what was beautiful and sublime in the realist art form. There seems to be an a priori presumption of a universal aesthetic judgment. In the act of copying the masters, it was hope that young trainee-artists such as Carrington would develop an artistic faculty for apprehending the form of universally recognized sublime art by which they could aspire to (Kant 160). Of course, this falls back on what is judged to be good and satisfactory, and these masters approximate that which is absolutely good in the world of plastic arts. At this stage of her career, Carrington had not came into her own and samples of her drawings done in this period of her life were academic exercises that could be seen as attempts at experimenting with standard techniques. There was a kind of awkwardness in them since they did not necessary commensurate with the nature and affinities of the artist attempting them. At the same time, Carrington was developing her own critical tastes through her use of particular techniques to bring out the emotional gravity of her subjects, such as her use of light and darkness in stark contrast. The critical aesthetic judgment formulated by Kant, especially in terms of what is subjective and objective, enables us to think through the differences and similarities in the way the artist, art historian and art critic would judge a work of art. As a student of art, Carrington is exposed to Bloomsbury’s Roger Fry’s lectures on Greco-Roman art, as well as to Italian Renaissance art. She also bought art magazines and visited exhibitions to train her eyes on theory in practice as well as to gain inspiration for her own work. Kant is also useful in helping us understand the two forms of beauty that inform Carrington’s work: free beauty whereby the object was not pre-chosen out of appeal to a universal expectation of beauty but only because Carrington had an emotional attachment to it. Nevertheless, the work usually resulted would be potent, even if the subject may be something as simple as a potted plant. This potency stems from the freeing of an inhibition that Baudelaire describes as “childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it had involuntarily accumulated.” This ‘raw material’ of everyday life was what Carrington excelled in transforming into transcendental luminous beauty that was seemingly unconnected to the other objects surrounding them. There were two forms of beauties that inform Carrington’s work. The other beauty was the adherent beauty that was a conditioned beauty whereby the object was chosen because it fulfilled the aesthetic requirements needed for a particular project, which was particularly important when Carrington took on commissioned work that had a fixed conception on what could be considered as satisfactory.

One of the best ways to try to understand the motivation behind Carrington’s art is to understand the importance of personal gratification to her work. For her, gratification is achieved through the process of artistic creation, not in the end result. Hence, she was not averse to reusing the same canvas for making new pictures by painting over old ones. Carrington was certainly an idealist. She was the kind of artist that Schiller describes as uniting the necessary with the possible in order to create the best effects, whether in her life or in her art, though she was more successful in the latter. In her letters and correspondences to her friends, particularly to Strachey, she would vividly convey the visual representations of her feelings and descriptions of what she saw through drawings as well as in the manner in which she punctuated and spelled (neither of which is conventional). Her style of letter-writing serves the purpose of conveying that which is immediately good, even if the product is an ephemeral. Nonetheless, I argue that Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment is too limiting a frame for situating our discussion on how Carrington viewed her work. Though she did have the tendency of critically reviewing her work, and in going through the different stages of planning before making a particular art piece, one cannot separate her disinterested critical judgment with the intuition and emotions that came into play in determining her judgment of her own art, and even of the art of others. For Carrington, the sublime cannot be divorced from the beautiful as it is the subliminal effect of a particular beauty that drew her. Moreover, while society may be interested in empirically quantifying beauty such as that ventured by Kant, Carrington found such a practice to jar with her nature, which was why she resisted exhibiting most of her work, and if she did, preferred anonymity. Carrington was less interested in categorizing art forms but her critical acumen usually came into play when producing works of art, skillfully using colors and tones to bring out the individual, hidden characters of the various individuals whose portraits she had painted. It is ironic that the training that Carrington underwent, such as in her Life drawing classes, were attempts at what Lessing would consider as the imitation of beautiful bodies, “…the perfection of the subject itself must give delight; he was too great to demand of those who beheld it that they should content themselves with the bare, cold pleasure arising from a well-caught likeness or from the daring of a clever effort” (Lessing 32). While Lessing’s conjecture seems to divorce the ego of the artist from that of his (her) work, where the ultimate goal is to create the best work of art, nothing is further from the truth as will be demonstrated below.

The kind of artistic apprenticeship which Carrington had received from Slade made her impervious to any distinction between her work and that of the male students, though she certainly desired the approval of friends whose opinions she highly valued. In most cases, these friends were men, whether artists themselves or intellectually creative men such as Strachey. With the exception of Strachey, these male artist friends did not always understand her and often leveraged her art work in an attempt to win her favor and commitment to themselves. Moreover, their interests over her work tend to heighten at around the time in which they were facing creative difficulties. They became jealous over her artistic preoccupations, rendering their criticism suspect (Holbrook-Gerzina 35-48). Artistic goals were often mixed up with social prestige and hunger for recognition. While Carrington may care less for the acknowledgement of the public at large, it was not the case with some of her artist-lovers such as Nevinson and Gertler, whose artistic and social competitiveness were often mistaken for love. If Love was to, as Lessing proposed, prompt the creation of plastic arts (32), this love may have more likely prompted the objectification of the woman, particularly a woman who fulfills the definition of ‘beauty,’ and she becomes part of the prize to be aspired towards. This becomes problematic for a woman who, despite enjoying the flattery of the attention she was receiving, was also striving to be taken seriously as a person and as an artist, and not merely for her sexual attractiveness. But when one reads Lessing and Baudelaire, the sexual attractiveness of the female form is emphasized in art and poetry. Carrington herself would later draw erotic figures of women. It would have been interesting to see how a woman artist drawing a woman could turn problematic the straitjacket definition of beauty, satisfaction, agreeableness and the subject/object promulgated by the Idealists and Romanticists. Would the generality and universality of the issues that grow out of attempts to organize empirical data by way of introspective reasoning break down when art as object performed by the artist who is normatively male become substituted by the female? I do not at this moment wish to venture that one may wish to take developmental systems in biology to talk about the organization of cultural values and intellectual work but this would be an area worth exploring in a different paper.

As mentioned earlier, Carrington had a strong love for all things English, including the English countryside and it was to the latter that she owes much of her creative allegiance as she began to mature as an artist. Unlike Schelling however, she saw much divinity and beauty in nature. For her, nature represented the ideal. Yet, she did not merely practice the kind of naïve realism criticized by Schelling but used it as a creative force whereby she created paintings that are at the same time expressionist, symbolist and impressionist, but also none of the above. Nature as depicted in Carrington’s paintings is Nature perfected by an emotional attachment. Nature was transformed, under her hands, into a mysterious beauty that affirmed its splendor. In selecting out a particular frame of time or natural event to be depicted in her paintings, Carrington sets it “forth in its pure being, in the eternity of its life” (Schelling 449). In other words, through the use of form, in terms of the media she chose to work with, Carrington was able to breathe sensuality into the softness of youth and the gracefulness of the aged in the portraits or the landscape oils she painted. Form was as important as content for Carrington. For it was by way of form that she brings the spectator/onlooker into her perspective of nature by foregrounding its lofty beauty and intelligence even as she conveyed a strong sense of infinitude that is not penetrable. In her paintings of natural landscapes or still life, matter seemed united to life (Schelling 449).

However, despite the seeming consensuality between the intellectual analytics propounded by the likes of Kant, Schiller, Lessing and Schelling in their attempts to connote and denote the creative process, Carrington herself was not an intellectual artist. She was brilliant and profound in her ability to understand abstract concepts, and her love for good literature was insatiable. However, the cerebrality of her art is less logically deducible, and seems to be channeled through creative energies and released in forms both simple and complex. One may allude to her lack of formal education as the reason, but a reading of her biography would lead one to conclude that Carrington is a highly visual person and her exposure to all the knowledge the world has to offer would merely fuel her imagination, and foreground her artistic brilliance at a higher plane. However, she will still retain very much of the earthy yet ethereal tones of her artistry.

This earthiness is most pronounced in Carrington’s celebration of the female form through her drawings. A repressed Sapphic, she found comforts in channeling her desire for female beauty through her work. Carrington was a very good figure artist, having won prizes in her Slade days for almost-perfect execution of figure-drawings. It would have been really enlightening to be able to analyze her more erotic works in comparison to the other artists of her era to understand the intertwining of art to sexuality in Victorian and Edwardian England, in comparison to the Continent. I part ways with Lessing when he argues that poetry is a much better medium in describing the beauty of the body, and in the example he used, the beauty of the female body, because poetry is more able to ‘paint’ the beauty of the woman through teasing allusions than the ‘revealing’ limits of paintings. He argues that poetry, through the indirect hints of narrative and sequences of events, is more likely to hit at the sensitive point of the spectator/reader’s imagination compared to art because

The painter could give the chin the most exquisite curve, the prettiest dimple, Amoris digitula impressum (for the εδω appears to me to signify a dimple); he could give the neck the most beautiful carnation; but he can do no more (Lessing 111).

I argue instead that the most sublime form of erotic art (which do not necessarily mean nudes) supercharges the imaginary as much as good erotic poetry. The poetry of plastic art such as drawings are the way in which the lines and shades are emphasized or tapered, and the playful shadings of these lines can be just as titillating as erotic metaphors. An example would be to look at Carrington’s letters. While her letters may describe the fulsomeness of her life and activities, her caricatures and drawings that accompany her letters have an even more intriguing effect and the reader is invited to draw his or her own conclusions. She often drew pictures to accompany her letters. However, she may sometimes not even bother to write, merely inserting a drawing in response. Take the example below for instance:
When I’m winding up the toy
Of a pretty little boy
- Thank you, I can manage pretty well;
But how to set about
To make a pussy pout
- That is more than I can tell

The poem was written by Lytton and to it Carrington had appended a drawing of a cat sleeping on a pillow. It is the combination of risqué writing and allusive drawing that gave rise to many speculations that Carrington might have probably lost her virginity to Strachey at the one and only time they might have attempted sexual relations with each other (Holbrook-Gerzina 90).

Carrington did not subscribe to the popular movements of her time (though she was very much influenced by Cezanne for most of her creative life) and used her own artistic instincts, informed by her personal readings and experiences, to bring out the genuineness of the present in her art pieces. For Carrington, Art is not a thing of the past as Hegel would have it. Nor is it a luxury, for Carrington has demonstrated that even the use of the most mundane materials such as boxes, rags and glass could produce the most sublime pieces (one would have to personally see the products oneself to believe). While Holbrook-Gerzina ventures that Carrington’s palimpsest art is due to the latter’s guilt for ‘stealing’ the soul of her subjects when she painted them (259), I would argue that it was more to do Carrington’s unconscious rejection of the idea that the process of art is subordinated to serious ends. In this matter, she differed very much from her contemporaries (Hegel 6). However, she would certainly agree with Hegel’s argument that “the beauty of art is the beauty that is born – born again, that is – of the mind” since for her, there was no end to the recreation of beauty through art, though she might not necessarily agree that “the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearances (4).” For her, it was the beauty of nature that gave her emotional sustenance and inspired some of her best paintings.

Attempting to write about Carrington and her art using the aesthetic theories I have enumerated here only works when one discusses the logical and trained artistic sensibilities that were instilled into her. While her creative impulses had been tempered and conditioned to a certain degree by the kind of training she had received, she was highly adaptable and adventurous in her experimentations, as was evident by the wide range of medium she had worked in. She produced some of her best work in ephemeral and decorative arts. However, these non-conventional art forms were not considered as serious works of art by the philosophies of art I have examined here and were thus not sufficiently articulated in their theories. Moreover, the theories did not take into account how the specificities of one’s life that is conditioned by the culturally gendered body one inhabits will have an effect in the manner in which one’s artistic impulse is articulated, regardless of the similarity of training and exposure that one has received. In this regard, I agree with Kant when he said that there is a social conditioning present that influences how one sees beauty and how one develops one’s tastes. Carrington’s tastes were as much influenced by her peers, including the important men in her life, as by her own personal choices. There is a kind of androgyneity in her art, especially in her portrait painting, not in the superficial, physical sense but in the illuminating manner in which she is able to articulate the duality, or multiplicity of the personalities she painted, the visibility of which may not be evident even when one associates with the subject-matter in real life. Oftentimes, she would use her art as a form of emotional release. Many an artists have had a close connection with their subjects of paintings, but it is not in too many instances that they successfully represent the spiritual aspect of their object in addition to its sensuality. If Carrington was confused and contradictory about her own life, needs and wants, this confusion and contradiction seem to disappear in the clarity and purposiveness of her artistic manifesto.

It is unfortunate that this short paper could not attempt a more detailed analysis of the intricate character that is Carrington that would have lent further insight into her developing process as an artist, but could merely gesture to the various instances in which her art and life were intertwined. However, I hope I have been able to show, in some way, the inadequacies of the theories in addressing some of the creative processes that stemmed not only from an organized science but also from our ignorance of the causality surrounding the phenomenology of art that seems to manifest for us, the seemingly unruly, instinctive, and intuitive disorganization in the artistic process. While Baudelaire’s three portraits of Monsieur G, Delecroix and Allan Edgar Poe may help us understand our own lack of knowledge of the artists’ creative processes, his tendency to idealize and paint over the chaos of their creative lives unintentionally heightens the sense of mystery in artistic genius.

Word Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Meyer. Second ed. London & New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1995.

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Carrington: A Life. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. Ed. Michael Inwood. London: Penguin Books, 1993.

Hill, Jane. The Art of Dora Carrington. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. 1766. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. vols. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhem von. “On the Relation of Plastic Arts to Nature.” Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. First ed. vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 2004.

Post-Conference life

*Is* *hard* especially when you are still doing coursework and you are *so* *very* behind.

Skipped a class to catch up, how about that? Need to learn NOT to overcommit…*or commit*….beyond my need for at least 7.5 hrs of daily sleep to stop leaving things behind all over the place.

Otherwise, it was an exciting weekend. Wished I saw more of Atlanta though. Only managed an hour walk around Midtown before dinner and airport.