Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

PART 1 IS HERE. 

• 1.2

When a Derridean says that everyone has access to writing, part of the problem is conceptual, but part of the problem is more rudimentary than that, hence more nagging, since in that claim we find our first indication that deconstruction invites us to believe things that are not true. Here’s another: A moment’s reflection should be enough to show that a contempt for writing simply is not the hallmark of the entire Western intellectual tradition. If you’ve read around in deconstruction, you have been told repeatedly that it is—you have been told that we must rally to writing, that we must rescue it from an almost universal opprobrium—and if you have come to accept that idea through sheer repetition, it might be worth pausing to consider again whether you actually take it to be accurate. So ask yourself: Do our most widely shared intellectual traditions train us to distrust writing? The point isn’t entirely far-fetched. It seems true enough that scholars working in the modern academic disciplines do not like having to contend with their own writing practices; they would prefer not to consider their writing as writing or to acknowledge what we might for the sake of convenience call the literary features of their output. Historians don’t like to be told that they are arranging the data of the past into well established narrative genres or that these genres determine what they write at least as much as whatever they last photocopied in the archives. Chemists and physicists don’t like to be shown that something in their prose remains stubbornly figurative and non-formalizable. No-one, scholar or not, much likes to consider the ways in which the words with which we make sense of the world are artificial—fictional, if you like, or poetic—that words are contrivances for endlessly fabricating distinctions where there were none, all of which could and eventually will be different. It is perhaps a bit peculiar to call this bundle of verbal anxieties “the suppression of writing,” but the anxieties surely exist, and it is useful to call them something.

But then maybe that formulation—“the suppression of writing”—isn’t just peculiar. Maybe it’s worse. Derrida’s readings of Plato, Rousseau and Husserl are all, taken serially, quite convincing, as is his grand re-staging of the old Hegelian idea that everything is mediated and nothing directly given. The question in front of us is whether these readings add up to the insight that Plato and Rousseau are the representative figures in European philosophy, that everything in Western metaphysics, including the ordinary language infiltrated by that metaphysics, defaults back to the banishment of the poets. And if we give in to the idea that in some sense or another Westerners just can’t deal with writing, then how do we account for the scripturalism of most Christian churches, or for the writerliness of the old humanist, grammar-school curriculum, or for the centrality of ancient languages to the nineteenth-century European university? It was the innovation, in fact, of twentieth-century linguistics to stick up for the study of spoken language against what the new discipline saw as centuries of overweening textualism—the obsession of Orientalists and classicists with the scribal cultures of antiquity. Grammatology, which Derrida presented as a new science struggling to be born, is perhaps better grasped as the disguise assumed by a refurbished philology, whose authority it attempts to restore. And what of bureaucracy, as both word and social form? Would a society that had comprehensively disempowered writing need a term that meant “rule by writing desk”? Of course, the very word, which has always been an epithet, could itself be understood as an instance of Europe’s deep contempt for writing—as further evidence of our collective determination to shame writers and writing whenever they become powerful. So am I meant to give up, as logocentric, the critique of bureaucracy? Is deconstruction a bureauphilia?

And what, finally, of the great ideologies of civilization? It’s enough to round up some commonplaces on the topic: “The invention of writing was one of the great advances in civilization.” “Whereas historians argue on what exactly civilization is, writing, cities, agriculture, government, religion and art are usually on the list.” Online, you can cue up a lecture course on “Writing and Civilization,” though you may not need to if you’ve already worked through the dozen or so webpages grouped under “Writing and the Development of Civilization.” If, conversely, you can’t be bothered, you might download and sign your name to a college essay called “Writing and the Rise of Civilization.” The word “civilization” is paired so often with the word “writing” that it can seem to absorb this other into itself, referring not just to the cities of its etymology, or to the making urbane of once unsettled places, but also to text and the expansion into new territories of scroll, book, or document. But then does this latter—grammification, we might call it, or scriptification—really have nothing to do with Western metaphysics? Do we really think that European intellectual traditions need to be called to account for having placed insufficient emphasis on civilization-which-is-to-say-writing? If writing is the opposite of metaphysics, and writing and civilization are closely linked, then does that mean that civilization, too, is un-metaphysical and so exempt from deconstructive scrutiny? If you find yourself answering no to these questions, then you might be coming round to the idea that Derrida, by sticking up in some general way for writing, can’t have been attacking Western metaphysics, if such a thing exists, which I doubt.^[i]

At this point, if not sooner, the learned Derridean interrupts to object that this simply isn’t what Derrida meant—that when he offered his theory of écriture, he wasn’t talking about writing in any of its accepted senses and certainly not in this Babylonian one, that deconstruction has no interest in that Victorian progression from cuneiform to hieroglyphics to ancient Hebrew (or “Phoenician” or “West Semitic”) and onto the Greek alphabet. When deconstruction speaks of “writing,” it doesn’t mean what Derrida used to call “writing in the narrow sense,” but something like the unfixed quality of all language, the tendency of language to head out in all directions in the way that mass mailings do paradigmatically. And when it speaks of the suppression of writing, it means the tendency of most language, including most written language, to pretend that it is more stable and transparent than it actually is. Deconstruction might indeed wish to rescue writing, or bring it out into the open, but only in this second, wholly specialized sense. To this one can only respond that the word “writing” is a truly terrible way of making that point, depending as it does on a sharp break with ordinary usage that the Derridean is condemned to explain and re-explain and explain again. Deconstruction is the philosophy that licenses a permanent and predictable confusion between the usual meanings of the word “writing” and what the Derrideans, when pressed, will tell you they mean by it. It is that system of thought that allows a defense of civilization to hitch a ride on what it insists is at one level only a defense of Mallarmé and Joyce. The Derrideans cannot reasonably expect us to bracket out the everyday associations that accompany their master term. Hence my second question: Derrida says that we People of the Book are the ones who repress writing. But we don’t repress writing. So who are deconstruction’s real targets?

 

[i] For the commonplaces, see:

http://history-world.org/writing.htm

https:// en.wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History/Ancient_Civilizations

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/writing-and-civilization-from-ancient-worlds-to-modernity.html

http://www.mrdowling.com/603-writing.html

http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=23519

All sites retrieved December 17, 2015.

 

• PART 1: WHO READS DERRIDA ANYWAY?
• 1.1

I want to begin by asking three questions about the philosophy of Jacques Derrida that I don’t think have ever been adequately addressed.

My first question goes back to something that Jacques Rancière said in an interview around the year 2000. I should note first that Rancière is one of the great unacknowledged Derrideans, a philosopher whose core arguments often work by transposing into a directly political key positions that Derrida was taking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Derrida is typically thought to have taken an ethico-political turn late in his life, but much of the interest of Rancière’s project lies in how effortlessly he devises an emancipatory or radically democratic program just by epitomizing the lessons of the supposedly pre-political Derrida. Rancière’s writings on aesthetics have been a boon to the many of us who had been thinking all along that deconstruction could stand to be quite a bit more than vulgar than it was, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted that it would be Rancière who would be keeping Derrida’s thought in front of us even after the latter’s death in 2004, or that deconstruction would survive into the present mostly in this post-Maoist vulgate, weaponized and plump.

Here, then, is Derrida on the whetstone. In an interview published as “The Distribution of the Sensible,” Rancière is asked to explain how novels and plays and maybe paintings can assist in the struggle against a managerial pseudo-politics. How does art equip us against the administered society? The first point to understand, Rancière responds, is that literature is not speech. It is important, indeed, to resist speech as celebrated by Plato, because the spoken word establishes fixed identities and fixed spaces. If you celebrate speech as opposed to writing, it’s because you want to know at all times who you are talking to and where you both are. Conversation to that extent always has a kind of police function, allowing me to visually ID my auditors and thus generating the position of the appropriate addressee—language meant for some persons and not others.  Speech is language under surveillance. But write out that same language on a page (or elsewhere) and everything changes. Script and the printed text don’t try to pin anyone down, establishing instead a “regime”—really a non-regime—“based in the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time.” We often think of language as best when it is living and intimate: words spoken to a lover, arguments shared around a seminar table, the poet we finally get to hear read her works out loud. But it is Derrida’s signature argument, here adapted by Rancière, that language is never really intimate in these ways—that it is always adrift, separated at once from the person who speaks or writes it, from the person to whom it is addressed, and from the things in the world that it putatively names. The words you speak and write aren’t really yours; nor can you ever be sure they will carry the meanings you intend them to have; nor can you guarantee that they will reach the people for whom they were devised, or that they will reach only them. Derrida’s core claim is that this is nothing to worry about—that, on the contrary, a liberated philosophy will have to keep faith with a language thus unfixed. Rancière’s way of getting at this—and this is the formulation that deserves our close attention—is to ask us to consider the “equality that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes.”^[i]

Writing is egalitarian and radically democratic because anyone can look at it. If I point out now that the premise of this claim is incorrect—that not everyone has the seeing eyes to pore over a printed page—then it immediately becomes unclear how to assess deconstruction in this form. You don’t have to feel outrage on behalf of the blind to feel that there is a problem here. Knowing that blind people exist, and presuming that Rancière knows about them, too, how are we to assess his claim? If it can’t mean what it says—“available to everyone’s eyes”—then what does it mean instead? And while we’re at it, what is the status in the vaunted critique of phonocentrism of people whose lives are for whatever reason sound-centered?—people, in the first instance, who don’t read, a group that would include most blind people, since current estimates indicate that fewer than one in ten ever bother to learn Braille. You might be tempted to shrug off the problem as negligible, by declaring the three to four percent of the population who are in some sense or another blind irrelevant to the project of deconstruction, but then your impatience would suggest the magnitude of the problem, which is that deconstruction, in order to preserve the conceit of its “everyone,” has to declare some people extraneous to its program.

But then why are we talking about blind people? Rancière almost certainly isn’t referring to eyesight. He’s not talking about the freedom that comes into being when we look at a written page; he’s talking about the freedom that comes into being when we read one, and interpretive charity would demand that we not parse his words with this exasperating literalness. What is at stake in deconstruction is not the freedom of the sighted, but the freedom of readers. The written page is available to everyone’s eyes, and what they do with those eyes is read. But then, of course, this revised claim is even harder to defend than the first. Interpretive charity only aggravates the issue. A philosopher might just about get away with the claim that anyone can look at writing—not strictly true, but true-ish. It is, however, ridiculous to claim that everyone can read the writing that they (almost) all see. A few numbers will bring the problem into focus: Current estimates suggest that roughly one in five adults in the US are functionally illiterate, meaning that they cannot without assistance perform the readerly tasks that a bureaucratic society routinely expects of them. So what is their status in deconstruction? But then Rancière is actually presuming higher literacy—the paragraph in question is mostly about Flaubert, so he has to be premising his claim on people who can read nineteenth-century novels—in which case the percentage of adults in the US eliminated from his “everyone” rises to roughly seventy-five percent. What we’ll want to take away from this—the starting-point, I would offer, of any clear thinking about Derrida and the Derrideans—is that deconstruction has secreted away within itself, as its precondition, a major historical event, which is the arrival of mass literacy in Western Europe and the United States after 1850, which event it then daintifies into the fiction of a universal literacy: Writing is available to everyone.^[ii]

But then rather than write off Rancière’s argument as a pious mistake, it would be more revealing to consider the ways in which it is inconsistently right. The easiest way to bring historical thinking to bear upon deconstruction would be to point out that it was closer to the truth in 2000 than it had been in 1800. That’s what it might mean to say that deconstruction’s claims are covertly historical—that they require a France that has existed in some centuries, maybe two, but not in most. And then, of course, the point would have to be repeated in a geographical register: Deconstruction is truer in some places than it is in others—plausible in those places (and only in those places) where one can just about say that everyone has access to writing. A philosophy, then, for Seattle and Minneapolis, but less so for Long Beach, CA or Mesa, AZ; for Norway and Finland, but not for Niger or Afghanistan. The claims of deconstruction realize themselves unevenly upon the planet.

When Derrida offers his own version of Rancière’s argument in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” his English-language translator assigns him the word “anyone” rather than “everyone.” “Isn’t writing … essentially democratic? … ready to do anything, to lend [itself] to anyone.” One wonders whether that switch matters—from “everyone” to “anyone.” Derrida is doing something complicated here. He has been calling attention to the ways in which speech, unlike writing, is radically localized (or can be readily mistaken as such); it is uttered and sprangles briefly, just here, within earshot, and then vanishes. His point is that the permanence of writing—the ability of language once written to live on as a kind of object—makes it impossible to localize in this fashion, hence impossible to control. Writing will tend to travel, especially in the print marketplace (which thereby reveals itself as deconstruction’s second great historical object, alongside mass literacy), and so find its way into new situations, unenvisioned by its authors, where it will be read in ways that these could not have anticipated and are powerless to countermand. Derrida’s way of putting this is to say that writing is “errant … wandering … uprooted … unattached to any house or country.” A drifter, a hobo, a train-jumper, homeless…^[iii]

At the same time, and as an extension of this point, Derrida is arguing that this writing-on-the-move cannot tell a reader what it means. No text can comment learnedly on itself, sparing the reader the labor of interpretation, since any self-commentary will re-join the text upon which it remarks, as text, and so require interpretation in its own right. Your favorite book will never pull you to one side and obligingly say something other than what it said the first time you read it—something fresh, something less oblique and roundabout: OK, you want me to break it down for you? Most saliently, no text can tell you what lies before or behind its own writing. If a book were a person, we would say of him that “he doesn’t even know who he is, what his identity—if he has one—might be, what his name is, what his father’s name is. He repeats the same thing every time he is questioned on the street corner, but he can no longer repeat his origin.”^[iv] Not just a homeless person, then, but a crazed and amnesiac homeless person.

There’s more. Derrida is also interested in the ability of writing to outlive its authors, and what’s distinctive about his position is that he thinks of this ability not as an extension of an author’s powers into posterity, a major poet’s claim upon the future, but only as further evidence of how little control a given author had to begin with. Writing inevitably leaves authors behind, projecting itself into scenarios where they simply cannot follow. His way of putting this is to say that the death of the author is implicit in all writing—that a patch of language cannot count as writing if it ceases to be intelligible upon its author’s death—and that it, by contrast, is the creature that will not die, a thing “not completely dead: the living dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of breath.”^[v] A zombie, in short—a homeless, crazed, and amnesiac zombie.

This brings us back to the “anyone.” Writing is essentially democratic, ready to do anything, to lend itself to anyone. If en reprise you hear a certain erotics in this last phrase, that’s only as it should be: Writing, as praised by deconstruction, is nothing if not game—slutty, DTF and not just sometimes, “giving itself equally to all pleasures” while “wandering in the streets.”^[vi] Here’s the puzzle: The subject of deconstruction is simultaneously the person capable of reading A Sentimental Education, bizarrely misrendered as l’homme universel, and this homeless, crazed, and amnesiac zombie-whore, not easily mistaken for a librarian or associate professor of Romance languages. And yet perhaps this position is less ambiguous than I’ve just made it sound, provided we realize that what’s being named here as “the subject of deconstruction” is not, in fact, a single position, but rather two distinct positions—the co-subjects of deconstruction: the reader plus (an anthropomorphized) writing, though it would be important to recognize that we-who-are-now-reading remain in the dominant position. We are precisely not the zombie-whore; we are the ones who indifferently dally with the nameless runaway. Still, even though writing thus allegorized is not a generalizable type—not an image of universal humanity, since most of us live in homes and deny ourselves at least some pleasures—it (he? probably she?) nonetheless re-stages the claim to universality in precisely the terms that Rancière will take over, as the wanton’s promise of universal access. Radical democracy means never getting to say no.

The word “anyone” promises a lack of discrimination—writing will open itself to anyone and most certainly to us, the anonymous johns of écriture—and this is what can make it sound like a Jacobin term, the pronoun of the democratic revolutions, their promise of capoyarchy or rule-by-who-knows?. And yet the word “anyone” at the same time insinuates limitations, and this in two different ways. It is almost always spoken over atop contextual assumptions, referring back to an established set, whose members one is declaring equivalent for some particular purpose. “Anyone” usually means “any member of the relevant group, which I don’t need to spell out to you.” This is a limitation that also afflicts “everyone,” which tends to be contextually bound in just this way: “Everyone” rarely means tous le monde, but then neither does tous le monde. It’s just that the word “anyone” introduces a further limitation that it doesn’t share with “everyone,” which we can flush out simply by making them the subjects of the same sentence: You ask, “Who do you want at the party?” And I might respond: “I don’t care. Everyone can come.” But then I might respond: “I don’t care. Anyone can come.” That I don’t care is the coin of my democratic indifference; it is what makes me the sans-culottes of this weekend’s festivity. But if I say the latter—that “anyone can come”—I probably mean any subset of what was already an implicitly bounded group, any thirty of some possible hundred, but not everybody. The sentence “anyone can come” might even house the concession that we don’t have room for everybody, that if everybody came, we would run out of gin. Not everybody, but anybody.

So that leads to my first question, which is: What do we make of deconstruction’s claim that writing is available to anyone? Or that literature is? And that question, once asked, generates at least two additional, closely related variants:

Can anyone be a Derridean?

Can everyone?

[i] Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 14-15.

 

[ii] Literacy statistics come in various forms. One recent set is available from the National Center for Education Statistics, A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21^st Century (NCES Publication No. 2006-470).

 

[iii] Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination (1972), translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61 – 171, quotations at pp. 144-5, 143.

 

[iv] ibid., p. 143.

 

[v] ibid., p. 143.

 

[vi] ibid., p. 145, 143.

 

PART ONE IS HERE. PART TWO IS HERE.

3.

A Marxist quandary, a Kantian path out—that’s Autonomy. If I say now that the path out is poorly blazed, and maybe even a trick, then you needn’t be disappointed, because it will also turn out that the quandary wasn’t one and that it didn’t need solving. You needn’t worry, I mean, that Brown’s account of art is unconvincing, and indeed disheartening, because the situation to which this art putatively responds is a non-problem. I’ll explain each in turn:

The non-problem: “The work of art is not like a commodity,” Brown writes. “It is one” (34). That sentence is admirably hard-headed—but is it also correct? Are music and film and such available to us only as commodities? Do we never encounter art without having bought it first? It will be enough to consult your own experience to see that you are, in fact, surrounded by non-commodified art. Works of art are the only items that governments still routinely take out of the marketplace, amassing large collections of books, movies, and symphonies that citizens can access for free. Public libraries make of the arts the only remaining occasion for the otherwise atrophied traditions of municipal socialism. But when we start surveying our contemporary reserves of non-commodified art, we are talking about rather more than some picturesque Fabian survival. There was a period around the year 2000 when the new technologies more or less destroyed the market for recorded music. Even neoliberals concede that markets are not natural or spontaneous—that they have to be created and politically sustained. For the market in recorded music to have survived the rise of digital media, the governments of the capitalist states would have had to intervene massively to counter the wave of illegal downloading—the Moment of the MP3—when in fact they were largely content to let that market stop functioning. Brown is telling a story about the ever-intensifying logic of commodification, even though he has lived through the near decommodification of an entire art form, its remaking as a free good. If we are no longer talking much about media piracy, then this is only because filesharing has since been nudged back into a drastically redesigned marketplace, in the form of streaming and subscription services, which are the Aufhebung of the commodity form and its opposite: the non-market of free goods, available for a fee: Napster + the reassurance that you won’t get sued. But then is the Spotify playlist a commodity? It might be, though it seems wrong to say that I have bought such a thing, and we still lack a proper account of the new political economy of culture and its retailoring of the commodity form: Art in the Age of the Platform and the Deep Catalog. There is, of course, one position on the Left that has become totally contemptuous of the new technologies and especially of social media. The claim here is that we are gullibly creating free content for the new monopolies; we are writers and filmmakers and photographers—and we upload our work: our labor! our creativity!—and the companies make money (via advertising and the hawking of our data), and we don’t get a cut.[1] We are thus all in the position of the ‘90s-era pop star who has seen her royalties tank; against every expectation, Shania Twain has become the representative figure of our universal exploitation. This argument is worth hearing out, but it remains important even so to recall the situation that gives rise to this misgiving in the first place, which is that the creative Internet involves much more than people Instagramming their dinners. It produces Twitter essays, Ivy League professors anatomizing authoritarianism, lots of short movies, 15-second TikTok masterpieces, and song—everywhere song. To the anti-corporate line that calls me a chump for posting a video of myself playing Weezer’s “Hash Pipe” on the ukulele, the necessary Marxist rejoinder is that an arts communism is already in view—or at least that we have all the evidence we will ever need that people given the opportunity will gather without pay to fashion a culture together. Our snowballing insights into surveillance capitalism co-exist with the unforeclosed possibility that social media is the opening to socialist media. But then one wonders how new any of this is—wonders, indeed, whether the culture industry was ever tethered to the commodity form, since network television and pop radio in their canonical, postwar incarnations were already free goods, generating one of the great unremarked contradictions of twentieth-century arts commentary. Already in 1980, the art forms that a Left criticism excoriated under names like “corporate rock” and “consumer culture” were the ones that you could readily watch or hear without buying them. Before the advent of the full-scale Internet, it was alternative culture that existed only as a commodity, like that Sonic Youth CD I was once desperate to buy because I knew I was never going to hear it during morning drive time. (Only as a commodity? Almost only? Surely a friend might have hooked me up with a dub. Was I nowhere near a college radio station?) Indie used to be our name for music more-than-ordinarily dependent on the market, for art that one encountered mostly as commodity.

That’s one way of understanding why Autonomy is trying, in vain, to solve a non-problem: The commodification of art is by no means complete. The relation of music, image, and story to the commodity form remains inconsistent and contradictory. But there’s a second way of getting at this point, and it goes back to the book’s fundamental misunderstanding of Marx and the commodity form. Brown’s promise, again, is that even in an era when we can no longer posit a distinction between the commodity and the non-commodity, we can still learn the subtler business of telling the mere commodity from the commodity-plus. Contemporary art might be a commodity, but it isn’t just a commodity. But in Marx, there is no such thing as the mere commodity. The very first point that Marx makes in Capital Volume 1 is that commodities have a dual character; it is, in fact, this dualness that makes them commodities: Objects “are only commodities because they have a dual nature”—they are simultaneously objects of use and objects of exchange, themselves as well as their fungible selves.[2] Brown seems to hold that this condition is the special accomplishment of the neo-modernist artwork—its ability to escape commodification by being twofold. But that simply is the structure of the commodity. A Thomas McCarthy novel has no advantages in this regard over a tube sock or a travel mug, and Brown can only believe that it does by arguing repeatedly, contra Marx, that it is usefulness, and not doubleness, that makes something a commodity: “An experience is immediately a use value, and therefore in a society such as ours immediately entails the logic of the commodity…” (49). “Since the display value of a picture is a use value, there is nothing in the picture as an object that separates it from its being as a commodity” (68). This error is baffling, since twenty minutes spent reading Capital would have been enough to correct it, but it is also the predictable outcome of trying to get Marx and Kant to speak in the same voice. Marx’s argument has two steps: 1) It is exchange that makes something a commodity, and not use; useful objects obviously predated market society and will outlive it. 2) But then equally, use is not negated by exchange; the exchangeability of the object coexists with its usability, even though these require contradictory standpoints. It is thus impossible to understand why Brown thinks that art would stop functioning as art just because it’s for sale. Brown’s way of claiming this is to say that “the structure of the commodity excludes the attribute of interpretability” (22). If a movie comes to me as a commodity, I shouldn’t be able to interpret it, and if I am against all expectation able to discern meaning in it, I can congratulate it for having slipped free of its commodity shackles. But why would that be the case? A commodified rice cooker doesn’t stop functioning as a rice cooker. Commodified soap doesn’t stop cleaning your face. Why would artworks alone lose their particular qualities when commodified, such that we would wish to solemnize those putatively rare examples that achieve the doubleness that is in fact the commodity’s universal form?

The fake solution: Brown’s argument gets itself into trouble by superimposing Kant on top of Marx, and yet its Kantianism is itself a mess. I should explain first why this matters. A critical theorist spots on the new arrivals shelf a book called Autonomy and can’t know at a glance what it is about, since its title exists in two registers at once. She might expect to find a book about the autonomy of art—a book, in other words, that belongs in the tradition of Gautier, Pater, Greenberg, and Rancière. But she might equally expect a book about the autonomy of workers, a book about autonomia, about the ability of workers to direct their own activity and set their own political goals without the superintendence of political parties and big trade unions. Anyone who notices that the book’s author is carrying a Duke-Literature PhD has got to expect this second autonomy, an Englishing of Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua; one might well be grateful for such a thing, since American Marxists still require the help of the Italians to make militant the cozily Jeffersonian program of “participatory democracy.” That Nicholas Brown holds no brief for the Italian Marxists is thus one of the book’s bigger surprises; if anything, the baldness of the book’s title seems designed to wrest the word autonomy away from the autonomists and to deliver it back to the aestheticism that historically predated Tronti and Virno. But the matter is more complicated than that. A certain workerism continues to inform Brown’s writing even so, if only because he so often makes about artworks arguments that we are used to hearing about proletarians. His biggest claim is that the artwork is wholly inserted into capitalism while also opposing it. “Art as such does not preexist capitalism and will not survive it; instead, art presents an unemphatic alterity to capitalism; art is not the before or after of capitalism but the deliberate suspension of its logic, its determinate other” (88-9). Or again: “The artwork is not an archaic holdover but the internal, unemphatic other to capitalist society (9). No Marxist should be surprised by this figure, though one might well marvel that it has taken the aesthetes so long to come round to it. It was the modernists, in this respect like the Third Worldists, who thought that the struggle against capitalism would have to come from some uncontaminated outside, from people who had wrenched free of the market or managed to avoid entering it in the first place. Brown’s project is to correct this bit of modernist doctrine by borrowing from Marxism its most basic dialectical motif, and in the process to get artworks to play the role formerly assigned to the working class. Brown’s artwork accordingly rumbles with otherwise diminished proletarian energies, and this has contradictory effects, for it is unclear in this scenario whether autonomous art comes to us as the ally of working people or as their rival. Brown is nowhere closer to a conventional Marxism than in his discussion of The Wire, where he offers some cogent remarks on the disappearance of the American working class, on casualization, the vanishing of jobs hitherto thought immune to mechanization, and the persistence of the category worker, as quasi-ethnic identity, even after work has disappeared. In this context, he has earmarked one line from the second season: “Modern robotics do much of the work” (qtd 174). But this last is a historical development that Brown’s argument emulates in the process of opposing, as his book palpably assigns to objects a set of historical tasks that were once thought proper for workers. Autonomy is accordingly stalked by automation, with the position of the working class—its superseded position? its only ever putative position?—now filled by quality television and smart novels. Robots do the work of capitalism; art does the work of “suspending” capitalism and is to that extent a second robot, the robot of negation: the nay-robot.

At the same time, however, the artwork will continue to serve as the anticipatory figure for a free and self-determining humanity. If I can’t figure out how to be autonomous, I can delegate art to be autonomous in my stead. This is the not-so-secret use of those special objects to which we do not assign uses. The autonomy that we ascribe to the artwork will therefore say a lot about the independence that we wish for ourselves, and it is for this reason that the book’s explanation of Kant’s aesthetics matters, since it is from his third Critique—and not from his moral philosophy, nor from his overtly political essays—that we are expected to extract this political criterion and aim.

The problem, then, is that Brown parses Kant’s theory of aesthetic autonomy in at least three different and incompatible ways.

1) Sometimes, though not often, Brown cites Kant’s most distinctive formulation. Some objects strike me as manifestly designed—organized, patterned, not random—even though I can’t tell what they are for or, indeed, whether they are for anything at all. This Autonomy knows to call “purposiveness without purpose,” design without function (12, 179). Anyone aspiring to this condition is aiming for a kind of idleness, or at least an un-work, a kind of busy leisure. If lack of purpose is how we recognize autonomy, then we will ourselves only gain independence once we have resolved never to achieve anything—to swear off goals and undertakings and weekend to-do lists.

2) But then Brown also praises some detective fiction for its ability to produce cognitive maps—for its “making connections” across “multiple milieux and classes,” and at that point one notices that he isn’t hostile to purpose after all (70). He has violated the Kantian stricture by assigning a purpose to Raymond Chandler and endorsing that purpose as worthy. The Big Sleep doesn’t just hum with needless pattern; it provides us with a service for which we might feel grateful (and for which we might pay Random House). What stands out at this point is that Brown has proposed a formulation of his own, which he prefers to “purposiveness without purpose”—namely, “immanent purposiveness,” a refusal, that is, of imposed or extrinsic ends (13). Sometimes he refers in this regard to “the self-legislating work”: “A work’s assertion of autonomy is the claim that its form is self-legislating. Nothing more” (182). For any Kantian, of course, autonomy is precisely something more—a rejection of all ends, and not just of “external” ones (31)—though the phrase “self-legislating” has a Kantian ring of its own, and we might soon conclude that Brown is silently correcting the third Critique by smuggling in a key concept from the second, in order to re-introduce purpose into a landscape forbiddingly devoid of it. He is putting the self-legislating subjects of Kantian moral philosophy in the place of the aimless objects of Kantian aesthetics.

3) But when is an end “immanent” to a work of art? And when is it “external”? Are we confident that we know the difference between inside and out? Early in Autonomy, Brown lists among his goals a defense of the category of “intention” (10-11): We won’t even be able to regard artworks as intelligible if we treat them as non-intentional—if, that is, we stop conceiving of them as somebody’s attempt to say something. This claim is plainly incompatible with a rigorous Kantianism, since whatever intention I ascribe to the artwork will be a purpose, and Kant’s whole point is that artworks have no such purposes. But Brown’s retrieval of intention is no less damaging to the loose Kantianism he prefers. He instructs us to think of autonomy as “self-legislating,” but he also wants us to consider the intentions that activate a work of art, and the latter generates all sorts of ambiguity around the former, simply by introducing the problems of authors and artists. Where before we had one term, the artwork, now we have two, the artwork and its intender, and now we have to wonder which of them gets to be self-legislating. If we allow the artist to give herself the law, then the artwork will presumably be secondary, the vehicle and working-out of the poet’s self-chosen code, the telegram of her intention. Sometimes, however, Brown sidelines the artist and lets the movies choose their own ends: It is the job of the viewer, he writes, “to figure out what [the artwork] is trying to do” (31). And from this second perspective, one is compelled to distrust the artist’s intention as an externality—just another imposed demand: The artwork, if it is to be autonomous, should get to do what it wants, where this desire is usually understood as an inherited formal project, requiring that all new artists solve hitherto unsolved formal problems or that they re-do old aesthetic experiments in radicalized form. But in this second scenario, the autonomy of the artwork plainly comes at the expense of my autonomy. The artwork that I had hoped would secure my independence instead ends up bossing me around. It was Adorno who observed that modernism, which we typically describe to undergraduates as an emancipated anti-traditionalism, a discarding of the old conventions, an experimental drive to make art otherwise, actually amounted to a “canon of prohibitions”: an ever-expanding list of Things You Could Not Do: paint figurally, compose with triads, end your novel with a marriage.[3]

But then do artworks really get to choose their own ends or give themselves the law? Brown sometimes writes as though they did, but mostly confesses that they don’t, preferring the following, thrice-repeated hedge:

• “The novel presents itself as simply following a logic that is already present in the material, as though the novel were not written by an author” (99).
• In the domain of art, all legitimate politics must “appear to emerge as if unbidden from the material on which these artists work” (38).
• For an artist, one important skill is “the capacity to produce the conviction that what we are seeing belongs to the logic of the material rather than to some external, contingent compulsion” (59).

This last sentence makes Brown’s point with special force: The artwork cannot, in fact, achieve autonomy; its glory is not to negate command, but merely to mask it, to produce in us a belief that the artwork was self-generating even when it wasn’t. Autonomy begins by recommending to us art as the undiminished paradigm of self-determination and free activity, and ends up enrolling it in that list of calculated things we misapprehend as spontaneous—consumer choice, electoral democracy, Spinozist consciousness—and this it does without ever admitting how dolefully it has dickered down its offer: We search art for the possibility of our freedom and walk away persuaded only that some things expertly disguise their subservience. They step forward “as though” unbidden. Autonomy … as if.

[1] See for instance the writings of Cracker’s Davd Lowery, collected at The Trichordist, a collective of “artists for an ethical and sustainable Internet.” thetrichordist.com, last accessed November 12, 2019.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1867), translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 138.

[3] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 36 -37.

[PART ONE IS HERE]

2.

Rather than summarize Brown’s findings, it might be more instructive to think of his book as having been constructed, modularly, out of four blocks:

1) A Marxist problem: The problem that drives Brown’s thinking arrives as a question: What is the condition of art in the era of the universal market? The very concept of art promises that there exists a special class of objects, objects that we intuitively set apart, that are exempt from our ordinary calculi, that indeed activate one of the mind’s more recondite and less Newtonian faculties. But it is the premise of the universal market that there exist no such objects. Art might thus seem to be one of the things that a cyclically expanding capitalism has had to eliminate, as rival and incompatibility, like late medieval guilds or Yugoslavia. And yet art plainly still exists. I swear I saw some last Sunday. What, then, is the status of art when it can no longer dwell, nor even pretend to dwell, outside of the market, when its claim to distinction can no longer plausibly be voiced, when we’ve all come to suspect that the work of art is just another luxury good? One way of thinking about Autonomy, then, is to read it as refurbishing the theory of postmodernism, thirty-five years after Jameson first put that theory in place.

2) A Kantian solution: Maybe “refurbish” is the wrong word, though. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Brown means to call off the theory of postmodernism, to soothe readers steeped in Jameson by explaining how art survives even once, in the latter’s words, “aesthetic production … has become integrated into commodity production generally.”[1] Autonomy amounts to a set of reassurances that aesthetic autonomy remains possible even within the market; that artworks can come to us with ISBN numbers and still elude the constraints of the commodity form. Brown’s book amounts to a list of the techniques available to contemporary artists for performing this feat. This is an argument that can be broadcast in different frequencies. Most often, it arrives in Kantian form, to the effect that there still exist non-instrumental objects, objects that, in some sense yet to be defined, display an anomalous relationship to purpose or use. At the same time, the argument can be modulated to carry a certain Marxist content. It was Marx’s claim, after all, that capitalism was bound to produce its own enemies, that bosses and investors were fated to produce a class of persons who would simultaneously serve and oppose them. One way of engineering the splice between Marxism and Kantian aesthetics is just to swap in the word objects where the last sentence had “persons.” Marx held that labor power was the commodity that did not behave like all the others. –Perhaps art is a second such. –And maybe work is the word that holds the two together. If we grant this point, postmodernism might reveal itself to have been a false problem all along. For which faithful Marxist ever thought we had to look outside of market society for solutions? Not Jameson, at any rate, whose mantra in the 1980s was that there was no advantage in opposing postmodernism, that the task for an emancipatory aesthetics was to pick its way through postmodernism and out the other side. Nicholas Brown, meanwhile, is more interested in what came before postmodernism than in what might come after it. In literary-historical terms, his argument is best understood as vouching for the survival of modernism within its successor form. Indeed, Brown is such a partisan of early twentieth-century art that he writes a chapter on The Wire, hailed by all and sundry as the great reinvention of Victorian social realism for the twenty-first century, and calls it “Modernism on TV” (152). The theorist’s attachment to the old modern is easiest to sense whenever the book’s readings reach their anti-utilitarian and aestheticist apotheoses. Brown thinks he can explain why, when presented with two versions of the same photograph, we should prefer the one with the class conflict left out (58-9). He also praises one white, Bush-era guitar band for negating the politics implicit in its blues rock, for achieving a pop formalism so pristine that it successfully brackets the question of race (145).

3) A high-middlebrow canon:  That the band in question is The White Stripes lights up the next important feature of Autonomy, which is that it has assembled a canon of high-middlebrow art from the last forty years: Caetano Veloso, Jeff Wall, Alejandro Iñarritu, Ben Lerner, David Simon, Jennifer Egan, Richard Linklater, Cindy Sherman. That Brown shares the last-named with Jameson’s postmodernism book is a reminder that this set of objects could be variously named. The mind swoops in to say that the high-middlebrow is nothing but postmodernism itself (EL Doctorow, Andy Warhol, Blade Runner)—that the book’s dexterity is therefore to redescribe as neo-modernist what we had previously known only as pomo—but then pauses. If we follow the classic account, then one of the foremost characteristics of postmodern art—the first box to tick if you’re in a museum carrying the checklist—is  the collapsing of high and low, or what Jameson often identifies as elite art’s unwonted interest in its downmarket rival, its willingness to mimic trash, pulp, schlock, or kitsch. But it’s never been obvious that the latter really and truly triggered the former—that the mere quoting of popular media was enough to abolish the class-boundedness of art or even to weaken our habituated sense that cultural goods sort out into a hierarchy of distinction. If I am sitting in a concert hall listening to a string quartet, then this setting alone will be enough to frame the music as high even when the composer briefly assigns the cello the bassline from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” One wishes to say, then, that the middlebrow—and not the citational—is the mode of art in which the distinction between high and low most fully collapses, which should make of Midcult the form of a perfected postmodernism, except that the doubling of the concept will now raise some puzzles of its own. For didn’t the middlebrow precede the postmodern? Wasn’t there middlebrow art before there was postmodern art? And if yes, then why wasn’t such art postmodern when it combined high and low in 1940? Were high and low commingling differently in 1980 than they had in The Old Man and the Sea? And doesn’t middlebrow art have its own, more or less direct way of reaching the median, its own styles and forms, without having to assemble itself afresh every time from pieces borrowed from high and low? So perhaps we would need after all to distinguish the middlebrow from the splicing-of-pop-and-art, for which we would continue to reserve the word postmodernism. At this point, watching those terms grow unwieldy, one casts about for new ones, and looking back over Brown’s list of autonomous artists, discerns the outlines of what until recently we were calling indie culture or alternative: small-label rock albums and small-studio features, supplemented by New Yorker fiction and the more accessible reaches of gallery art. If you are persuaded by Autonomy, you’re going to say that it is a thoughtful Gen X’ers riposte to Jameson, thirty-five years his senior, a careful explanation of why he has never experienced the art of his generation as all that broken. If you are unpersuaded by the book, you’re going to say that it is Immanuel Kant’s manifesto for dad rock.

4) The methods of the literature seminar: At this point, it becomes important to identify the first of two ways that Brown has modified the Kantian arguments that he makes often and by name. The third Critique is at pains to explain that you are doing something unusual every time you call something beautiful. First of all, you are judging without interest; when you experience something as beautiful, you stop caring what it is for, or what it can do for you, or what it is worth. And if you are judging without interest, then it follows directly that your judgment should hold universally, since all other people equally capable of bracketing their interests should judge as you do. And yet the universality in question will be a fractured one even so. When I call this painting beautiful, I demand that everyone agree with me while knowing in practice that not everyone will. My claim is thus universalizing but not genuinely universal. Beauty is the occasion for what Kant innocuously names our “subjective universality”—our failed and spectral commonality, which is, of course, the fate of all universalisms thus far, unusual here only because raised to consciousness.[2]

Brown follows this argument closely, but has nothing at all to say about beauty, which is the term one might have thought a Kantian aesthetics could not forego. His revision goes like this: I know I am in the presence of art not when I experience an object as beautiful, but when I know it to be meaningful, and I discern its meanings even having admitted that I can never know what it was that the artist meant. Deliberating about art, Brown says, has to involve the “public ascription of intention,” and it’s worth taking the time to extract the Kantian structure of this claim (13). Intention is merely ascribed, something that I have to posit. But this ascription is necessarily public; I posit meaning while expecting others to co-posit it alongside me. Meaning is subjective but not private and in this sense the successor to Kant’s beauty. Brown’s niftiest trick is thus to get meaning to do the work of the beautiful, and we can accordingly read Autonomy both as the making-hermeneutic of the philosophy of art and as the making-aesthetic of meaning, hence as philosophical aesthetics’ revenge upon semiotics for having once taught us to talk about art in de-aestheticized ways.

“The public ascription of meaning” is also Brown’s big proposal for authenticating an object as real art even when it comes to as us as commodity. It’s his bite test and dropper of nitric acid. Can I generate public meanings around x (Alison Bechdel, Gus Van Sant, Yeah Yeah Yeahs)? In practice, this is bound to mean: Can I teach a class on x (St. Vincent, Wes Anderson, Cormac McCarthy)? Will it work in seminar? We know something to be art, Brown says, when it “solicits close interpretative attention,” and Autonomy is most convincing when modeling such attention (22). Brown is a first-rate exegete, and his book tosses off one illuminating reading after another, repeatedly vindicating the program of an older criticism: why Boyhood isn’t really a coming-of-age movie; why the second season of The Wire is Greek rather than Shakespearean tragedy (and why that distinction matters); the particular way in which bossa nova bridges the divide between popular and art musics (and what this has to do with developmentalist politics in the global South). Readers might nonetheless be disappointed to learn that postmodern art’s paths to autonomy are the ones they already knew about. The book’s point, in fact, seems to be that the old paths still work, that new ones aren’t needed. Brown likes art when it displays a degree of self-consciousness about its own procedures and historical situation, and especially when an artwork includes a version of itself which it then subjects to critique. Simple self-referentiality is his most basic requirement: that art not reproduce without comment the inherited imperatives of its genre or medium, always glossed as market imperatives. He sticks up for “framing” and “citation” because of the meta-questions that these provoke; some guitars don’t just play rock songs, but get you to reflect on the condition of rock songs. All three of the novels he recommends are thus Künstlerromane, or at least readable as such, but these are only the clearest instance of Autonomy’s fundamentally didactic preference for literature when it interrupts our naïve attitude to fiction and instead makes us think afresh about same. The White Stripes are congratulated for having turned “fun” into an “inquiry” (149).

This position is no more perspicuous than it has ever been. A person might finish Autonomy still wondering how it is that irony in this accustomed mode is able to “suspend the logic of the commodity” (34). The question is difficult: When irony comes to us in the form of the commodity, can we be sure that the commodity always loses? What keeps the self-ironizing commodity from functioning as commodified irony? In order to be convinced of Brown’s position, do I have to believe first that irony is the one uncommodifiable thing? Or that a work that confesses its dependence on the market has thereby neutralized that dependence? In Autonomy, autonomy sometimes withers back to my ability to name my subordination. Brown, moreover, is altogether inured to one version of clientage, which is the continued dependence of art upon the critic, who, after all, is the only one who can ratify it as art, via that public ascription of meaning. Artists forward works to the marketplace without knowing whether they will even count as art, generating instead a kind of proto-art, obliged to wait for the critics who produce the aftermarket meanings that classify some works as not-just-commodities. If you are an artist, then  autonomy apparently means marking time until somebody else certifies that you have successfully described your heteronomy.

[PART THREE IS HERE.]

[1] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 4.

[2] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (1790), translation by Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987). See especially section 8: “In a judgment of taste the universality of the liking is presented only as subjective.”