THE POTENT KEEL: SUBLIME AESTHETICS

"Benjamin's historian is not interested in exercising control over the past through the use of an ostensibly critical and objective method. The task of the historian rather is to strike a spark by bringing past and present together in an image of truth, an image in which 'the Then (das Gewesene) and the Now (das Jetzt) come into a constellation like a flash of lightning.' The 'lightning flash' in effect 'rescues' the past not by fitting the past into the flow of events but by interrupting that flow. And the constellations are constantly being reformed. Benjamin's historian is not the social scientist following a positive method to construct the truth of the past out of the raw material of, for example, memories. Neither is the historian the hermeneutical deployer of narrative strategies to give memories meaning in an interpretive framework. The historian is rather the chiffonnier, the ragpicker, rummaging through the detritus of history looking for the cast-off, the discarded, and that which is in danger of being lost. Put another way, the task of the historian is to 'brush history against the grain.'"(1) --Steven Ostovich (2002)

A LA RIGUEUR - The primary flaw in modern-day aesthetics (if such a thing even exists) is that it has reduced primary connections with things to secondary, tertiary, and -- worse -- endlessly mediated and instrumentalized relations that produce a vast Book of Lies. This 'book' is the 'machine' that is eating the world. Walter Benjamin (as eschatologist) sought to burst this all-encompassing bubble of myriad reflections while -- in a sense -- stuck in the Frankfurt School's operational datum, a post-Kantian datum, which developed an unending critique of forms of alienation and anomie -- an unending negative dialectic. This critique could not assimilate Benjamin's intuitions regarding primary forms (cultural and otherwise) and his most heretical writings (vis-à-vis the School) were dismissed as 'unddisciplined'. Hence Hannah Arendt's misreadings of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History ... Hence, too, the suppression of Akhmatova and Pasternak, in Soviet Russia, and the aggressivity of the utopian vision unleashed by revolutionary forces in Europe with its technological sublime mirroring a teleological drive toward subsuming subjectivity itself within a monstrous objectivity at the very heart of Socialist Realism. The disappearance of the radically contingent forms of Russian formalism within the collective drive to utopia signals, if anything, that such moments are truly irruptive and leave but a residue as they vanish, and as they are co-opted and turned to propagandistic purposes (or reified into nothingness, as in the West). It was not until the 1950s (with the death of Stalin) that this 'winter' began to shift into a type of 'spring', in Russia, and new works of a type not seen since the Silver Age (the late 1890s, early 1900s) emerged from the ashes of the Russian soul.

It is the critical-poetical vision (the surrationalist vision) that permeates Benjamin's unassimilated (unassimilable) works ... This vision is of primary intuitions regarding things and forms, but most especially cultural forms (as perceived in the corrupt continuum of bastardized, official histories). The task of the poetic is, according to Tarkovsky, to forestall the catastrophic -- which the poet almost always sees directly in everything. This catastrophic is the vision of the Angel (in Benjamin's work) viewing the wreckage of history while racing backward into the future. This sentiment reveals the nature of nostalgia insofar as nostalgia is a form of futurity itself (being futural) ...

"Living among the debris of the past, the nostalgic's challenge is to construct a world and an identity out of this debris. Put in terms from Benjamin, it is possible to speak of the 'shock' of nostalgia [...] 'Nostalgia' is the refusal to let the past be simply past while resisting its incorporation into the present. There is a future content to nostalgia that can be dangerous."(2) --Steven Ostovich (2002)

THE MAIN EVENT - The chief concern of Aristotle's Poetics (the first 'proper' aesthetics?) was that a work of art not be episodic ... This complaint resonates today insofar as everything is intentionally episodic every day. That things are disconnected from (bereft of) their milieux is the prime event in Capitalism Triumphant. An aesthetics that drips caritas (charity) would strive to exempt things from this horrible process of de-naturing everything ... A de facto anti-capitalist aesthetic in fact is what is most direly sought in art (which is why any art in service to the machine is a half-bastardized art automatically) ... It is this presentiment that led Kant to his delimitation of artistic autonomy. But it is this same thing, today, that both justifies hijacking everything in the name of pragmatics (productivity), while at the same time giving solace to those working for 'some-thing else' who wish to defy the ultra-banal state of things and remain, until called, 'extra-territorial' ... Is everything to become a mere 'episode' within the capitalist machine? Is it possible to fashion an anti-capitalist sublime?

All architectures that have jettisoned an ethics (in pursuit of specious autonomy) serve the machine while claiming otherwise ... It cannot be otherwise (one cannot serve two masters) ... Architecture resembles nothing other than the two-headed monarchy of the late Austro-Hungarian empire, trying to look regal in its bereft (tattered) state ... always falling as it attempts to rise ... Musil's extreme, intellectually-charged (unfinished) novel The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften rendered almost meaningless through translation, and meaning -- in George Steiner's estimation -- "The Man Whose 'I' Is in Search of His 'Me'") seems poised in/at that place where an aesthetics of an exorbitant beauty (and price) might rise, only if ... only if ... only if 'self-possession' has any currency whatsoever, now and then, versus the empty gesture of autonomy such a term implies in a philological 'landscape' devoid of fiery perturbational, critical-poetic hyper conceits on the path to the Some-thing Else.

It is axiomatic that hyper-Capitalism will always shut down such things, out of its perverse, internal logic ... out of its own self-possessing necessity ... Yet, that such a non-thing might have a form of hyper-consciousness usually ascribed to sentient beings is a curious conceit in itself ... But it is no different a curious thing than the arguments supporting architectural autonomy. Such arguments are constructed by the machine itself, and the machine must roll on at all costs flattening everything in its path. Jameson's idea that "theory" is a creation of late-capitalism is prescient, insofar as "theory" exists as an elective antidote to an endless field of commodification. Primarily 'academic exercises', theory proved its true nature when it turned on its head and became anti-theory (neo-vitalistic operational games) ... And so forth ... An aesthetics that might take up residence elsewhere (an aesthetics that might resemble clouds drifting across the 'sky') would instead be unassimilable by the machine ... Not unlike Tagore's poetry, it would be heard in the fields 'sung by lowly peasants' while also printed and marketed -- in deluxe folios -- at the outer edges of the overlapping circles of artistic disciplines 'here' and 'there' ... It would be pervasive ...

ARCHITECTURES DE JOUISSANCE - Which is why ... which is why ... which is why we must develop an aesthetics of 'landscape' (an aesthetics which includes -- folds into itself -- architecture) ... Which is why an aesthetics of landscape would be first and foremost an aesthetics of words ... Which is why we have no choice but to 'harvest' the 20th century, expropriating every failed moment, every promise not broken, and every thing that has not yet been appropriated for instrumental reason ... This is also why an aesthetics of immanence (an 'immodernity' always upon us, almost always 'there' but not 'there') will arrive whether or not we choose to acknowledge it ... For these reasons, and there really is no other option except to flatten everything Left and Right in the pursuit of an all-encompassing hegemony of de-materialized things, endlessly circling, endlessly -- hopelessly -- de-natured and 'lost', an aesthetics of immanence is imminent ...

There are vital movements (moments) in architecture that are endlessly short-circuited ... It is possible that this short-circuiting is a byproduct of the all-but invisible machinations of the machine eating everything. It is also possible that these moments are staged offstage such that the principal action (building) remains immune to the agitation and destabilizing 'nature' of such moments. Given the immense élan of academic exercises, one must come to terms with the fact that "theory", as it resides 'offstage', is defined by its separateness versus its integrity. For it to fall is presaged in its marginality -- as it will always be marginalized as "theory" ... It is evident in the superstructures of professional and academic practices that praxis (and praxes) defines not so much a 'making' as a denial of useless things. It is the useless that provides the tensions, torsion, and caesuras underwriting (in-forming) the topologies of praxis. They are, obviously, not quite so 'useless' after all ... This duality is inescapable only in the sense that one or the other presumes priority in the individual, as professional disciplines do not really exist except as an assemblage of individuals. It is a sign of the capitalist drive toward the de-materialization of everything that non-things (e.g., corporate entities) have been granted the status of individuals. Such forces survive (surpass) individuals -- they make a mockery of individuality itself -- demolishing anything (any alternative or other option) while swallowing everything useful. To remain 'provisionally useless', then, is the first moment of an aesthetics of immanence. Perhaps it is instructive to remember that both Tadao Ando and Carlo Scarpa represent 'unlicensed' autodidacts ('unauthorized' poets of form) ...

"And so, winged-thought: The 'insane' Holderlin holed up in his tower, walls plastered with maps; Bruno wandering England and Europe, and, then, burned at the stake by the Church Triumphant; Byron swimming through the canals of Venice at night, torch in hand; Zarathustra's (Nietzsche's?) 'discovery' of the devastating Eternal Return of the Same; the Asian image of Ourobouros biting off its own tail; Yeats in his tower, writing up a storm; troubadours rounded up with Cathari; Francis of Assisi (erstwhile troubadour) receiving the stigmata high atop a ragged mountain; Unamuno's wild vision of vertiginous black (nothingness?) by way of Velazquez's "Crucified Christ"; and on and on ..."(3)

THE IMPERSONAL PERSONAL - In cultivating such an aesthetics (of immanence) it is necessary to find the impersonal in the personal and the personal in the impersonal. There is no other way ... This aesthetics of words contains (as it always contains) the secret paroxysm, the shuddering in everything. The eschatological spirit that moves such things is uncannily the same spirit that moves within every person. The faux universal mathesis (Dostoievski's Grand Inquisitor) seizing this spirit must be set aside (ignored) for the advancement of a new aesthetics of immanence. The Coming Coming (a sticky mess, perhaps) is the actually existing state of things (the 'given') that comprises the "gift of the world".

The pathetic fallacies associated with former landscape ideologies (aesthetic systems) are of no use ... They are the reason why reason itself has fled elsewhere. A 'reason' that has nothing to do with (nor resembles) instrumental reason ... This reason is completely unreasonable in its demands on everything (every single person) ... For this reason it is all but impossible to utilize, today, the word 'reason'.

There are vast, hidden 'geographies' (topologies) of 'S' (Spirit) -- this spirit is almost entirely useless in the conventional sense of the word. IT cannot be reified ... and reified ... and reified ... IT is suspended in a void (protected), surrounded by nothingness. It is the vertiginous black rapturized by Unamuno (seen in the painting of a dead Christ by Velazquez and seen in the darkening puddles of rainy, stormy pre-Civil War Spain) ... IT has been called the Cloud of Unknowing by those who know ... Whatever IT is, IT cannot be turned into anything other than what IT is.

Such an aesthetics must remain -- per force -- individualized, resisting all forms of mediation ... It must be extraordinarily surreptitious. For it to register in everything else, it must remain gossamer (as gossamer as words). It must defy the detritus of the world of fallen things (things enslaved) ... It is the mark of a Some-thing Else that must be born in the individual soul. It is a small flame within all things (within all things that are 'on fire') ... As such, landscape -- in its normative sense -- becomes an 'abnormal', sublime tableau of 'fire signs'. 

"When we speak the word 'life', it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames."(4) --Antonin Artaud (1938)

THE BLOOD-RED WINE - For this reason, the look in Mandelstam's eyes in his official prison portrait is otherworldly ... There is no looking away from this look ... This one photograph eclipses all of the photographs of Rodchenko, all photographs of the Soviet industrial sublime, the sea of nameless workers erecting the "worker's paradise" ... Dostoievski was right ...

Today, what is the unnerving nerve of/within landscape photography? Why does it do what it does? Why is it so profoundly, unwaveringly precise in its estimation of the state of things? Ruff and Struth, Koudelka and Salgado turn an all-seeing lens toward the mirror (Yeats' "outer glass of weariness") and its monstrous, unnatural hyper-nature ... 'Here' is a diabolical landscape aesthetics writ large, very large (in very large prints, oftimes digitally altered to enhance the extraordinary aura-less aura -- the emptiness). Landscape + Architecture + Aura collapses into an abject nothingness, when it might -- instead -- prefigure a new renaissance, an encounter best called L+AURA (after Petrarch's muse, and in honor of Walter Benjamin) ...

AESTHETICIANS OF ENNUI - Eschatological excesses ... Brechtian signposts ... Godard's Eloge de l'Amour (In Praise of Love) ... "Quelque chose ... Quelque chose ... Quelque chose ..." An eschatological aesthetics of everything cues diremptions and/or irruptions, revealing the incessant slippage in-between things (of things) ... Godard's exquisite swan song (starting out with gorgeous black-and-white film stock, and switching to garish color video ... dissolving ... disintegrating) seems poised between worlds -- 'this' one and 'another'. An elegiac 'song', this film embodies everything 'waving good-bye' every day. Godard's autobiographical JLG/JLG -- Lake Geneva lapping at its edges -- pushed the cinematic edge of things to its limit insofar as the exiled auteur (at home in Switzerland, ignoring Paris), speaking from the shadows, felt compelled to explain the inexplicable nature of images through images through the imperfect impersonal ("It is raining ...") ... An aesthetics of extreme sublimity ... Quelque chose ...

Tarkovsky's Stalker ... The Room in the Zone ... It is raining ... The writer, and the scientist, and the guide (Stalker) sit at the edge of this room that grants wishes ... The scientist pitches a detached nuclear detonator into the pool of water and the water begins to bleed ... Tarkovsky's watery cinematic world bleeds ennui and nostalgia. In this world things are constantly disintegrating ... and architectures are constantly ‘s’mouldering before our eyes ... The long silences (and the long, painful tracking shots) are punctuated by stray sounds -- dripping water, rustling foliage, a fragment of a song or poem ... Mise en scène overwhelms dialogue. Time expands and contracts ... dreams trigger dreams ... mirrors reflect mirrors ... And so, the great Russian soul reflects the little mist-filled circle of the world. And for this same reason Theo Angelopoulos awaits inclement weather to shoot his own visions of the world gone awry ... As in Mia Eoniotita Ke Mia Mera (Eternity and A Day) ... "How long is forever?" ...

Gavin Keeney (August 2003)

ENDNOTES
1 - Steven Ostovich, "Epilogue: Dangerous Memories", The Work of Memory, edited by Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2002), http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/confino/toc.html
2 – Ostovich, op. cit.
3 - See http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/surrationalisme1.html
4 - Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 13

Regarding Capitalism Triumphant, see Arundhati Roy, "Come September", War Talk (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2003)
Regarding the “gift of the world”, see Jacob Rogozinski, "The Gift of the World", Jean-Francois Courtine, Michel Deguy et alia, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Albany: SUNY, 1993)
Regarding George Steiner’s remarks apropos of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, see George Steiner, "The Unfinished", The New Yorker (April 17, 1995)
Regarding the double-edged nature of nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)