Rochester Is Killing Me

Right now I am trying to read Baudrillard -- it's not working too well. This is because I am too deep in the simulacra. I've been watching too much television and not doing enough work. I don't think I'll ever be able to do what I consider to be enough work. It's really quite odd if you stop and think about what Baudrillard is trying to get at; what is "real" or what is just an attempt to create a symbolic real out of something that was never real in the first place. I know this doesn't really make any sense but the big bad scary internet isn't really interested in what I have to say.

Well on a completely separate but not entirely different note; what the past month's events have taught me is that possibly the only thing I can take any semblance of comfort out of is that I really am a nihilist. Not the absolute harshness of nihilist that everyone thinks that Nietzsche wrote about but the one where humanity has killed god through their love of the simulacra. (See not so different) God no longer exists because the real representation or symbol of god is gone and is substituted with an artificial symbol of what we wanted the first symbol to be. The death of god is celebrated everyday because we no longer attempt transcendence. Anyway, the comfort part is that I am a romantic nihilist -- transcendence is possible but can not be found in the culture we live in.

Thesis work

Though I am sure no one is actually reading this I feel that this blog affords me the opportunity to use it as a forum to regurgitate and recapitulate ideas I have on the subject of Blake and Barker. That said this is what I am working on right now:

What interests me most about William Blake and Clive Barker is that they both hold the power of imagination in the highest regard. Through imagination we are able to transcend the restrictions of contemporary culture. Both writers, through the mode of fantastic literature, attempt to redefine humanity in a way that complicates and often eradicates the artificial limits we place on ourselves through various ideologies. They try to break the mind-forged manacles of culture. For me, culture (at least contemporary late-capitalist culture) is perhaps the most detrimental thing that has happened to the human condition. Our culture simultaneously promotes positivist thinking and discredits any discussion of what seems to be explicitly unreal. Better put, our society forces monologic ideologies and tries to discredit any engagement in subversive exploration of the human condition. Example -- Speculative Fiction is apparently not a legitimate academic pursuit.

I feel that Speculative Fiction allows us a unique insight to how culture forces concepts of self-creation/ identity creation to be little more than creations of rather complicated simulacra. What is real when everything around us is in some way tied to the nebulas workings of late capitalism? Both Blake and Barker's literature tries to decenter capitalism's hold on ideologies while replacing it with imagination. Imagination functions a both a subversive and transcendent force for new creations of identity outside cultural ideologies.

What I am trying to do now (in my Master's Thesis) is to look at Baudrillard's concepts of Simulacra and Simulation, Althusser's Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Zizek's proletariatization of the Subject and apply it to Blake's work. In Blake's work I am looking at the question of how do we create a self inside culture? And does creation of unopposed ideologies force an apocalypse?

Any ideas?

Clive Barker

I find the horror writer Clive Barker to be a good analogue to William Blake, in part because I am writing my thesis on comparing the literature of the two, but also because Barker cites Blake as being a major influence to his work. Barker is perhaps a better example of revolutionary artist for this class insofar as he is contemporaneous and specifically engages with a fight to decenter ruling class ideologies.

Both Barker and Blake deal with concerns regarding ruling class ideologies and use their artwork and literature to fight against them. Barker's artwork, like his writing attempts to destabilize the white heterosexual male patriarchal society. He does this by privileging women in his novels. More specifically he places the power of the menstruating woman in the center of many of his narratives. (i.e. “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” The Great and Secret Show, and Weaveworld)

Barker also places great importance on imagination both in his images and in his novels . He argues along the same lines as Blake re imagination. Many of Barker's sketches are darkly lined images of monsters, many of them contorted, deformed, anthropomorphous men.

Barker states that the male nude subject is particularly interesting to him because, as a gay male, he enjoys the male human form. What to me seems subversive about this subject of monsters is, if we look at his literature, we see that he views original power as residing in women and monsters. In many of his narratives he explicitly states that men are simply an after product of the copulation between women and demons. (“The Skins of the Fathers,” Imajica) How he emphasizes the male figure subverts the female nude subject. Because he uses the nude male body as a base for many of his pictures the female body is not the object of gaze, instead it is inverted. Furthermore, because the male body is caricatured and morphed into a monster it is no longer an objectified object.

One of the sources that Barker uses to explain the power he places in demons is Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” In this, Blake writes that the Devil, because he symbolizes energy and imagination is a better source for art and inspiration when compared with the tyrannical Christian God. This could explain both men's preoccupations with monsters and devils.

Both Barker and Blake place importance on the transcendent power of imagination. As we can see in many of the above images, Barker often creates imaginative variations of the human body in order to subvert standard artistic forms such as the female nude instead privileging imagination and impassioned energy.

In general, Barker's art utilizes many of Blake's transcendent ideas in order to decenter ruling class ideologies of sex and hegemony. His art can be considered revolutionary because, through his art, Barker begs us to consider different forms of power and different ways to perceive the sexes through image and narrative.

William Blake

In order to explain my position on William Blake's art and how it is revolutionary (at the very least in a Marxist sense) I think it is best to engage in a dialogue with parts of Northrop Frye's book on Blake entitled Fearful Symmetry. In a general sense Frye's book engages academically with Blake's poetry. However, because Blake's poetry and artwork literally and figuratively envelop each other,they cannot be separated and therefore one cannot talk about his poetry without also discussing his artwork.

Blake's work is revolutionary for several reasons. The foremost reason is that his artwork engages the reader in a political sense. At the time of his writings and engravings/illuminations Europe was immersed in the beginnings of the industrial revolution and also reacting to the politically charged French revolution. Through his poetry and artwork, Blake reacts to his anxieties against Lockean Empiricist ideas(arguing for imagination over logical positivism) and the proliferation of industry. What is also explicit in much of his work is his encouragement of revolutions against tyrannical governments. While I can go on at great length about Blake, I wish to look specifically at how he expresses these ideas and anxieties in his artwork.

Blake's almost radical objection to the mechanical reproduction of artwork is exhibited in much his work, often times in direct opposition with the theories on art that existed in his lifetime. It seems to be the case that almost every aspect of his life suggests his anxieties towards the mechanical or otherwise copying of art. Through exploration of his disdain towards the mechanical copying of art we can better understand the necessity for imagination and originality in Blake's art. Blake believes that the imaginative force can not translate through the copying process and any further copying deteriorates the already mimetic process of rendering an idea or image on a page; thereby insisting on originality. This is why Blake personalized each of his illuminations by changing the colors in each duplication to make each explicitly original. ¹

1So as not to plagiarize myself some of this is from an essay that I previously wrote on William Blake's poetry. Placilla, Corinne. “Breaking Mnemosyne's Mirror: Exploring Blake's Objections to the Mechanical and Otherwise Reproduction of Art” For Dr. Stefano Evangelista, Trinity College: Oxford 2009.

Above are two examples of the same illuminated poem "Tyger." The poem itself is engaged with the need for energy and passion and how the animal is an embodiment of it. We can also see here that, while the text and general outline of each illumination has not changed, the color has. Also, Blake purposefully makes the punctuation and capitalization inconsistent to further the originality of each piece.

To continue the original discussion, Fry writes that, for Blake art “ is a form of spiritual communication with God which is by its nature incommunicable to anyone else, and which soars beyond faith into direct apprehension. But to the artist, qua artist, this apprehension is not an end in itself but a means to another end, the end of producing his poem” (Frye 7). Both this and his statement that “what we see appearing before us on canvas is not a reproduction of memory or sense experience but a new and independent creation” (Frye 25) fights against Lockean ideas of epistemology that existed at the time. Locke argues that everything we know comes from our sense experience. Blake fights against Lockean view because he feels that imagination is necessary to be an artist and experience the world.

Here is an image by Blake of Newton, who at the bottom of the sea uses his measuring instruments to measure the world. Blake shows this man isolated in part to show how science (with its root in empiricism) actually abandons the world of imagination.

“Similarly [the world] is more real to the man who throws his entire imagination behind his perception than to the man who cautiously tries to prune away different characteristics from that imagination and isolate one” (Frye 21)

Although theses ideas might not initially seem important for a class on media culture, we can look at Blake's artwork as an early form of protest commercial. Because his artwork fights against common cultural beliefs by using image and these images are produced and introduced into the culture, his artwork becomes revolutionary for his time and for contemporary culture. Frye writes that “the sources of art are enthusiasm and inspiration: if society mocks and derides these, it is society that is mad, not the artist, no matter what excesses the latter may commit” (Frye 13).

What is the Marxist definition of Revolutionary art

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. -The German Ideology

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write, in essence, that for a piece of art (be it literature, comic book, or painting) to be affecting and necessary, the message needs to be easily distinguishable from the artistic material from which it is given to the public. They seem to echo similar concerns that Plato provides in his dialogues. Art, because it is potentially full of “mystification and speculation” detracts from the message it tries to convey. This problem can be seen in anything that is considered mimetic. While this description of art by Marx and Engels does not necessarily provide an especially easy way to interpret art, we can extrapolate their concerns and use them to engage in art from a Marxist perspective. If we do not look at Marx's anxieties about art as a literal disavowal of all art forms, we find that he is perhaps begging his audience for a better, more transparent mode of art that can be used as political tools for revolution.

In a separate work, Marx (Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy) writes that, because we are unable to think outside the confines of our political economy, we must try to define those limits and then stretch and break them as best as possible.

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Although he does not necessarily define it as such, revolutionary art is art that first attempts to define the political economy, then create attempt to instil the possibility of an alternate to the current society in consciousness of both classes (paying particular attention to the bourgeois class).

Moving away from Marx, Benjamin provides a context in which we can look at not only at the Marxist definitions of revolutionary art, but also the affects of the political economy on the production and reception of art. In his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin suggests that, because of late capitalism our definitions of art have changed. Furthermore, the value of a piece of art is no longer considered to be its affecting charm or image, rather it is now based on our abstracted monetary system where the art is considered valuable only if the powers that be say that it is. For further reference to this, look at the article “Capital Effects” by John Crary where he provides valuable commentary on Benjamin's essay and applies Marxist interpretations of art to actual sales of art in modern times.

This all applies to to what I hope to achieve in this project. Mainly, I wish to show that both Barker and Blake are revolutionaries re Marxist definitions because they both critique the status quo and the political economy by challenging Ruling Class Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses in order to achieve definitions of humanity that transcend the capitalist superstructure.

You can find the essays used:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#5a4 - “The German Ideology”

or

Marx, Karl, Engels Friedrich. “From the German Ideology.” The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch. New York: W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 2001

Marx, Karl, Engels Friedrich. “From the Preface to A Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy.” The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch. New York: W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 2001

Marx, Karl, Engels Friedrich. “From Commodities.” The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch. New York: W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 2001

Crary, Jonathan. “Capital Effects” High/Low: Art and Mass Culture. October, Vol. 56, (Spring, 1991), Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 121-131 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778727

Introduction

Hello all,

I am not sure how much of an introduction this project warrants but I will try to outline my major argument. Because our class is concerned with art in our mass media culture and my own academic interests lie in how the Romantic Poets are interpolated by modern Speculative Fiction Writers, I will use the poet/artist William Blake and the contemporary writer/artist Clive Barker to explore Marxist notions of revolutionary art. It is my contention that both artists would be considered revolutionary per Marxist definitions because of their use of imagination, uniqueness of works, subversive messages, and efficacy of praxis inherent in their art.

Both artists Barker and Blake have websites and archives of their art readily available on the internet which I will be providing links to. While I can perhaps take great issue with this proliferation of mass produced images and how it is antithetical to their (explicitly Blake's) art, I think the images provided by the websites provide context and reference to what I hope to write about. Although these images are copies of original works, they are by no means viable substitutes for seeing either artists originals.

Clive Barker's official website is linked here. This main site links to both his children's site and adult with galleries and book information for each. http://www.clivebarker.info/

The University of Rochester's William Blake Archives are linked here http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/main.html