#13

note for an essay: on sartre's "something" and blanchot's "someone" -- as a crucial concept for postwar art (michaux, dubuffet, giacometti) and for film (adorno/hork on film's alliance with the middle class "anybody")

#12

Luc Boltanski, Cadres, on classe moyenne vs fonctionnariat in the 1930s:

"Le fonctionnariat s'oppose àla libre entreprise comme la sécurité ai risque, la lâcheté et la mollesse à l'énergie et au courage, la routine àl'innovation, la soumission à la liberté, l'administration machinale et aveugle àla responsabilité de la "personne." Le "fonctionnaire" est un "parasite" de la société, détenteur d'une sorte de tenure bureaucratique, il n'engage pas, par son activité, l'avenir d'un patrimoine personnel ou familial." (97)

the consolidation of the middle class under the banner of patrimony serves to obscure a number of crucial divisions: that between the poor and rich middle class (through the exclusion of functionaries and other bureaucratic workers, the middle class is united in the manner of the republican dreyfusards -- here, the united front of proletarian and bourgeois is hypostatized in the name of a class 'neither right (corporatist/antiparlimentarian) nor left (socialist/radical)') and between non-professional and professional (i.e. those w technical competence and/or advanced schooling).

#11

Sternhell, Sorel and myth:

"To the rationalist concept of natural rights Sorel opposed the theory of myths. Myths are 'systems of images' that cannot be broken up into their component parts, but must be accepted in their totality as historical forces. 'When one stands on the ground of myths,' said Sorel, 'one is safe from all refutation': a failure 'can prove nothing against socialism.' A general strike is a myth; it 'must be regarded as an undivided whole; consequently, no detail of its execution can contribute anything to an understanding of socialism. One should even add that one is always in danger of losing something of that understanding when one attempts to split this whole into parts.'" (78)

myth permits martial mobility (Sorel the Bergsonian), freedom from the mire of consensus, compromise, and the fragmentary: "The idea of class struggle fulfills this function of promoting movement; it is in fact a myth aiming at the maintenance of a state of continuous tension, scission, and catastrophe, a state of covert war, a daily moral struggle against the established order. [...] To the idea of justice, that 'vapor,' as Maurras always called it, 'that old lag, ridden for centuries by all the renewers of the world deprived of surer means of historical locomotion,' as Rosa Luxemburg said, Sorel opposed the idea of the strike, which is a 'phenomenon of war.'"

cult of jeanne d'arc

#10

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, "From Absolute Space to Abstract Space":

"In the extensions and proliferations of cities, housing is the guarantee of reproductivity, be it biological, social or political. Society -- that is, capitalist society -- no longer totalizes its elements, nor seeks to achieve such a total integration through monuments. Instead it strives to distil its essence into buildings. As a substitute for the monumentality of the ancient world, housing, under the control of a state which oversees both production and reproduction, refers us from a cosmic 'naturalness' (air, water, sun, 'green space'), which is at once arid and fictitious, to genitality -- to the family, the family unit and biolgocial reproduction. [...] Shattered by a host of separations and segregations, social unity is able to reconstitute itself at the level of the family unit, for the purposes of, and by means of, generalized reproduction." (232)

Exercise of political power required for transit from absolute to abstract space

Rome, the mundus, paternal law: "The Pater-Rex did not have a passive relationship to the world; rather, he reorganized it according to his power and rights, Property and Patrimony, jus utendi et abutendi -- the limits of which were set not by the 'being' of others but rather by the rights of those among the others who partook of the same power. The Pater-Rex, later Imperator, at once magistrate and priest, thus reconstituted the space around him as the space of power. [...] Paternity's imposition of its juridical law (the Law) on maternity promoted abstraction to the rank of a law of thought. Abstraction was introduced -- and presupposed -- by the Father's dominion over the soil, over possessions, over children, over servants and slaves, and over women." (243)

"What Rome offers is an image that engenders (or produces) space. What space? Specifically, the space of power. Political space is not established solely by actions (with material violence generating a place, a legal order, a legislation): the genesis of a space of this kind also presupposes a practice, images, symbols, and the construction of buildings, of towns, and of localized social relationships." (244-45)

Why did the process of accumulation begin not in antiquity, where numerous favorable preconditions were present, but in medieval Europe (ca. 12th century)?
"I propose the following answer: the space that emerged in Western Europe in the twelfth century, gradually extending its sway over France, England, Holland and Italy, was the space of accumulation -- its birthplace and cradle. Why and how? Because this secularized space was the outcome of the revival of the Logos and the Cosmos, principles which were able to subordinate the 'world' with its underground forces. Along with the Logos and logic, the Law too was re-established, and contractual (stipulated) relationships replaced customs, and customary exactions. (P). With the dimming of the 'world' of shadows, the terror it exercised lessened accordingly. It did not, however, disappear. Rather, it was transformed into 'heterotopical' places, places of sorcery and madness, places inhabited by demonic forces -- places which were fascinating but tabooed. Later, much later, artists would rediscover this ferment of sacred and accursed. At the time when it held sway, however, no one could represent this 'world'; it was simply there. Space was ridden with hidden powers, more often malign than well-disposed. Each such place had a name, and each denomination also referred to the relevant occult power: numen-nomen. Place names (lieux-dits) dating from the agro-pastoral period had not been effaced during the Roman era. On the contrary, the Romans' innumerable minor superstititions relating to the earth, carried down via the villae and tied into the great maledictions of Christianity, could only sustain the profusion of sacred/cursed sites scattered across the face of the land. In the twelfth century a metamorphosis occured, a displacement, a subversion of signifiers. More precisely, what had formerly signified, in an immediate manner, that which was forbidden, now came to refer solely to itself qua signifier -- stripped of any emotional or magical referential charge. [...] Besides being decrypted, medieval space was also cleared. Social practice -- which did not know where it was going -- made space available for something else, made it vacant (though not empty). As part of the same process, the 'libido' was freed -- that tripartite libido which was denounced by Augustinian theology and which founded the secular world: libido sciendi, dominandi, sentiendi: curiosity, ambition, sensuality. Thus liberated, libido mounted an assault upon the space open before it. This space, deconsecrated, at once spiritual and material, intellectual and sensory, and populated by signs of the body, would become the recipient, first of an accumulation of knowledge, then of an accumulation of riches. Its source, to locate it precisely, was less the medieval town envisaged as a community of burghers than that town's marketplace and market hall (along with their inevitable companions the campanile and the town hall)." (263-64)

"Money and commodities, still in statu nascendi, were destined to bring with them not only a 'culture' but also a space. The uniqueness of the marketplace, doubtless on account of the splendour of religious and political structures, has tended to be overlooked. We should therefore remind ourselves that antiquity looked upon trade and tradespeople as external to the city, as outside its political system, and so relegated them to the outskirts. The basis of wealth was still real property, ownership of the land. The medieval revolution brought commerce inside the town and lodged it at the centre of a transformed urban space. The marketplace differed from the forum as from the agora: access to it was free, and it opened up on every side onto the surrounding territory -- the territory the town dominated and exploited -- and into the countryside's network of roads and lanes. The market hall, an inspired invention, was for its part as far removed from the portico as it was from the basilica; its function was to shelter the transaction of business while permitting the authorities to control it. The cathedral church was certainly not far away, but its tower no longer bore the symbols of knoledge and power; instead the freestanding campanile now dominated space -- and would soon, as clock-tower, come to dominate time too." (265)

cryptic space -- taboo and mystery of the underworld
Gance's walking dead
ground-space as underworld, city as grotto/catacomb
Adorno/Horkheimer and the incantatory word

On war: "Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries wars would revolve around accumulation. Wars used up riches; they also contributed to their increase, for war has always expanded the productive forces and helped perfect technology, even as it has pressed these into the service of destruction. Fought over areas of potential investment, these wars were themselves the greatest of investments, and the most profitable. Cases in point are the Hundred Years War, the Italian wars, the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, Louis XIV's wars against the Dutch and against the Holy Roman Empire, and the wars of the French Revolution and Empire. The space of capitalist accumulation thus gradually came to life, and began to be fitted out. [...] Industry would pitch its tent in a space in which the communitarian traditions of the countryside had been swept away and urban institutions brought to ruin by wars (through the links between towns, the 'urban system', had not disappeared). This was the space, piled high with the rich spoils of years of rapine and pillage, which was to become the industrial space of the modern state." (275-76)

#9

Dubuffet
Giacometti
Fautrier
Brancusi
Leger (invention of ideological space)
Picasso

Matisse?
Picabia?
Max Ernst?
Klee? (not really in Paris, not immediately known to Paris artists)
Helion (from abstraction/figuration to ideological space - worth mentioning in Leger chapter)

Thematic chapters:
aviators, passenger aircraft, aerial warfare
the automobile (the banality of ground-speed)
electricity and painting (1937 expo)
planification, corporatism, cadres

#8

malevich “non-objective art and suprematism” (1919):

“I have ripped through the blue lampshade of the constraints of color. I have come out into the white. Follow me, comrade aviators. Swim into the abyss. I have set up the semaphores of
Suprematism.”

fontana: "[T]he artist must have the courage to stop idolizing himself, to stop seeing himself at the center of the earth and of all things."

The object and the painter divorced from one another; to make a painting is to divest oneself of the painting. The violence of a sundering or a dissociation. The painting as a site of action: an exalted violence -- exalted insofar as it becomes part of the normal procedure of Fontana's picture-making; the rending of the canvas surface is no longer an exceptional case.

In what sense does postwar society remain fascist? Fascism without nationalism or socialism: military corporatism. Corporate power aims to operate in an autonomous zone with total impunity - a zone of violent competition (action) inacessible from either the space of the nation or of society. Fontana points towards this: if the painter can't participate in this world of force, the painting can - or it can present itself as if it had.

#7

from Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (L'Imaginaire, 1940):

"Hypnogogic phenomena are not 'contemplated by consciousness': they are of consciousness. Now, consciousness cannot be an automaton: at the utmost it can ape an automatism, associate itself with automatic forms; that is the case here. But in that case, we must speak of a kind of bondage. This inattentive consciousness is not distracted: it is fascinated." (62)

"What is lacking [in the case of the hynogogic image] is precisely a contemplative power of consciousness, a certain way of keeping oneself at a distance from one's images, from one's own thoughts and so [consciousness permits] them their own logical development, instead of depositing upon them all of one's own weight, of throwing oneself into the balance, of being judge and accused, of using one's own power of synthesis to make a synthesis of whatever sort with no matter what." (63)

on fatalism: "Fatalism posits that such an event should happen and that it is this coming event that determines the series that is to lead up to it. It is not determinism but fatalism which is the converse of freedom. It might even be said that fatalism, incomprehensible in the physical world, is perfectly in its place in the realm of consciousness. [...] In captive consciousness, in fact, it is the representation of the possible that is lacking, that is, the faculty of suspended judgment. But all thought captures and enchains consciousness -- and consciousness toys with it and completes it at the same time that it thinks it. Had that sudden noise failed to arouse me, my interpretation of 'eagle' would have matured into the form 'I see an eagle.' It becomes a certainty when taken for a finished act of consciousness." (67)

Cf. Alain, Mars ou la Guerre Jugée

strength in resisting delusion / weakness in sucumbing to fascination

#6

"The 'leftist' form of revisionism did not survive the war. In the years following the war, a very different form of revisionism flourished, at first sight closer to the Bernstein tradition but in reality quite different in spirit. This was a 'planist,' technocratic, 'managerial' form of revisionism, which maintained that between traditional capitalism and the proletarian revolution was a third option--the celebrated 'intermediate regimes' referred to by Marcel Déat."

planists: déat, henri de man, bertrand de jouvenel (had an affair w his 40-something stepmother while only 16! writer colette)

h de man: "In reality, there are not many qualitative changes in the history of mankind that can be compared, as regards their revolutionary significance for society and culture, with the change from mechanical movement to electrical movement, from the technique of the lever to the technique of waves, from the cogwheel to the electric wire and wireless transmission, from material to energetic work processes, from mechanistic thought to functional thought." (sternhell 32)

unity (under the sign of the nation) versus fragmentation (under the sign of bourgeois atomization)

anti-cultural positions?
"The critical attitude to individualism, democracy and its institutions, parliamentarianism, and universal suffrage owed a great deal to this new view of man as an essentially irrational being, confined by historical and biological limitations and motivated by sentiments, associations, and images, never by ideas. (P) The belief in the domnance of the unconscious over reason, the stress on deep, mysterious forces led, as a natural and necessary consequence, to an extreme anti-intellectualism. To rationalism, to the critical spirit and its manifestations, the rebels of the end of the nineteenth century opposed intuitive feelings, emotions, enthusiasms, an unthinking spontaneity welling from the depths of the popular subconscious." (sternhell 36)

#5

abel gance 1938 version of "j'accuse" !

roger icart, abel gance, ou, Le Prométhée foudroyé (1983) monograph
abel gance, prismes (nrf 1930) collected writings

#4

Sigfried Giedion, from "Fernand Léger: La forme humaine dans l'espace" 1945, writing about the Plongeurs made in the mid 40s (first in Marseilles, later in New York)

"C'est comme si la masse volait simultanéent à travers le ciel et la mer. Présence statique du mouvement! Tout est saisissable. [...] Les contours dessiné sur le fond de la toile se réuisent à des signes d'une fermeté absolue et librement tracé dans l'espace comme l'écriture d'un aéroplane dans la stratosphere."

#3

céline:
le voyage au bout de la nuit (32)
mort à credit (36)
guignol's band (44/52)

#2

waldemar-george? léger monograph 1929

eisenstein / strohen, "a propos du cinéma" (date?):
"Le cinéa et l'aviation vont bras-dessus bras-dessous dans la vie, ils sont nés le mêe jour. (P) La vitesse est la loi du monde. (P) Le cinéma est gagnant parce qu'il est vite et rapide. Il est gagnant parce qu'il fait sauter des tas de chiffons à restaurant comme le programme et le ridieu."

léger, "pienture et cinéma" (date?):
no more prejudice against the larger-than-life
"L'erreur picturale, c'est le sujet.
L'erreur du Cinéma, c'est le scenario."

#1

gramsci - prison notebooks written during 30s (dies in '37)
hayek and polanyi - both publish major works on what to do about end of bourgeois era (both in '44?)

particularly polanyi: "Nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed. This book is concerned with the political and economic origins of this event, as well as with the great transformation which it ushered in. (P) Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market which produced an unheard-of material welfare. The fourth was the liberal state. Classified in one way, two of these institutions were economic, two political. Classified in another way, two of them were national, two international. Between them they determined the characteristic outlines of the history of our civilization. (P) Of these institutions the gold standard proved crucial; its fall was the proximate cause of the catastrophe. By the time it failed, most of the other institutions had been sacrificed in a vain effort to save it. (P) But the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation which gave rise to a specific civilization. The gold standard was merely an attempt to extend the domestic market system to the international field; the balance-of-power system was a superstructure erected upon and, partly, worked through the gold standard; the liberal state was itself a creation of the self-regulating market. [really?] The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century lay in the laws governing market economy."