Notes from the road...

"bubble factories"

re: gopal, stationary state, yes (magdoff and sweezy on financialization; crotty; brenner?) but with some unforeseen consequences:

1) the late 20th century middle class is formally proletarianized but not to the point of a loss of real reserves. crises/crashes are a shock to this system, serving to justify austerity budgets, union busting, etc. financialization and proletarianization are co-constitutive, but the point isn't to increase the middle- or long-term profitability of firms, only to generate bubble conditions--both in miniature (indiv firms) and in the macro field (national and international institutions)

2) timeframe for capital much shorter than in previous eras of boom/bust, since the production of bubbles is active and widespread, and has the function of shrinking productive capacity as capital attempts to profit from its own falling rate of profit (!). communization possible in the US (definitely) and western europe (sort of) since middle class still has reserves but formally misaligned with work conditions; possibility of broad-based refusal of work. elsewhere, 

stationary state of contemporary art? has anyone written on this?

facebook/twitter as enclosure of a commons -- bourgeois revolution in tunisia, egypt.

Contra Hardt/Negri, it's not labor that forces capital to restructure, but rather the dialectic of capital approaching and surpassing its territorial/dynamic limits (limits of the market), expanding its reach, prolonging its vampiric existence, internationalizing, intra-nationalizing ("colonization of everyday life"), etc. The history of capital is its subsumption of labor; there's nothing special about the 20th century in this regard. Capital works by rupturing local economies, breaking ties of affiliation, rerouting flows through the apparatus of surplus-value. Doing this often entails "clean-up" costs, typically shouldered by the state, which serves to knit together the threads of a social organism at the level of national myth. In the 20th century, the rise of spectacle culture in the West is simply the radicalization of the task of phony mediation which can no longer be performed at the level of the state. What's unique about the post-1945 period of capitalist expansion is that the fault lines and discontinuities of the global market are so exaggerated as to rule out all forms of nationalist mediation--hence the imperial quality of political mythology in the American half of the American century. This is what's meant by the real subsumption of labor to capital. In the 20th century, capital sets out to forcibly adapt the human subject to new forms of being--though new only in terms of capitalism's own history, resulting from a merely subtractive operation, capitalism minus the social contract. First, the combination of cinema and lawless war; then later, when cinema finds ways of picturing the real state of the postwar market, the hegemonic rise of television, which returns the semiotic of the market to a state of relative order (though at the price of fostering an open season of political fascism--an opportunity seized, though only infrequently, by elements of the activist Left).

In the 20th century, the process of labor's subsumption to capital takes a radical turn: in order to capture the full working life of the worker--and beyond that, her future as well--it is no longer possible to rely on myths of national belonging; it becomes necessary to articulate a second-order semiotic that both obscures the operation of the market and substitutes for it any number of alternative symbolic systems. In the moment of "real" subsmuption of labor to capital, the world market is strictly delimited, codified, digitized; its representation is as a circuitry distinct from all other forms of mediation. The salaried middle classes purchase the right to spectacle--the right, that is, to ignore the market--by signing away the last vestiges of their real autonomy.

Idea for an essay: Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne

Outline 12/25/10

1. Introduction: Reconsidering Léger's machine period:
    * Survival of Cubism / Cubist space after 1919
    * Motif of the machine / topos of the factory
    * Marx and Hegel in the age of automated machines

To what extent, and in what ways, did Léger's Cubism pertain to the machines he claims inspired him? How do we reckon with the conspicuous absence of actual machines and machine parts in the paintings of his so-called "machine period"? What "knowledge of the machine" do his pictures ultimately provide?  To answer these questions will necessitate, as I hope to demonstrate, a revolution in our understanding of machines and paintings.

1. Léger and Cubist space. Transition from Contrastes de formes to post-1918 Cubist paintings. Several claims to make here: 1) Léger was never more Cubist than after WWI--in other words, after the moment of Cubism's apparent death. But his relationship to painting, though authentically Cubist, was diametrically opposed to that of Picasso and Braque; the world of his Cubism could not be further from theirs. 2) More so than any of the other Cubists, Léger begs comparison to traditions of pre-classical depiction, Egyptian art (wall painting/relief carving) in particular. Readings of Schafer and Groenewegen-Frankfort. 2) Importance of circular forms; multiple valences of the circle in Léger's paintings: as design motif, object-part (or part-object), as token of a post-Cubist "planetary" space. These possibilities are held in the balance, so to speak; all are suggested as directions for a post-Cubist spatiality, though it's not until the late 1920s that Léger arrives at a conclusive spatiality--though not necessarily a post-Cubist spatiality--appropriated from Kandinsky and El Lissitzky (to be discussed more fully in Chapter 3). 3) The machine object as a "center of energy" (Einstein), an absolute, an obsession. Though Léger insists on the importance of machines throughout the Cubist years (1918-1924), neither machines nor machine parts are visible in his paintings, not even in the "machine period" of 1918-20. To what, if not the machine--or some machinic imagination of the modern city--can we attribute his turn to Cubism?

2. Leger's "machine period" (1918-20) reconsidered. Argument turns on the unpaintability (resistance to depiction) of modern machinery, and in particular the factory. Machinery: "a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs" (Marx). History of painting of machines from Bonhommé to the 1920s. Chapter to be written in two sections: 1) The topos of the factory. Status of factories in his earliest "machine" paintings. Importance of factories as sites of radical uprisings: the Italian biennio rosso, Russian Revolution, Spartacist revolt. Urban sociology of Paris proletariat in aftermath of First World War. 2) Early theories of automatism; boosterists of automated factories; their critics. Influence of Cendrars, Pound. Machines as "absolute objects." Marx and the penseurs de la technique (Reuleux, Maurer, Lafitte, Mumford, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem, Simondon). Several theoretical claims to pursue here: Hegelian status of the unpaintability of power-driven machines. Leroi-Gourhan's theory of the autonomous genesis of technical objects applied to painting: autonomous genesis of the "painting machine," and its technical inoperability in a world become the milieu of a global autonomous machine. Revision of the Hegelian argument about art and absolutification: does painting have access to a mode adequate to the material absolute? No, but cinema and architecture both do--again, Egyptianism.

3. Einstein's Léger, 1929-30: Equivalence and the apotheosis of objects.

4. Conclusion: Schmitt's machines. The earth, enemy of the proletariat? Machines, metal, etc.

Hegel, Jena lectures 1805-6:

ii. [Law and Property] This law [relating to] the individual’s immediate existence is, as law, the will of the parents, or sustains their will as such. In the disappearance of the contingent being (death of the parents), the law becomes positive, taking over the existence which they previously were: the state [takes charge]. Law is the actual validation of property, the element of actual existence through the will of all. The law protects the family, leaves it in its being – but like the family, the law is the substance and the necessity of the individual. It is the unconscious guardianship over the individual whose family has “died out” – i.e., insofar as he appears as individual. It is the substance and necessity – the rigid aspect in which the law presented itself.

Law is the universal right, property in general, protecting each one in his immediate possession, inheritance and exchange. But this is merely formal right, which remains quite free in regard to content (the element of chance in inheritance). The individual presents himself as earning by means of labor. Here, his law is only that whatever he works upon or exchanges belongs to him. But the universal is at the same time his necessity, a necessity which sacrifices him in his legal freedom (die ihn bey seiner Rechtsfreiheit aufopfert).

(a) The universal [i.e., the social substance] is pure necessity for the individual worker. He has his unconscious existence in the universal. Society is his “nature,” upon whose elementary, blind movement he depends, and which sustains him or negates him spiritually as well as physically. The individual exists through immediate property or inheritance, completely by chance. He works at an abstract labor; he wins much from nature. But this merely transforms itself into another form of contingency. He can produce more, but this reduces the value of his labor; and in this he does not emerge from universal [i.e., abstract] relations.

(b) Needs are thereby diversified; each individual need is subdivided into several; taste becomes refined, leading to further distinctions. [In the production of goods a degree of] preparation is demanded which makes the consumable thing ever easier to use. And so that all of the individual’s incongruous aspects are provided for (e.g., cork, corkscrew, candlesnuffer), he is cultivated as naturally enjoying [them] (er wird gebildet als naturlich geniessendes).

(c) By the same token, however, he becomes – through the abstractness of labor – more mechanical, duller, spiritless. The spiritual element, this fulfilled self-conscious life, becomes an empty doing (leeres Thun). The power of the Self consists in a rich [all-embracing] comprehension; this power is lost. He can leave some work to the machine, but his own activity thereby becomes more formalized. His dull work constricts him to a single point, and his work becomes more consummate the more one-sided it becomes.

Yet this multiplicity creates fashion, mutability, freedom in the use of forms. These things – the cut of clothing, style of furniture – are not permanent. Their change is essential and rational, far more rational than staying with one fashion and wanting to assert something as fixed in such individual forms. The beautiful is subject to no fashion; but here there is no free beauty, only a charming beauty (eine reitzende Schonheit) which is the adornment of another person and relates itself to [yet] another, a beauty aimed at arousing drive, desire, and which thus has a contingency to it.

Similarly incessant is the search for ways of simplifying labor, inventing other machines, etc. In the individual’s skill is the possibility of sustaining his existence. This is subject to all the tangled and complex contingency in the [social] whole. Thus a vast number of people are condemned to a labor that is totally stupefying, unhealthy and unsafe – in workshops, factories, mines, etc. – shrinking their skills. And entire branches of industry, which supported a large class of people, go dry all at once because of [changes in] fashion or a fall in prices due to inventions in other countries, etc – and this huge population is thrown into helpless poverty.

The contrast [between] great wealth and great poverty appears: the poverty for which it becomes impossible to do anything; [the] wealth [which], like any mass, makes itself into a force. The amassing of wealth [occurs] partly by chance, partly through universality, through distribution. [It is] a point of attraction, of a sort which casts its glance far over the universal, drawing [everything] around it to itself – just as a greater mass attracts the smaller ones to itself. To him who hath, to him is given.  Acquisition becomes a many-sided system, profiting by means or ways that a smaller business cannot employ. In other words, the highest abstraction of labor pervades that many more individual modes and thereby takes on an ever-widening scope. This inequality between wealth and poverty, this need and necessity, lead to the utmost dismemberment of the will, to inner indignation and hatred. This necessity, which is the complete contingency of individual existence, is at the same time its sustaining substance. State power enters and must see to it that each sphere is supported. It goes into [various] means and remedies, seeking new markets abroad, etc., [but] thereby making things all the more difficult for one sphere, to the extent that state power encroaches to the disadvantage of others.

Freedom of commerce: interference must be as inconspicuous as possible, since commerce is the field of arbitrariness. The appearance of force must be avoided; and one must not attempt to salvage what cannot be saved, but rather employ the suffering classes in other ways. [The state power] is the universal overseer; the individual is merely entrenched in individuality. Commerce is certainly left to its own devices – but with the sacrifice of this generation and the proliferation of poverty, poor-taxes and institutions.

Yet the [social] substance is not only this regulatory law, as the power that sustains individuals. Rather, it is itself productive [of a] general benefit, the benefit of the whole (Gut des Ganzen).

Taxes [are of two types:] direct taxes on fixed property, and indirect taxes. Only the former type is in accordance with the physiocratic system. Raw materials alone are the abstract base, but [this is] itself a distinct particular that appears too limited; it is abandoned. This branch is missing in the totality, and then incomes are lessened. The tax system must establish itself everywhere, make its appearance inconspicuously, taking a little from everyone, but everywhere. If it is disproportionate on one branch, it is abandoned. Less wine is consumed if heavy taxes are imposed on it. For everything there is a substitute that can be found, or one does without. But even so, this necessity turns against itself. The costs of detection become more considerable, the discontent ever greater, since the enjoyment of everything is spoiled and is entangled with complicated details. State wealth must be based as little as possible on the landed estates (Domänen), but rather on taxes. The former are private property and contingent, exposed to waste, since no one seems to lose thereby but either gains or hopes to gain. Taxes are felt by all, and everyone wants to see them used well.

Wittgenstein, Zettel:

711. There is a way of looking at electrical machines and installations (dynamos, radio stations, etc., etc.) which sees these objects as arrangements of copper, iron, rubber etc. in space, without any preliminary understanding. And this way of looking at them might lead to some interesting results. It is quite analogous to looking at a mathematical proposition as an ornament. --It is of course an absolutely strict and correct conception; and the characteristic and difficult thing about it is that it looks at the object without any preconceived idea (as it were from a Martian point of view), or perhaps more correctly: it upsets the normal preconceived idea (runs athwart it).

Carl Einstein, "Absolute," Encyclopedia Acephalica, 1929:

It is undeniable that man invented God so that his wretchedness might be forbidden by somebody greater than himself: God is the dialectical opposite of human imperfections. Ideal entities serve as compensations for wretchedness; that is why the qualities ascribed to the gods delineate by contradiction the failings and servilities of their creators.

The absolute is the sum of the compensations for human wretchedness. To create so perfect a notion, man has been obliged to renounce his peculiarity and miserable content. The absolute is powerful because perfectly empty: it is thanks to this characteristic that it represents the perfection of truth. Nothing can be demonstrated by the absolute: the absolute is precisely that supreme truth which remains indemonstrable. Only the details, the interludes can be demonstrated. Yet it is precisely this impossibility of proving the absolute which makes it irrefutable. It is impossible to shatter a lie which, having no object, cannot be related to anything: the lie, in effect, can be proven only if an object, which is readily and at first glance observed, does not seem consistent; which amounts to saying, in instances without importance. The lie limited by an object can be proven, but never the artifice of a construction, because that excludes the object. It is in this way that works of art are indemonstrable, on account of their being separate, like the absolute, from the object.

The absolute is the greatest expenditure of energy made by man; he then seeks to recoup the energy expended by means of prayer: from which it is evident that man is unable to endure his own energies, being obliged to separate himself from them in order to find equilibrium. It should be added that man, above all, is afraid of himself and of his own creations, imaginary entities he has separated from himself. It is thus that he has done everything to forget his dreams, because he fears his wandering soul. I believe that man has less to fear, faced with the Universe, than faced with himself, because he does not know the world, but only a little corner of it.

The absolute has been man's greatest exploit: it is thanks to that exploit that he outgrown the mythological state. But it was at the same time his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself. Man has created his own servitude. That absolute is identical with the void and with that which has no object. It is thus that man dies by the absolute which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man dies, killed by his fetishes, whose existence is more or less situated in the absolute.

It would appear that philosophy is the degeneration of the mythological state: in fact, in the epoch of philosophy, the absolute is so enfeebled that it needs to be demonstrated. Things – whose frailty is such that, after having accepted them without due consideration, one must still demonstrate them – are called facts of science or of knowledge.

The absolute gods were, to begin with, the ancestors of governing classes, who deified themselves to enhance servitude and fear. Like money, the neutral absolute is a means of power; each may be changed into anything whatever, since they do not possess precise qualities. The absolute belongs to leaders, priests, madmen, to animals and to plants. On the one hand to the mighty and to kings, on the other to those without any power, entirely separate from objects and that very fact from their poverty.

The power of the absolute shows itself in its identity with the unconditional. The absolute has been identified with the essence and with being itself, and it is by means of the absolute that one is immortalised. What a fear of death! People must begin by seeing words through death, and it is thus that they become immortal spirits like the latter. Words, created by man, become his nightmares, and notions are the padded cells of the logicians; it is by means of notions that duration is conned.

The absolute belongs to the tectonic-ecstatics; the contemporary "contortionist" believes only in his own banal and obsequious "I": in this way he has discovered the most obnoxious form of the absolute and a freedom which, after one has forgotten death, has ceased to be limited by "taboos" and is no longer anything other than abject and ugly.

Ezra Pound on machines:

Machines are not really literary or poetic, an attempt to poetise machines is rubbish. There has been a great deal of literary fuss over this. The Kiplonians get as sentimental over machines as a Dickensian does over a starved and homeless orphan on a bleak cold winterrrr’s night.
Machines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and energy; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d’être, as if their essence [sic].
Let me put it another way, they don’t confront man like the faits accomplish of nature; these latter he has to attack ab exteriore, by his observation, he can’t construct ‘em; he has to examine them. Machines are already an expression of his own desire for power and precision; one man can learn from them what some other man has put into them, just as he can learn from other artistic manifestations. A painting of a machine is like a painting of a painting.
The lessons of machines is precision, valuable to the plastic artist, and to literati. …
I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new emotion. But to return to the vorticist demands:
‘Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form, it belongs to the art of that form.’
I am inclined to think that machines acting in time-space, and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time-space; at any rate Antheil has used them, effectively. That is a fait accompli and the academicians can worry over it if they like.”

Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 1924/27

Outline 11/8/10

1. Introduction

2. Léger’s machine paintings: 1918-24 – space, objecthood and the commodity after Cubism

3. Valences of the sphere – problem of the absolute object [this chapter looks at the long history of the sphere in art and theory; also considers case studies of interwar avant-gardism, ubiquity of the sphere and circle, pictorial aporia]; planetary space of technology
[Consider Badiou’s Le Siecle; Heidegger and/or Hegel]

4. Léger and Le Corbusier/Ozenfant, 1924-30: Equivalence

5. Le Corbusier’s minimalism: circuitry, infrastructure, “poem of walls”; factory space/factory as object; [“why blast furnaces matter now more than ever”] – pursue analogy with ‘60s minimalism.