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Meaning in Production text in https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=198558, Open that in new window by clicking here.

It was typical that I not notice that the task I chose did want meaning to be covered – although this was covered in the wording of Option 1 rather than the categories given for write-up.: ‘try to do some analysis of the resulting image(s)’.

 So here is a first of a series (if I ever take it further) of iterative thinking about my collage.

 a)     In both the online screens and the photographed offline location there are phenomena which call themselves ‘rooms’ that can be ‘entered’. The latter is a physical room in which a lone worker sits. The former (on the screen-prints) is of 2 online ‘rooms’ – the first is the ‘Main Meeting Sharing Layout’ (as designated by Adobe Connect [AC]) and the second (under design by the worker) is a ‘Break-Out Rooms layout’. This same layout (Fig 2b) will be demonstrated in the Meeting Main room (following the scenario represented in Fig 2a), and then will be used by three or more sub-groups in their individual ‘Break-Out Rooms’. Both online and offline rooms can be said to be entered by the participant (SB). In what sense are the action of ‘entry’ or the space indicated as ‘room’ related to each other in offline and online space?

b)     The physical room is distinguished by ‘space’ apprehended through various perspectives on its interior distances. These involve perspective, dimensionality and orientation. The camera representing the participant looks up, down (although these latter tend not to be represented in the collage). Each perspective as the cameras ‘sees’ it are influenced by the direction of light that illuminates the ‘room’ and makes its contents visible or obscures them in shadow. Those conditions of light are effected by spatial and temporal distance of the light source (a window to a garden, garage and field beyond and a desk light). The variation in perspectives fragments the whole so that our whole impression of the room is ‘mocked up’ as a whole whilst making clear the partiality of the grasp of each part of the scene to the pauses in the movements of the camera ‘eye’.

c)     The offline rooms are located in what we might call cyberspace – but the role of metaphor here is important. The Internet does not require the idea of architecture or rooms but hierarchical organisations of education (universities do). I notice with some surprise that the idea of room architecture is employed as a self-labelling metaphor in both rooms and to connect them to each other. The break-out room event is represented symbolically in 2(a) by pictures of two rooms – taken from Google and with no knowledge of what they represent. In part they were chosen so that the institutional language of main meeting and break-out rooms can be visualised and absorbed. However, it was also purposeful to show two different rooms – to emphasise that how digital meeting-space is conceptualised is both arbitrary, can be different for different people in the same space, and the conceptual sequelae of that. Those sequelae are that online spaces can be used in ways that offline spaces cannot – to destabilise space by linking to other places / resources / pages. However:

ENOUGH FOR NOW

Steve

It should be apparent from Nesbit’s title that her essay is, in some sense, a retort to Foucault’s influential ‘What is an author?’ As you read try to keep this dimension in mind. Ask yourself, and include in your notes:

·        How does her account differ from Foucault’s perspective on authorship? To put this another way, what is her dispute with him?

·        How does copyright define biography/authorship? How does it change?

·        Why does Nesbit employ the past tense?

1.     Style is important in comparing this essay to Foucault: ‘The French definition of the author has gone vague …’. We begin with a very relaxed response to what ‘some say’ about an author, including the characterisation of Barthes infamous notion of the ‘death of the author’ – ‘some say corpse’. This rather deliberate undercutting of your antagonist (a kind of reduction ad absurdum’) is as near to the allusiveness of Barthes and Foucault as is gossip to formal debate. It mimes the ‘crudeness’ (229) of which it speaks. This then is stylistic control of a high order, which tries to show that author-functions (the plural is indicative of what is to follow) are implicit in the work but may be multiple, rather than singular. It shifts the question from, in the last analysis, what are authors in relation to a work – even, we might say, somewhat reflexively, the work you are now reading. The use of an authorial ‘we’ in this essay is probably as worthy as study as anything else in it.

The substance of the dispute with Foucault appears on pp. 240ff.and again starts with an allusive wit. In mounting a case that Foucault does not cite law specifically as a means of explaining the socio-cultural function of an author: “to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” (cited 240). Nesbit riffs, in the stylistic register of the detective –fiction genre. Foucault does not ‘call in the law’ to investigate the death of the author but prefers like any old private dick to do the job himself.

We are left with a deeper critique than we might suppose. Foucault assumes authority in order to question it, and, Nesbit suggests, thus fails to see how, in the end, even his own function is socially inscribed in determining economic practices – market regulation in the name of the law. Author functions are called forth by the relations of supply and demand in the economy: ‘Authors function, whether the state of knowledge recognizes their existence or not.’

This is so beautiful – in turning ‘author function’ into ‘Authors function’ we see that function in relation to the economy of desire (another term for supply & demand). Nesbitt says Foucault fails to note that discourses are not superior to the ‘market economy’ and are indeed their locus of being: indeed ‘this economic condition … defined the author in the first place (240). Author functions are determined (or in Althusser’s use of the Freudian term  ‘overdetermined’) ultimately by the economy in Nesbit, who goes to insist that law is, at some level, the primary political articulation of this changing economic condition. The ‘state of knowledge’ ruled by Foucauldian authority forgets that its ‘state’ is merely transitory and ultimately determined (‘in the last instance’) in determining socio-economic practices such as the market. It is a state therefore in deep political peril.

Nesbit therefore argues, I think, that history, through mutating legal discourse, does not provide an authoritative definition of the author and their work but a determining ‘working definition of art’, which has been ‘as a quantity not a quality, the zero-degree of the law’ (241). Her conviction is that Foucault is blind to this because he is blind to any perception of over-determination, such as is argued by Marxism as a totalising analytic philosophy. As the economic bases of an economy slowly change, so do, by necessity, the laws which maintain stability are slowly changing, either in the direction of the consolidation of notions of individual ownership of intellectual property or capital (235) to one where capital is aggregated from interest groups working in uneasy collaboration (in the present day [257]). In this present context copyright law is barely able to form a coherent statement, not least about what an author is. What I think is suggested here is that the author is seen as a conflicted concept at present and that, it is in this conflict that there is hope of beneficial historical change, in which cultures differentiate in the very act of coming together (257). This provides a source of postmodern change not available to the more structuralist theories of Althusser.

My concern here is that Nesbit rather reifies the law and its ability to speak in a unitary voice. The law speaks only at the moment of its interpretation (in court) and otherwise lives in an interpretive vacuum, using only tools enabling its texts to be read and these in themselves being largely past interpretive moments (the role of legal precedents). Law in practice is often defined by discourses other than itself – including professional discourses. If we fail to see that, we fail to see how a liberatory law for those with queried mental capacity in 2005 has become a law that articulates mainly how ‘deprivation of liberty’; can be justified – following revisions in 2010.

2.     Copyright defines biography’s relationship to authorship by ‘flattening’ any differentiations one might want to make between authors’ biographies which other discourses, such as those of connoisseurship: high art, lower art and non-art; genius or non-genius; or good art & bad art. It reduces authorial function to a set of rights ‘to a cultural space over which he or she may range and work’ (230).Thus photography is defined not by its concomitant devices (such as the camera) but by the photographer’s ‘work’ understood as his or her ‘property’. (237). This could be extended since Nesbit here falsely names the camera device as the main progenitor of photography as an art, whereas it was in fact the means of imprinting durable images produced within the camera. There remains a lively debate about the role of the camera in visual art since Brunelleschi, Caravaggio and Vermeer. This debate however would perhaps not shake Nesbit’s main point. The artist’s ‘eye’, ‘hand’ and their especial interaction remained a means of enforcing hierarchical distinctions, since it was conceptualised as a valorised and distinct type of interaction through virtue of nature, nurture or both.

3.     Nesbit employs the past tense for a number of reasons I think.

That’s me, done though.

Steve

· What kind of topics are you interested in researching?

 As far practical research in the world of work, that is no longer an aspiration for me. However, my residual interests in the nature of research into health and social care remains, even though I never during my career found a context of research in this area that focused on a multi-perspectival approach to the psycho-social world that I once felt to be such an urgent need. The work I do part time (AL at the OU) that introduces methods remains either thin (at undergraduate level) or focused on quantitative approaches that actively excludes qualitative work at any depth (in conceptualising data collection and analysis). I teach a course on Mental Health (aimed at part at nursing and social work trainees) that virtually invalidates the kind of qualitative analysis, which I find most useful as a mental health practitioner, survivor or learner.

My present involvement in study then is mainly on an MA on Art History, which does at least raise issues fundamental to my interests – such as the role of multimodality in teaching, learning and research. In the end then I plump for that as my main interest. As you will see below, I kind of resist the ‘research question’ approach because I think my current interests are fulfilled by the speculative, intuitive and reflective examination of the limits of research for my needs were I ever to try and realise them.

· What initial research questions might be starting to emerge for you?

How can multimodal input into teaching and learning be used to engage, motivate and raise expectations of ‘self’ and the ability of practitioners to practice with a more critical sense of what evidence is important in work with people who identify as having mental health problems?

I understand that this is too large, but I am not at the point of knowing how to ask the researchable questions, which might evaluate current or past implementations of multimodality in teaching or learning, as well as attempting trials of newer interventions.

In a sense I do trial and error (with safeguards) in my present work as a teacher in this vaguely conceptualised direction (and I still hope to be motivated by some external prod to a clear conception of what I want to give as a teacher). How else can one teach effectively & develop as a teacher though without some kind of continual reflexive self-examination.

· What are you interested in researching - people, groups, communities, documents, images, organisations?

Again all of these objects (and subjects captured through ‘ethno-methodological method and analysis) of research are important to me. The research should eventually focus on how these foci of interest interact with each other in day-to-day teaching situations in HE.

 An example of small scale thinking I did on using multiple perspectives in qualitative research analysis in the language of assessment (abandoned as unworkable) is this old blog. (click to open in new window). When I look at it now it seems confused but it does at least say that what I want is some approach that integrates multiple inputs.

In the end, my interest remains speculative and reflective and this may be because I have personally ‘sort of’ resigned out of the practical issues. But the interest remains because I find ‘research’ so often used to justify a certain approach to subject matter that I can’t quite feel comfortable with. I think this is painfully evident in this blog ‘blog-blasted from the past) - (click to open in new window).

 · Do you have an initial ideas for the kinds of methods that might help you to gather useful knowledge in your area of interest?

Ethnomethodology that looks from within learner and teacher communities at perceptions of the barriers and commonalities that arise in performing the identities that inscribed learner & teacher roles prescribe. How deterministic are these roles? Can they be explored in terms of performative ambivalences that threaten ‘stable’ power relations? Is that a worthwhile aim?

· What initial questions do you have about those methods? What don't you understand yet?

To the last part, there is quite a lot I don’t understand. In many ways, I will learn whether my interest is in pursuing ‘research methods’ or whether it is purely speculatively epistemological and based on the lived experience of epistemological conflict in the contemporary institution of HE.

·  Do you perceive any potential challenges in your initial ideas: either practical challenges, such as gaining access to the area you want to research, or the time it might take to gather data; or conceptual challenges; such as how the method you are interested in can produce 'facts', 'truths', or 'valuable knowledge' in your chosen area?

Many. This seems the base problem for me and stymies me, at the moment, from conceptualising a research role for myself and which indeed was a barrier to me taking on an Ed.D at this time as the first step in this process.

Knowing where to start can be difficult, as Castiglione’s character, the Count, admits. It is a matter of judgement. Then, isn’t everything, says the Count in the same breath. This passage, which somehow reminds me of Wittgenstein, is actually about what constitutes judgement of what is good and best in a thing, action or person. It rests on an as yet unresolved dialectic – in a sublunary world we might intuit ‘perfection’ but never know properly that it is ‘perfection’, mired between different and varying (diachronically and synchronically) ‘opinions of how such perfection be adjudged. Judgement is a slippery thing. This is Castiglione at his most playful best posing problems of judgement and authority. The Count is talking about perfection in a ‘courtier’.  We are posed by opinions about what is judged to be perfection in an artist.

This task looks at 2 opinions of what constitutes an artist’s achievement.

(1)    Raphael doesn’t in a sense, in a private family letter not purposed for sharing beyond that family raise the issue of perfection in the artist per se. He is concerned to show his family that he has achieved a certain status and that status (and its surrounding circumstances) have changed since they last heard of him. The change that constitutes achievement is expressed in the following series, with more than a hint in the ordering what Raphael thinks will most be adjudged success by his current audience: first, monetary wealth, then a role with status (and that adjudged by income) and then a hint of the stability of both status and income. Raphael ‘making it’ as an artist, or at least so he thinks his family will judge, is Raphael with money and promise of more to come. Of course Raphael also associates these things with ‘honour’ that is personal but also shared with the family to which he writes and the city where they live and he originated. But that ‘honour’ is quantified in money and whose value is evidenced in those quantities. Of course, this witty letter is an act of reassurance to his family and a bolster to their faith in them and their belief that he continues to think of them, despite not writing. The final joke is telling. Yes, this could be Raphael but is Raphael in the subject position of the young man who, having left home, must prove he is making good. He does not mention the aesthetic value of his art but is this because he is not thinking of it OR that he knows (in as far as he can judge) that that will not be uppermost in the minds of his audience. We need to remember that all communication will, as I think Castiglione, suggests above will take on the values of the current interaction in assessing what matters.

(2)    The Subject position of the Raphael invented by Castiglione (I'll call if Faux-Raphael) is precisely a man self-conscious that judgements differ in our world and that a better judgement is hard to assess or find. Hence, Faux-Raphael says of the ‘designs’ he sends to Castiglione that they have been judged as good in themselves, but notes that judgement may in itself be compromised in quality and sincerity. This mock letter then is a much more obvious illustration of the dilemma expressed dialectically in The Courtier.

In that search for knowledge of what constitutes ‘perfection’ in art faux-Raphael seeks models in the reconstruction of buried antiquity, critical authority of a master (Vitruvius) but neither offer ‘all that I need’. What this suggests is that perfection is an aspiration rather than an achieved phenomenon and that searching it is dangerous and potentially fatal (the point of the use of the Icarus myth here – to fly too near to the sun of perfection may end by drowning in a sea of undifferentiated mutability.

This piece is full of humour about dangerous death: does, for instance, the original Italian allow you to read the joke in English that shows that the ‘collapse’ of a career can be like being buried under the weight of a falling St. Peter’s. The metaphors of falling and rising he are contiguous – collapsing like a building, raising like Icarus to show that the issue of social reputation too is a dangerous area – seeking perfection may fall foul of the fact that there are too many opinions of what perfection might be – and some of them, not that well informed (even if it be one of successive Popes, as both Raphael and Michelangelo were to find).

The meat of this passage is very playful but central to Castiglione’s philosophy (perhaps I think of him as a precursor to Wittgenstein). A perfect woman cannot be fairly judged – note how Castiglione plays (heterosexual men will be heterosexual men) on Raphael’s well known uxorious life – without being found in a wide trial amongst a very large sample of women. Just as he submits his ‘designs’ to what he supposes is the better judgement (than his own, The Poe or the Roman intelligentsia) of Castiglione at the opening of the letter, at the end, he invites Castiglione in a similar bed-hopping hunt for the ‘best’ in ‘beautiful women’. This is more than a mere joke, it dramatizes the problem in the Courtier – we believe that ‘perfection’ exists but tastes so vary that we cannot attest to perfection without trial of it. At this point, it may no longer be see-able as ‘perfection’. This is the same dilemma we find in Milton’s Comus. Perfection survives not in realised body but in an imagined one that is desired but never caught (witness Galatea in flight in her scallop shell – the scallop is the very icon of eternal perfection). It is really ‘a certain Idea that comes to my mind’. Such intuitions might though actually BE the road to Perfection. Castiglione fades into Plato or, at least, the ancient Neo-Platonic school Castiglione favoured.

Castiglione, B. (1976) (Trans Bull, G.) The Courtier London, Penguin Books.

Consider the self-portrait of Raphael (Figure 3.6). What does it reveal about the artist’s identity? What is the relationship between Raphael and the other sitter, and what does it seem to tell us about Raphael’s persona? Note that the second sitter’s identity is not known, despite much speculation by art historians.

‘acheiropoieton’, an image made ‘without human hands’. : The look and hands of Raphael

This may turn into a small essay. Why? Because I desperately want to resist the idea that Raphael paints himself as Christ. In as far as he is like Christ, I believe the simile is merely and self-consciously rhetorical and communicates complexly. This is very much a ‘thing’ of mine, perhaps an obsession and, in this sense, this can never aim to be an essay in miniature. However, I do not see any identification with Christ as necessitated in this or other self-portraits of Raphael. If it is there at all, it is only in terms of an analogical allegory of Christ’s mission (the way, the truth and the life) in that of the artist. Concentration on the facial appearance seems to me less important (although possibly there I admit) since there is no pressure – in our portrait - on the characterisation of Christ as ‘type’; even if a humanist type such as is explored rather thinly by Thomas (1979) and more deeply in Kemp’s (2012:35ff.) treatment of Leonardo’s portrait of the saviour.

Nevertheless the lively debate in Christian thinking on the nature of images of the divine is important. It matters that the ‘Veronica’ (as Dante calls it) is the imprint of the real body of Christ precisely because it both (a) differentiates the image of Christ from a ‘graven image’ & (b) takes away the impurity implied by the fact that the divine might need human ‘hands’ to represent itself as an idea. However, the relationship between Raphael and his ‘friend’ here is clearly mediated in terms of what we see in the hands of the two participants. Raphael’s hand sits at rest on his friend’s shoulder in total relaxation from labour (manual labour characteristically) whilst the friend’s hand works to express intention and purposive meaning. If feels to me to point in the index out of the picture plane – a point that is essential to readings of this picture I’ve encountered. And the friend’s hand co-operates with his head and face, one attempting to direct, in its backward glance, the gaze of Raphael towards that place where he wants it to be.

That both hand and face can be read together as index of interaction and intentionality (or its lack) is common in Raphael I think. The very opposite being the sketch of ‘A battle of nudes (The Siege of Perugia)’ where hands and gaze express committed action and mental intention in total concord, creating a directed flow in the viewer’s gaze on them towards the right edge of that drawing (NGS 1994, Item 19  - not pictured).

There is as a result of the focus towards dramatic action in the latter a great stress on human body and art that is of the body. In contrast, all of Raphael’s known (or suspected) portraits (Thoenes 2016, 7ff) show Raphael as merely a head without active hands. The gaze of that head is never on the action of the picture but towards the viewer, implying a relationship of minds engaged in looking (and thus valorising looking as an act) rather than an active physical or even mortal relationship. This was perhaps noticed by Raimondi as noticed both by Thoenes above and Whistler (2017) in her essay on the importance of ‘hands’ in Raphael. For me it is the relationship between head and hand that is important here. That is because desegno in Vasari and others was both a matter of what happens in an artist’s head when s(he) plans and their hands when they draw. Yet there is something less than perfect, less than ideationally divine. About the reliance on manual labour. It is for this reason that Raphael appoints himself as of the gaze and the head (looking out to an unperceived and therefore potentially eternal viewer) rather than to any other mere actor on or behind the picture plane. We see this in our picture but also in the School of Athens.

In the detail above Sodoma is veiled and darkened by his attention to other artists, whilst the light on Raphael’s face emphasises a gaze that goes beyond Sodoma or Pinturicchio to us – his repeating viewers and requests a meeting of minds. And not because he is isolated (spiritually at least) here. Look at the figure left who Goffen (2002:222) insists is both Michelangelesque and perhaps Michelangelo himself, whose gaze is obscured and shadowed, with his hand in restless action.

The same is true of the ‘The Expulsion of Heliodorus’, (Theones 2016:10 - not pictured) where Raphael bears a weight but concentrates attention on the gaze as if the work of the hand were as nothing, and the disputed Uffizi self-portrait (not pictured).

Now this has something to do with divinity but it also has relation to the relative importance of manual dexterity and work compared to the role of the head – in design / desegno.

Raphael is building a characterisation of the artist I’m arguing that might use ‘godhead’ as one of its analogies but not merely in terms of appearance. The Godhead is more impressive when it plans than it executes (as for living our assistants can do this for us). Although Raphael is not a mere aristocrat as that analogy with the Duchess of Windsor suggests. He values the products of his hand and the action of hands (perhaps in interaction they are genuinely potentially one – hence the beauty of the painting).

Look for instance at the telling drawing of unconnected (if that ever can be true) of apostolic head and hands in Catalogue item 120 (Whistler & Thomas 2017: 246f.) In our beautiful painting of two men, the gaze which looks out and beyond mere relationship in real time is valued in relationship to that which acts out of the picture. Here there may be a Christ analogy. No-one can ever know what it is that is pointed towards. It could be the artist’s mirror or a third person who WAS there. Belting (2013; 133ff) argues that the two point to the picture from whose completion Raphael and sitter are resting and showing by the compared attitudes and appearances the difference between how art might and must capture social masks but also the living face in the moment of the ‘speech act’. But much must be assumed in this reading. But then that is the case in any reading. That is why I think Raphael inevitably engages us as viewers, asking for his picture’s completion in that relationship of ideas. Now a Christ analogy might be useful here. Raphael’s mission to his friend may be like that of Christ – to ask his disciple or mentee to see the ‘way, the truth and the life’ he must lead – with all the pain therein. However, I see that as one of many possibilities. The painting’s meaning for me is overdetermined by Raphael’s mentation within of the meaning of art for the true artist, where immortality and divinity appear in a more mortal light – all in war with time (a true Renaissance theme and in Edmund Spenser as much as Raphael).

References

Belting, H. (2013) Face and Mask Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press.

Goffen, R. (2002) Renaissance Rivals New Haven and London, Yale University Press

Kemp, M. (2012) Christ to Coke Oxford, Oxford University Press

NGS (National Galleries of Scotland) (1994) Raphael: In Search of Perfection Edinburgh, NGS.

Thoenes, C. (2016) Raphael Cologne, Taschen.

Thomas, D. (1979) The Face of Christ London, Hamlyn

Whistler, C. (2017) ‘Raphael’s Hands’ in Whistler, C. & Thomas, B. (eds.) Raphael: The Drawings Oxford, Ashmolean Museum Oxford University.

Whistler, C. & Thomas, B. (eds.) (2017) Raphael: The Drawings Oxford, Ashmolean Museum Oxford University.

I love to answer these and commit to an answer before I reveal the course discussion, so here goes again:

. While reading, you should ask yourself:

·        What does Butt claim about gender and sexuality in this essay?

·        How does he characterise the sexuality of Rivers?

·        How does he find this sensibility in Rivers’s artworks?

·        What does this suggest about gendered identity?

Note: What Did I Do? is the title of Rivers’s autobiography from 1992

1.      I find this essay somewhat confusing and I would not wish to say that Butt commits to straightforward and univocal characterisations of either gender or sexuality. He appears to wish to characterise a socio-culturally determined set of subject positions and a discourse associated with those positions that in 1940s and 50s USA characterised a marginalised community and how those positions became equated with a statement of an artist’s wish to confront and challenge the norms of society. In a sense they seem to offer merely a means of characterising art and artist as denying any solidity to the objects it reproduces and produces and as, therefore both object and subject, understood both in terms of the ‘object’ represented and the subjects who both respond to culture through remaking its imagery.

Yet it is not so simple, since, Rivers also uses those subject to both play and enact sexual practices that those subject positions enable in a minority and oppressed community: the sexualisation of the male body as object of desire and appropriation, the valorisation of the penis and the deconstruction of masculine heterosexual hegemony over the realm of desire.

Problematically, the discourse of gay subjectivity already employs subject positions which both critique but also maintain the validity of binary gender discriminations, which can be experienced as oppressive by lesbians, some gay males and some women. Thus the issue of ‘gay subjectivity’ is far from simple. The ‘self-othering game’ (p. 89) may enact otherness in complex interacting forms that may undermine them. However, in as much as it remains play or game, it refuses to challenge essentialist notions of subjectivity that may be the real root of contradiction in subjects seen by themselves and others. Butt seems want to point out that Rivers preserves essentialist positions ('real' heterosexuals act out as gay and vice versa). The same might be said of the use of feminine subject positions – not only in painting but the art of Tennessee Williams – which retain some of non-playful power dynamics which contradistinguish binary power distictions like male & female.

I may not have read carefully enough but I am unsure where Butt stands (or sits to carry on the camp play) on this issue.

2.      Butt characterises Rivers as playing gay but also benefitting from that play by the appropriation of sexual pleasure possible when the sexual subject which is the other is hardened into sex object. He could be clearer about this if that is what he means. Tennessee Williams, for instance, shows that the appropriation of the sexual object through performance is both dangerous and a matter of real power – in Both Streetcar Named Desire and, my favourite, Suddenly Last Summer. He also suggests that Rivers uses sexuality and sexual pose as a means of characterising the challenge to conventional meaning posed by art and the artist. Images no longer mean what the prevailing power structures in society want them to mean and are therefore ‘queered’ by the legitimation of counter-cultural meanings.

3.      I am not sure that we are really looking for a reflection or mimetic representation of River’s own sexuality in these paintings but rather a performance of traditional subjects – both in the act of the painting and the representation of these subjects’ action. I’m quite happy to take on the reading Butt gives to the painting of the figure of Washington in the boat (see above). The emphasis on the stark outline of the naked leg and the phallus is taken as an enactment of painterly emphasis but also as an action in Washington that offers his sexualised body for some sort of appropriation.

However, I can’t stop where Butt does at camp fun. There is an abstraction in the use of white here (and potentially in the brushwork mentioned but I can’t see that) that does other than point out the joke of Washington’s ‘burgeoning basket’. Looked at in the context of the whole picture, that white patch is recalled in figure of Washington before embarkation (below) for instance as well as other abstractly white motifs. There is something of glory in Washington’s horse that defies outlined drawing. Now, this might be merely making an equivalence between stallion between the legs as phallus – the white makes his neck look like a phallic projection and it, as in the Washington in the boat, reflected by the horse’s strong white and painterly legs.

But return to the whole painting and we see a display of such stark whites throughout, not least in the characterisation of the water. These whites may or may not have meaning but they cannot be confined to a camp joke. I may therefore be wanting to see ‘more’ in the picture than a camp joke. I agree that in the 1950s camp and gay life seemed to heterosexual men to embody excess (p. 84) but the ‘excess’ in the white of this picture cannot be reduced to such stereotypical characterisations. It may have multiple meanings, not least in re-characterising light and notions of illumination and reflection. In a sense, it stops Washington being the iconic focus of the picture, replacing that figure by homage to spaces and spatial relations in time and space. At least I think it does.

4.      What Rivers does to David’s Napoleon (already quite a camp figure) is to reflect him, almost recessively in male shapes, which are beginning to lose their iconic ‘masculinity’ and are thus ‘queered’. I love how Napoleon’s constraining sleeve is mirrored in the subject/object to his left (our right). Here male bodies are subjected to cubist fragmentation. The sleeve can look like the camp red hat of a miniature figure with red epaulettes.  The men turned round, eventually running into each other. The link of military values to latent male homosexual bonding had already been made by Freud (in relation to both French and German militarism.  And Rivers appears here not only to allow male figures to reproduce each other but, in a cubist fashion, undress them, with suggestive emphasis on groin areas. I wonder if that too comments on neo-classical traditions in art, wherein, David, for instance, would first draw his figures unclothed in order to allow what parallel he then attaches to hang appropriately. Was David too willing to employ the ‘myth’ of Napoleon as well-hung man? Here again a joke has the capacity to undermine traditional values – of man as fighter, leader and so on. Hence I think, Rivers may be employing gay subjectivity as a subversive potential, but I can go no further and I’ll look at the discussion after mounting this reading.

All the best

Steve

A843 1.3.5 Griselda Pollock on Van Gogh

 How does Pollock’s critique of art history take its cue from what she identifies as a Marxist literature? Take particular note of her use of the word ‘ideology’ and consider its meanings.

·        Pollock deconstructs the means by which art history produces a discourse of art history focussed upon the individual artist or ‘subjective genius’. The latter becomes in that discourse the unitary guarantor of the meanings of an oeuvre and limits those meanings to the ideological reflection of the specialised ‘subjective genius’ – the artist. In the term ‘subjective genius’ we understand that what the artist realises is something specific and special to their own subjectivity, rendering their art into ‘visionary scenes’ (that appears without awareness of the work that goes into building a scene).

At the same time the ‘subject’ is rarefied from its social constituents, which may be multiple and contradictory rather than unified and coherent, and rendered magically apparent rather than ‘made up’ from work on discourses, which may also be visual discourses or image repertoires. The stress on self-transcendence in vision is what links ‘subjective genius’ to the notion of asocial madness and the ‘romance life’ produced by allowing VG to appear as a subject in his own subjective visions in the film Lust for Life– such that self and vision are removed from the ‘everyday’ and the processes constructing the everyday (social configurations of both time & space in the constitution of ‘work’ for instance).

For Pollock the reflection of social philosophy in Carlyle is needed to understand in part the origin of VG’s motifs, as is also an awareness of how his work with images mediates relationships of class, gender and so on between him and his art. The source of all the disguises which mask work on and in multiple discourses (both validation and otherwise of the given social order in which VG is ‘thrown’) is ideology.

·        Ideology in Pollock’s use is a means of rendering a social practice in ways that ignore its origins in social relations, including power relations) and the ongoing history of changes in modes of production (in ‘art’ as in other commodities). Hence we can create an ‘ideological ‘pure’ space’ for art (57). Art history is then a social practice that not only disguises its object – art as made in history – but its own practices as ideology by precisely seeing itself as non-ideological. Commodities like the monograph and catalogue raisonné embody the ideas of art and artistic genius as shown above but are, like art itself, materially produced out of a set of (hidden) power relations. The practices productive of such commodities, which declare themselves as non-ideological (note Marx on Robinsonades in Grundrisse) are ‘temporal and causal narratives’ and ‘biography’, in which the latter is the primary agent in the former.

The agency of institutions and dynamic social processes is missing from ‘art history’ which makes it, in effect, not ‘history’ but a narrative of transcendent realisation of a special individual’s whole body of art  work. This is illustrated in the role of the publisher in Pollock’s own work on VG (67).

Are all works by an artist relevant? What exactly is an artist’s ‘work’? Write down a few notes in answer to these questions.

Exercise

Once we begin to ask ‘what is relevant for the study of the artist?’, what further questions come to mind? Write a few down that occur to you.

(a)    The question ought to be are “‘all works relevant’ to …” and then nominate an issue in art interpretation, evaluation and / or other area of thought and study. Otherwise there is too much to think about I think. However the second question is more pertinent. We could say that an artist’s work is all of the work that s/he completes but that raises issues about how being ‘finished’ is interpreted and by whom. Can the artist alone decide the answer?  And what of draft work or ‘preliminary studies’ where the earlier question is even more acute in that the work is mainly an object whose meaning lies on the processes that lead to a complete work – which we may consider another work. Yet Leonardo’s greatest work is often represented by ‘cartoons’ (once the name of preliminary studies. transitional to the making of the final work). Moreover, some works – say Louise Bourgeois recovered notes and drawings done (sometimes) on scrap paper during nights in New York in which she was unable to sleep and pushed under her door to be picked by her person who worked with her (http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/archive/louise-bourgeois/). Was this therapeutic private work or more than this – a portal to other parts of her work? The video on this page claims it gives access to a Louise Bourgeois who is not otherwise ‘well known’.

(b)    Is art only those things that have the potential to be made into a relatively ‘enduring’ record? What then of unrecorded performance? What of the performance thought to make everyday life? Does art need even to be seen by others to be art? Do we distinguish between the ‘works’ of an artist and work done in conditions where they are not in control of the product?

Comparing Four 2017 novels based on Attic Tragedy

Part 4 of a 4-part self-directed project

Having said I’d do 4 parts I felt less like it once I’d completed Part 3. So here are just a few bullet points of comparative description and partial evaluation. This will be done by taking thematic points of contrast and comparison.

1.      Religion

This issue relates to the following 2. Each of these novels uses the polytheistic structures of Greek religion in some way and with varying effect. Perhaps most tellingly they, like Knapp (2017), explore the shifts between polytheism and atheism that sings in the original plays too, although often for atheism to be subverted. Knapp rightly asks though, why that was necessary – it suggests a voice for atheism in Classical Greece louder than we have thought. All of the novels variously show religious faith that is often a disguise for power politics – only sometimes only sexual politics. Thus Vann shows Medea has raising a vast and relatively less formed Oriental religion, even older than the polities of Thrace and Cappadocia – a feminine past. She often though also uses this, quite nakedly, uses this to talk about how to assume or disrupt political discourses. This is even clearer in Toibin’s Clytemnestra, although Electra appears to abandon even Clytemnestra’s rootedness in ancient religion to displace its role with power – and not only power (sex used as power). I didn’t (and it may be my fault) get as strong a sense of ambivalent complexity in these issues in Haynes. Clearly people use religion for the purposes of power but the linkage of desire to power is not so cogently or forcefully there (for me at least).

2.      Gender & Sexual Politics

5th Century Greece made a problem of gender and sexual politics in its own right and in every domain of debate: politics, religion and identity. It is possibly for this reason alone that the contemporary theatre and writers for the theatre have revisited it – often, in the case of Anne Carson (of whom no-one is a greater authority at every level of that discussion and its sequelae in other issues). Eros the Bittersweet is probably still the most under-rated book of literary-historic-cultural criticism. I still value some of the early pioneering and radical (where my contemporaries would write naïve) versions of that, such as Eva Keuls (1985) The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual politics in Ancient Athens. And if you want balance on these questions look no further than Edith Hall’s continuing and urgent output.

Academic interest aside however, these three novelists have picked on urgent questions about sexual politics in the original plays of Medea, the Labdacid (Theban) plays and The Oresteia(s) and in the production history of them. My feeling is that Haynes probably moves least radically in political terms from older themes – and I have characterised that as the equivalent of updating tragedy to the themes of pre-feminist writing by women of the 1950s. There is an overt concern with a woman’s voice – honesty about childbirth and about the supposed natural feelings that link women to family structure. Women are more rational than men – this is even true of Eurydice (the wife of Creon) who otherwise plays the role of the jealous sister-in-law to cover her perception of what really drives her husband. In Toibin, women uncover the power games that keep men in control in the state and family but it is a male voice (a queer one) that does the subversion of that order at each and every level. The women fall victim by death or, in the case of Electra, by becoming women playing in the role of men – a thing that seems true too of Haynes’ Antigone. Vann’s feminist Medea refuses to wish to be known or likeable – she seeks to overthrow such solid certainties as the only path to a redrawing of gendered relationships.

3.      Queering the Picture

There may be no need to develop this. The theme of both novels by males is honestly queered, although in ways that might distinguish a novelist who identifies as gay, like Toibin, and one who, though heterosexual in public pronouncements, is so without any easy belief that such labels mean much as all his fiction shows. I have to say that there may be some bias in my view of Haynes novel as good but not a contender for great (unlike the others) because she does not take up this theme from Attic Greece.

4.      Narration

Toibin’s narrative is thoughtful – it mimes the problems of authority (and ‘death of the author’) as part of its exploration of other themes. These issues underlie Vann’s submersion in the literary critical gender politics of the contemporary US University but are not (as in Toibin) worn on the novel’s disturbed narrative surface. With more than a little Derrida via Bakhtin in its make-up, Vann’s narrative often works by internal contradiction rather than change of narrator and is symbolised in metaphors of depth, surface, flow and eddy. Medea is a thing of the disturbed elements we are told.  

5.      Past(s) and Present(s)

What then do these novels make of the past they (under)mine? Each of them exploits the Greek awareness that the past is a kind of fiction that is forever malleable, at least by the fifth century BCE, to the needs of the present – a view that allowed Euripides to completely overturn the stories of older dramatists within a century and which has kept on turning since (even with violence to the text – as in Seneca, Racine, Corneille and Wole Soyinka).

More important is that Toibin and Haynes balance this past and present with possible futures that may or may not value women differently as well as relationships. They are still open to Utopia. I don’t think Vann is.

Part 3 of a 4-part self-directed project

Colm Toibin sought authoritative readers for his novel, including authoritative classicists such as Edith Hall and Natalie Haynes. Yet this is a novel that queries the role of all sources – whether gods, kings or parents – and invents a consciousness that Toibin elsewhere describes as ‘the essential privacy of the emerging self, of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness, of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is thus … between the protagonist and the reader.’ (Toibin 2012:3)

That is why both the novel as a form and its emergent dominant consciousness, an a-social Orestes, wrests the authority to ‘name’ things as they are from kings, queens, fathers, mothers and the hierarchies that seek to impose social orders. Rather than allow a focus, as if from the start, to be any first person narrator who may claim such ‘authority’ (and authorial role), he ensures that Orestes (as a point of view in a third person narration that overcomes theirs – morally at least) to be the novels ‘voice’ rather than that of one of the characters. First person narrators’ attempt to control the stuff of narrative in this novel but are submerged under questions of their ‘reliability’ and integrity as both narrators and focal centres of a moral consciousness.

Hence, Toibin’s main self-proposed challenge in The House of Names is the genuine transfer of complex play-text ‘versions’ of the Orestes story to a novel in which he lends, when he can, his authority as writer to emergent rather than focal consciousness’s. The latter are compromised by their pasts whose aims are very much about how to reproduce that past  in the present and control how that present is perceived. Toibin does not allow either Clytemnestra (with the richness of her inner (indeed infernal) resources) or the outright and simpler and more conscious love of control in Electra to dominate. Hence, although given prominence – Clytemnestra opens the novel and appears, like Mary in The Testament of Mary, to seek to dominate with her hunger for an authority, as constant as death itself. Like Milton’s Death she seeks to digest the world she takes in and transform into a dark art: ‘We are all hungry now. … Murder makes us ravenous’. This is an art that feeds the hunger of the ‘taste’ it alone relishes by keeping still (quiet and static in time) except as a ‘moving’ interior monologue. There is a rich poetry here: ‘I feel if I remain still, something more will come.’(227) Dead pasts that ‘remain still’ must make the present appear meaningless in its endeavours to ‘emerge’ anew and different.  Contrastingly, Electra, accepts the most heinous of political oppressions (that represented by a still (because broken- legged) Aegisthus) to seek power and control rather than inner authority:

‘She no longer went to her father’s grave. She had become brisk, almost sharp. Since she spent the day … exercising control … . She … spoke rather of distant regions that would have to be brought under control. (243f.)

No longer poetry – rather (and Haynes finds a similar character in her Ani – Antigone) this is the thin legend of a politics of control.

Orestes (the primary focal ‘point of view’ of the author) who spends time reworking fictions which rewrite the structures in which authority, power and control inhere – especially the family (which he witnesses in continual cycle of formal and semantic change). He does so in collusion with an author who renders everyone else in full meta-cognitive control of a kind of conscious role-play that recycles the past. Note, for instance, Agamemnon: Clytemnestra see him interacting with child Orestes (enacting a sword-fight); ‘as if (he) knew that he must play the part of the father with his boy for all it was worth.’ There are multiple such self-conscious references to theatrical and social role-play: ‘’I would assist my mother in her role as someone who had known grief and was now almost foolish, distracted, harmless. We could play the parts together even if my brother came back.’ Says Electra (163).

Orestes in contrast inhabits fictions where people do not exactly know what their roles are or how to name them. Central to that is his fictive and imaginative hold on the silences that make up even his sexual and physical relationship with Leander, until the latter pushes him out of the world of known roles that he prefers. We know that Orestes experiences a silent physical tenderness with Leander (125, 134) that cannot be merely explained away by reference to Greek male bisexuality and which, in its refusal of names – such as ‘sexual’ or ‘physical’ - nevertheless has felt presence in its silence. When Orestes, in the ‘house of whispers’ (213) that is Mycenae, hears the sexual congress of Aegisthus and his two favoured bodyguards, by following them to a remote palace room and waiting and listening outside these ‘sounds were familiar to him and unmistakable’ but still do not get named.

Attic Tragedy investigates family more radically (and with self-conscious politics since Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE itself aimed to refashion family links for the purposes of its democracy and no more so than in Aeschylus’ Orestes plays) than has been done (except perhaps in Shakespeare) until modern times. Toibin’s analysis is a defence of what in Margaret Thatcher’s legislation was called ‘pretend family relationships’ and what more knowing souls call the ‘chosen family’.

He imagined sometimes that Leander and Mitros were his sisters, … (115).

These imaginations and plays (transformations of role) seek later not to be named but merely experienced: ‘Orestes lay back and leaned his head on Leander’s chest as Leander put his arms around him and held him. Orestes knew when that happened to say nothing, …’.

Personally I have always wanted Toibin to be known as a great gay novelist. That would be a help to restore so much of what is lost otherwise to public discourse of gay sexuality (something Lorca struggled with when he met open gay people in the USA and thought ill of them in contrast with Whitman’s ideals). However, to name him thus might be ambivalent – a mere act of power. In the novel the richest character, however otherwise unreliable as a ‘narrator’ and who needs to be finally (as is old Hamlet by his son) dismissed as backward-looking ghost, is actually the one who gets nearest to the theme of that ambivalence and projects it, if not in a way she will ever understand, into the world:

There are presences I wish to encounter, presences that are close but not close enough to touch or be seen. I cannot think of their names.

Un-named presences remain open rather than closed identities. Names may overly bind presences – perhaps. Such is our existential dilemma. Hence I’ll be happy for Toibin to remain merely a great novelist and for the radical potential for the future of the novel as champion of chosen family in his novels such as The Blackwater Lightship and The Master to remain unarticulated within that ‘greatness’

 All the best

Steve

Toibin, C. (2012) New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families London, Viking.

2017: 3 Novelists search the Attic and find more than Tragedy there.

This blog is my preface to a project I have set myself to discover what, if anything, links three novelists (all already known to me) in a desire to take their narratives from Attic tragedy. In the fifth to fourth century BCE a vast social, religious and political cultural project created a vast series of dramas of which only 40 or so remain extant.

Since that time, these dramas –based in a mythological ‘history’ shared by not only writers but by people, literate and illiterate (the latter the large majority) – have remained the staple of world literatures, continually reinvented by cultures who returned to them to express moral, religious, political, psychological truths (or admixtures thereof) that were often widely divergent in their interpretation and functional application.

Hence, any writer who revisits the stories therein often revisits a palimpsest of divergent narratives and narrative functions that variously might also recall the aesthetics of Aristotle, the political divergence that French society found in comparing Racine and Corneille, and the inconsistences within and between psychologists including William James, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre.

So this blog is the preface to 4 others which will look at:

1.      Natalie Haynes The Children of Jocasta on the Labdacid family tragedies and their versions.

2.      David Vann Bright Air Black in which Attic Greece confronted its ambivalent dependence on the Ancient East.

3.      Colm Toibin The House of Names in which myths of Mycenae find new application.

4.      Summary and comparative conclusions

I’m aware that this isn’t a visited blog and I'm 'cool' (indeed almost frozen) about that . 

This is a project basically by me for me, but if anyone happens upon it, or part of it, please join in and initiate discussion if you’d like to. You can be as personal as me.

All the best

Steve

Simon Armitage (2017) The Unaccompanied London, Faber &  Faber

What’s in a name? Armitage could have called this volume ‘Solitude’ and in a stroke joined the army of poets and poetasters who have milked this hackneyed stereotype of the poet and poetry. Instead he asks the question: who or what and how do we become ‘the unaccompanied’. Armitage becomes therefore yet again a ‘measure’ (in all its senses) of the social forms and functions of loneliness and its professions in poetry – even down to the wonderful, funny and intensely moving evocation and pastiche of Wordsworth written about an ‘accompanied’ (though the company is ‘borrowed dog’) walk from Dove Cottage (‘The Candlelighter’ p. 56):

…

The sense that ‘division’ whilst real and solidified in objects might be some temporary loss of a fuller and more connected vision persists, lifting poetry back into its social function. The stance we take both connects and distinguishes (at their respective line ends) ‘I’ and ‘its dark eye’, and whilst not promising greater light admits of its possibility.

Hence, a poem that starts with a sorry ghost of Wordsworth in the ‘corpse road’ from Dove Cottage, ends with a kind of secular communion of company that is both also a sorry ghost of community but an admission of its underlying potential. It is as potent as the ambiguities in its half-rhyme (tarn / cairn):

My favourite poem has to be ‘The Claim’ (p. 47). It, like other poems here, shows what I feel to be a new (or perhaps deeper) interest in the unconscious (whatever we take that to be) that is, as in ‘The Candlelighter’, ‘still and unaware’. This poem joins others that humorously or otherwise explore the realms of the undead or, in his most literary of jokes that conjoins Homer with Ezra, ‘Poundland’ (pp. 10f), by pastiching Ulysses’ visitation and libations in Homer’s Hades. The deep mine in ‘The Claim’ is that of the US West but it applies to any claim to own a deeper selfhood (private and dark), let alone that of being a ‘poet’: ‘operation mind-fuck’.

This is a poem about dredging creation out of a thing that feels like death and yet still (the hope is – gloriously realised in this poem) resurrected in a passage that uses snow like one of my other favourite poets, John Burnside, and likewise his deeply ambivalent religious analogy and metaphor.

‘The Unaccompanied’, finally (p. 74), is a glorious poem – one that, were it not too universal for that purpose alone, seems a poem about unaccompanied, sad but ungenerous Brexit Britain, as do others –satirical of the notion that we can ever ‘walk alone’, other than over a precipice. The Company we keep is in the past, present and future – it builds our ‘suspension bridge’ structures that fly in hope of joint survival in each other. I love this great piece because, ambivalent Yorkshireman myself, it bridges for me some of the poets that belong to what Armitage himself wanted to see as a Yorkshire tradition: Tony Harrison, himself (forgive me the others) but also that son of new Yorkshire, the just-risen star of Andrew Macmillan  (there’s father, there’s son)[1]:

I wonder how much that ‘cliff edge’ owes to the imagery of fear and hope in the Brexit lexicon.   

But to be honest, I am not at all confident that I know why these poems are something new – just that they are. Becoming recognised, midst the ‘alpha males’ of his sixth form as ‘the poet in my heart’ (from Fleetwood Mac of course) raises an image that will forever remind me (now in my 60s) of being ‘outed’ in my Yorkshire school in quite another way although the fear seems less fixable to an event that has or might happen now – just significant of the excitement of transition (in ‘Gravity’ (p. 22f.):

with orbs and globes

and an outed choirboy’s

Till the heavens ballooned

Of course, this is clever. In a stanza or two earlier, he sets himself the task of bringing together Isaac Newton and Robert Browning (rhymed with ‘brown-nosing’) but it isn’t the cleverness (the metaphysical wit) I love it is the ability to dig down deep into feeling that emerge from his readers as their own in ways he cannot have known would have happened.

Read them. Enjoy them! They will ‘interpellate’ (I knew that word from Althusser would come in handy one day) you too!

All the best

Steve