the Fox aesthetic

There’s something immediately offensive about Fox on an aesthetic level, quite apart from the content of anything said on the network… the pompous brass music when returning from commercials… the forced gravitas of their sports announcers and reporters… the jittery and overinformative on-screen graphics.

And again, that film-like quality of the image, which is really awful (assuming it’s really their own fault).

back to the All-Star Game

Eventually I returned home and decided to give this game a few innings’ worth. I’m no longer sure that Fox is responsible for the film-like air of the video image; it may just be a bad TV in this room, whose quality seems questionable.

But otherwise, I find the event pretty depressing, and can’t remember if it was already this bad when I left the U.S. I’d call myself patriotic, but I loathe schmaltzy group patriotism staged according to scripted anthems and flitting images of the tombs of the fallen. I’m all in favor of fighting cancer to ease so much suffering, but see no point in the ceremonial communal wallowing in the need for a cancer cure in the midst of a baseball game. I’m sad that Harmon Killebrew died (a big baseball star from the 1960’s), but don’t wish to listen to tasteless mournful piano music as his image is displayed on screen. I’m not being a snob here– these things really do startle and offend my nervous system.

This ought to be an exciting baseball game featuring the best players in the game today, but it has somehow been transformed into a kind of national group sex enabled by the imaginary support of collective commitment to charity and military actions. That may sound too harsh, but the baseball really seems obscured by the cardboard Americana with which it’s been framed.

a second irony about Greenberg

I’ve mentioned the first: that one of the marks against him is divorcing art from its social context, even though he was deeply formed by Marxism.

The second is that he’s generally viewed as an ultra-modernist, yet his harsh critique of “millenialist” critics who view every new art style as utterly revolutionary and radically distinct from the preceding tradition makes him sound at times like he wrote Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern.

on bad art writing

One more Greenberg passage tonight, which gave me my laugh of the evening. Here he is complaining about what he sees as the low quality of most art writing in the early 1960’s when he writes these words:

“Things that would get expelled from other kinds of writing by laughter multiply and flourish in art writing. In a recent book on Polloch (by an Englishman) we read of his ‘attempt to disrupt the time flux and invoke a new contingency’; in a recent book on de Kooning (by an American) we read of colors that ‘erupt through the ceiling, coherent in their poetry of ambiguity’; in another book on Pollock (by an American) we read that one of Pollock’s paintings is a ‘scornful, technical masterpiece, like the Olympia of Manet… one of the most provocative images of our time, an abyss of glamour encroached upon a flood of innocence.’ (This, about a picture that Pollock himself considered a failure.)”

“My child could paint that!”

Here’s a nice response from Greenberg to this phrase:

“The onlooker who says that his child could paint a Newman may be right, but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do. The exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion… are what alone determines the quality of the result…”

Even more than the witty and reasonable comeback, what I enjoy here is the idea that Barnett Newman might have taken this passage as a literal art idea, and obtained a child servant who would have been ordered to carry out Newman’s commands: “Paint the whole canvas with this red… That’s it! Now put a very thin vertical stripe of this blue one inch from the left edge… Good!”

Levi on the nihilism question

An eloquent post HERE.

(Note: link fixed. Sorry, I had just emailed someone about the weather disaster in Tama County, Iowa, and that initially went here instead of Levi’s post.)

melodramatic production by Fox

A question for sports fans resident in the United States: how long has Fox been doing this stupid production thing of making a live baseball game look like it’s on 15-year-old film rather than real-time video? It seems like a phony, sentimental way to monumentalize the present– especially when accompanied by the maudlin pseudo-symphonic soundtrack they’ve chosen to accompany the player introductions. This is unbearable.

This may have been going on for years, for all I know. But it may be enough to get me to turn off my first baseball All-Star Game since the year 2000 before the first pitch is even thrown. (As a former sportswriter, I am also horrified by my now laughable unfamiliarity with most of the players anyway.)

Or do I just have a low-quality TV here? But it looks to me like a deliberate producer’s decision.

Oh God, the first round of their manipulative commercials just came on. This isn’t even Fox news, but Fox already makes me want to leave the country again.

OOO and anthropos

Recently I linked to Knowledge Ecology’s interesting review (the first of which I’m aware) of The Quadruple Object.

Now FOOTNOTES2PLATO seems largely in agreement with the spirit of that review.

To some extent I think it’s important to let people have discussions about one’s own work and not intervene that often, which can be a difficult policy to follow in the blogosphere where it’s so easy to see everything people say about you, whenever you have enough time on your hands to check.

So I’ll confine myself to a brief comment on this passage from footnote2plato’s post:

“But in order to avoid spinning into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe… I think OOO needs to unpack its own theological and anthropological implications.”

I’m certainly not a nihilist, as footnote2plato openly recognizes in the post.

But I think we need to distinguish between two problems here, a positive one and a negative one.

The negative point should not be underestimated. Namely, by placing all objects on the same footing, OOO disallows inscribing human being as a full half of some ontological dualism: on the one hand there are humans, on the other hand there’s everything else. We’re very familiar with such philosophies: res cogitans/res extensa, for-itself/in-itself, Dasein/intraworldly entities.

Since footnotes2plato doesn’t seem inherently opposed to the OOO project, I assume that when he says that “OOO needs to unpack its own theological and anthropological implications,” he doesn’t mean that the way to do this is by restoring human being to its previous grandiose eminence. I don’t think footnotes2plato means that nihilism automatically results form putting all beings on the same footing, and if he did mean that I would argue against it.

However, this negative point –that humans are just one entity among others– still has plenty of power, since the vast majority of continental philosophy continues to ignore it through maneuvers of greater and lesser sophistication that I’ve critiqued here in the past.

But then there’s the positive question… Once objects have been more or less flattened out so that humans have no special ontological status in comparison with flutes, dust grains, and pinwheels, what sorts of theories might allow us to work within this flatness and still do justice to the obvious richness of human reality compared with most other kinds?

Oddly, this sounds a lot like Greenberg’s discussion of Braque and Picasso developing collage as a manner of escaping the increasing flatness of analytic cubist painting, which I just reread yesterday by chance. They had to be very inventive to escape that flatness without retreating into the academic illusionist 3-D painting that had become so banal by their time. By the same token, it’s also challenging to balance the need for a (relatively) flat ontology with the need to recognize that there’s something very interesting about humans. But the solution is not to jump back into an ontology that places the subject at the heart of things.

One contrary position is offered by Žižek. There are many things I love about Žižek, but perhaps most of them can be summed up in the single word candor. For a generation like mine that was nursed on postmodernist waffling and evasiveness, it is refreshing that Žižek always simply comes out and makes blunt claims and takes responsibility for their consequences.

One of the best examples: Žižek is so committed to the primacy of the subject as a special rip or tear in the fabric of the universe, and this requires him to posit an “ontological catastrophe” in which the subject emerged.

I happen to think this is an utterly impossible notion, but at at least Žižek comes out and asserts it and prepares to defend it to the hilt. Because that’s what you’re ultimately committed if you ontologize the human into half the universe or more.

OOO takes the other route (and here it shares common ground with naturalism): there’s nothing ontologically special about the human. But just because the human is no longer everything doesn’t mean that it’s nothing, any more than the fact that dolphins and corn are just two objects among others warrants a nihilistic attitude about the worthlessness of dolphins and corns. They aren’t worthless, after all. They’re simply finite. But so what?

[ADDENDUM: The only thing I really disliked about footnote2plato’s post is its flirtation with the old Heideggerian chestnut that humans can experience objects “as” objects, whereas other entities cannot. This reached an absolute dead end for Heidegger in the 1929/30 course and was never clarified further. I don’t see it as being any more useful than saying that animals hunt “by instinct.” It’s a placeholder pretending to be a solution. It’s better, I think, to admit that all we have are placeholders– the absolute ontological distinction between human and non-human cannot be sustained, and we are left with the somewhat puzzling mission of clarifying the special status of the human, which is not a special ontological status. Something about language is probably the best bet, but not language as the transcendental condition of everything else. That’s been tried.]