On Things

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"The aesthetic, which was once a kind of resolution, is now a scandalous impossibility."‍

- Terry Eagleton, “Art After Auschwitz”

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‍Bracketing Modernity‍

Within the boom and bust cycles of affluence and crisis which regulate the phases of industrialization beginning in the 19th century, an object and its objecthood can no longer expect any sort of sanctity: it must choose either to endure the abusive cycles of various provisional meanings which will inevitably be imposed on it, or relinquish its status as an agent within the dynamic of development. It is this former strategy which Adorno reserves for art after Auschwitz, finding no impetus for its participation in a 20th century, post-genocide Europe. In an endless game of ying chasing yang, art for Adorno both resists and defines the realm of bourgeois capital with a tenacious dialectic instinct.  Insofar as Adorno shares with Kant a philosophical binary structure mediated by aesthetics, these two philosophers allow for a symmetrical bracketing of the object of Modernity, where the former’s critical theory of society deflates once and for all the latter’s Enlightenment tendentiousness.

Although both Kant and Adorno position aesthetics and bourgeois social practice as separate yet coexistent categories, Kant’s object of beauty maintains a privileged autonomy which supersedes in spontaneous commune the phenomenal world, while Adorno’s work of art is an implicitly linked specter which will never escape the reality to which it is tethered, an object which is both “centripetal and centrifugal together, a portrait of its own impossibility, living testimony to the fact that dissonance is the truth of harmony” (Eagleton 353). This tragedy, however, is counteracted by the magnified salvationary quality of its singular moments of redemption. The fact that a Francis Bacon triglyph now sells for $142.4 million dollars isn’t a testament to the degree of its commodification, but rather to the amplitude of its critical capacity, its alarming ability to articulate the absurd delirium of the market by participating with an intensity of disinterestedness that materializes events into blinding reflections.

It is this reflexive yet neutral rendition of aesthetics, where “vertigo must serve as the index of veracity,” (Eagleton 358), that disenchants Kant’s state of enlightenment. Converging Kant’s mutually exclusive realms of the subject and the object into a cyclical vortex, authentic meaning reveals itself in art after WWII only in rarefied and unsolicited flashes, constellations of reflections in the smoke and mirrors environs which result when systems of representations which have lost their meaning. Tracing the aesthetic object back from this state of instability to its origins as the keystone of being, we observe how the rupture between subject and object come to define Modernity and the crisis of its objects.

Technology of Vandalism

It is with the French Revolution, which begins in 1789  (just 1 year after Kant publishes The Critique of Pure Reason), that vandalism emerges as a systematic mechanism for destabilizing objecthood. Following the overthrow of Louis XVI’s monarchy, architect and revolutionary Léon Dufourny explains the space of Paris directly following the Revolution as a sort of iconographic battlefield: “We receive complaints from all sides that the eyes of patriots are offended by the different monuments constructed by the despotism in the time of slavery and which certainly should not exist under the reign of liberty and equality” (Vidler 186). The extremity of this statement attests to the capacity of revolutionary politics to create not only a new way of governing, or behaving, but a new of of perceiving. The Revolution injects the residual material culture of the Ancien Régime with a personification of their monarchistic patrons — it is as if the ghost of Louis XVI lives on through the objects produced under his monarchy, reified by the revolutionaries through the same paranoia and sense of of vindication which sustained the Terror.

Vandalism thus emerges as political solution to an aesthetic impasse. Described by Vidler as a “a ‘systematic act,’ one whose ramifications extended beyond the mere breaking or mutilation of a single object,” vandalism functions as a sort of technology: a solution for establishing dominion through a methodological subjugation of perceived threats within the environment. Just as technology in the more general sense can be understood as surmounting of nature and a stabilization of its forces, vandalism sublimates artefacts of the Ancien Régime into new objects, fashioning “didactic signs of the triumph over tyranny” into the steadfast material substrate of the new French Republic (Vidler 186) . Stones carried away in the aftermath of the Bastille’s destruction are sculpted into commemorative scale models of the event of its storming, and monuments are ordered by the Convention to be “constructed out of the fragments of royal tombs and statues… symbolizing the triumph of the French over despotism and superstition” (Vidler 187). It is in this way that the paradox of vandalism reveals itself as a conflation of creation and destruction, problematizing its category of technology as something more than the simple instruments of progression.

This symptom of technology can in fact be traced back to cradle of civilization itself, where the agricultural practices overcome the instability of nature, setting the stage for the leap-frog relationship between technology and nature, where the former continuously increasing scale in an effort to overcome the latter’s mounting threat of catastrophe. Prior to the initiation of this cycle, the hunter-gatherer, foraging in the forest and subject to the ebb and flow of seasonal migratory patterns, seeks to stabilize his lifestyle and so cultivates seeds into crops of agriculture which in the surplus of their harvest produce exchange value as the foundation for western civilization. Out of this agricultural foundation various forms of technology proliferate, beginning with the projects such as the terracing of the banks of the Nile and the construction of temples of Nubia, and evolving eventually into the infrastructural jungles and globalized markets of the post-WWII era. Just as in late Modernity we see C>M>C’ become M>C>M’ (M-money, C-commodity), thereby placing money as the ends rather than the means, a similar inversion of causation between technology and nature can be posited. Instead of Nature producing Technology producing new Nature, we can speculate upon the possibility that Technology produces Nature produces new Technology.  N>T>N’ becomes T>N>T’.

(Re)Locating Value‍

This re-positioning of technology as the end of society, rather than the means, will come to play a major role particularly in the 19th and 20th century myth of progress and technocratic obsessions. An example of this can be seen where warfare technology produces landscapes of ruin, which then necessitate the development of machines and infrastructures for reconstruction whose mechanisms are threaded into collective subjectivity and cultural identity: “The most advanced modern techniques, and the experience we have recently gained from the destructions of war, have changed nothing to what remains, fundamentally, a problem of principle… The transfer of any monument, as perfectly executed as it can be with the contemporary techniques, is still an imperfect solution” (Allais 203). This post-war perspective on the preservation of the things, expressed by Pietro Gazzola as one of the foremost international authorities of the subject at that time and lead preservationist for UNESCO’s campaign in Nubia, finds in the ruins of war an experience of gain, developing out of destruction a technical expertise for re-assembling the disassembled.

This nature of thought–which breaches Adorno’s insistence that objects of value must resist the reconstruction of their identity following destruction–articulates an alternative but equally compelling reading on the identical/non-identical object dialectic. For Gazzola, the relocation of an object empties it of any authentic identity, emancipating it into a domain of free agency where any number of political or economic parameters (e.g. UNESCO), can pick it up and employ it in its systems of representations. Therefore for Gazzola cultural objects must seek to fortify their identity if they are to remain external to capitalist processes. If Adorno argues that the authentic object must reject an identity, then Allais illustrates how an object must maintain it, thus reintroducing  the value of heritage and begging the question: how can an object without an identity maintain authenticity, if authenticity is about a mode of being which is faithful to its foundational origins?

If Adorno insists that art remains implicitly dialectic and unrepresentable, it is exactly for this reason, to avoid having an identity and in doing so remain missing in action as systems of representations are manipulated, instrumentalized, and obfuscated by political and market forces: “…our civilization divines a mysterious transcendence in art and one of the still obscure sources of its unity…Your appeal is historic, not because it proposes to save the temples of Nubia, but because through it the first world civilizations publicly proclaims the world’s art as its indivisible heritage” (Allais 188). In Malraux’s description of the “transcendence” of art, he illustrates the ease with which it loses its sovereignty and how through simple appeal the entire contextual history of the Nubian temples is obliviated to proclamations of global value and international jurisdiction. From the outset UNESCO’s rhetoric instrumentalized the temple as “art” into its bureaucratic politics, a subtle distinction which ceases upon a certain “purity” of the ancient temple form. Removed from the circumstantial particularities of dynastic socioeconomics, the temples proffer to the bureaucrat of Modernity the purely formal characteristics of surface, materiality, and texture, qualities which Eagleton recognizes in Modern art as  â€œborrowed from the technical, functional forms of a rationalized social order” (Eagleton 353). This affinity between the instruments of Modernity and and the typological form of the ancient temple in ruin was recognized by Le Corbusier at the Acropolis, and reappears in post-WWII Nubia as the basis for a campaign in international spatial politics. Abstractedness is thus a form of Thing-ness within rationalized social orders which “holds out against domination in its respect for the sensuous particular, but reveals itself again and again as an ideological ally of such oppression” (Eagleton 351). This phenomenon explains Malraux’s choice to categorize the temples as art, and not as architecture. Out of this seemingly minor detail, a role of authenticity can be scrutinized to to reveal a fundamental difference in the objecthood of art and architecture in Modernity. There is an awareness in Malraux’s statement of a relationship between mobility and authenticity, where in his critical suspension of the term architecture he acknowledges that the relocation of the temples as art objects does not necessarily undermine their status as authentic, whereas their relocation as architectural objects does. That is, he is aware of the problematization of authenticity posed by dislodging the temples from their foundational origins of place. By announcing the temples as art, Malraux avoids this issue but figures the temples into false pretenses, combining cultural discourse with political activism at the expense of an authentic objecthood.

‍Marginal Value

Understanding the dissemination of temples in Nubia as a mode of design, we can configure a relationship where design stands as the axis of symmetry and datum of articulation between capital and art as two polarized and opposing realms. Like the storefront gallery wall, that which exists on the street-side functions along the lines of capital, while that which stands within the gallery functions only as an index of itself. It is in the processes of post-modern urban planning such as the making of a Modern market at Rungi, on the southern outskirts of Paris, where design ceases to act as a container which carves out a space for objects to exist in opposition to the the market forces of the city. Rather architecture succumbs to commodification, and in doing so synchronizes itself and what is contains to the exchange-value market and its systems of representations. Between the field conditions of scattered temples in Nubia, and the networked linkages of the French food industry, technologies of mobility articulate the regional spaces of the post-WWII global community into a myriad proliferation of forms of meaning which in the chaos of their multiplicity elicit polemic outcries from theorists such as Adorno and preservationists such as Gazallo. In Paris, the effort to remain globally competitive through the centralization and optimization of its food distribution industry results in novel forms of consumption frameworks and vast, marginalized distribution centers that “because of their peripheral location… did not need to be invested with the aesthetic qualities of earlier [buildings] that had occupied a place of pride in the center of growing cities” (Tenhoor 223). Through nationalized market optimization, the urban scale of the city of Paris confronts the  functioning of regional resource networks, yielding a hinterland of infrastructural entrails as the collateral damage produced in the modernization of concentrically expanding metropolitan area of 12 million inhabitants.

In an effort to bring additional value to this new junk space, tourism presents itself as a spin-off industry which promotes both mobility and consumption as the cornerstones of healthy post-modern market activity: “…as they planned the ZHL, the leaders of SAGAMARIS understood that they had to attend to the cultural needs of two primary groups: workers and tourists” (Tenhoor 228). This emphasis on tourism, found both in the development of the ZHL and the relocation in Nubia of “all the temples to an island near a tourist site,” signifies the shift of value in the object from use-value, to age-value, to exchange value. In the case of Les Halles, the original market’s use-value as a center for food distribution is compounded by the rhetoric of age-value, which emerges in response to the proposal of its destruction and elevates the structure to the status of an unintentional monument. This use-value, highest at the moment right before its destruction, is dismantled, reconfigured, and synthesized along the lines of market-driven exchange values and competitive capitalist ambitions. In the case of Nubia, their original use-value as tombs gives way to a inflated age-value in the face of regional flooding and soviet dam construction, driving the preservation campaign which ultimately funds the temples deconstruction and reconstitution as revenue-generating tourist destinations. As such, they simultaneously stand as both intentional and unintentional monuments: intentional in the sense of their original construction as colossal tombs to commemorate the greatness of ancient pharaohs, and unintentional as instruments monumentalized by UNESCO for their potential as symbols of altruistic foreign policy and icons for a new post-WWII concept of global heritage.

Within these viscous exchanges of reality, art must crystallize and partially cure in a way that challenges the overall dynamic and prevents it from accelerate into a homogenous solution of textureless grey. Remaining critical, the architect must, in the words of Adorno,  take measures to avoid “works that are in constant flux and have no unitary point of reference. For the many become too homogenous, too monotonous. too undifferentiated.”  In a sense, negative dialectics manage to do so, as it ”provisionally configures” art as a certain category of thing which survives the horrific catharsis of Auschwitz by refusing to take on an identity in the systems of representations which emerge in its denouement. As destruction gives way once again to creation following WWII, the thing can only maintain value by excusing itself from the processes of rebuilding identity, a righteous self-pardoning in the aftermath of an event whose Final Solution was complete extinguishment. Like a POW who after years of being referred to by a string of arbitrary tattooed integers has forgot his or her name and has no desire to recover it, it is not accurate to say that art can not be, but rather that it can not be integrated.

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Works Cited‍

Allais, Lucia  â€œThe Design of the Nubian Desert: Monuments, Mobility, and the Space of Global Culture” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 179-215.

Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishing, 1990): 341-365.

TenHoor, Meredith. “Decree, Design, Exhibit, Consume: Making Modern Markets in France, 1953-1979” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 216-236.

Vidler, Anthony  â€œThe Paradoxes of Vandalism,” in The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (The Monacelli Press, 2011): 183-208.

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