modernity

Louis de Bonald’s “On the Agricultural Family, the Industrial Family, and the Right of Primogeniture” (1826)

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Corbet, “Farmers of Flagey returning from market” (1850)

A brief note by way of preface:

What follows is extremely, extremely reactionary.  Obviously, in no way do I endorse or support any of the views it advocates.  Louis de Bonald was a central figure in the Catholic counter-enlightenment,  an ultrareactionary French royalist who ferociously condemned liberalism, republicanism, Jacobinism, the Enlightenment, science, and commerce in general.  As I once tried to explain to a friend, de Bonald makes de Maistre look like Robespierre.

Part of his anti-modern ideology was its nostalgic portrait of the French countryside, the quaint customs and “rootedness” of agricultural life, and so on.  Now it’s clear, of course, that present-day proponents of a “return to the land” —a process sometimes referred to, rather absurdly, as “repeasantization” (a term used by “Jewbonics” blogger Max Ajl, among others) — don’t necessarily wish for a return to old-style spirituality/religiosity, conjugal patriarchy, illiteracy, etc.  But still, it’s helpful to know where this atavistic ideology originally stems from.

When we see our liberal philosophers so exclusively preoccupied with commerce, industry, the progress of manufacturing, and the discoveries of the mechanical arts, we are led to admire the mutable nature of philosophical opinion.  There is no lack of material for a new Bossuet to write a History of Its Variations.

The agricultural state, the first condition of man, is essentially monarchical.  The territorial property is a little kingdom, governed by the will of the head and the service of the subordinates.  Thus the Gospel, which is the code of societies, often compares the kingdom to the agrarian family.  The good sense or habits of an agrarian people are much closer to the best and most sane political ideas than are any of the idle minds in our cities, whatever be their knowledge in the arts and physical sciences.

Farmers live in peace, and can have neither rivalry nor competition among one another.  Merchants are in a necessary conflict of interests with one another.  We might say that the farmer, who leaves each to his own land, unites men without bringing them together, and that commerce, which shuts men up in cities and puts them in continual relations, brings them together without uniting them.

Nobility in France was, for the family, a hereditary devotion to public service, and for the individual, the exclusion from all mercantile professions.

A republic is a society of private individuals who want to obtain power, just as a commercial society is an association of private individuals who want to make money.  This identity of principles makes republics commercial and commerce republican.

Thus Rousseau admires nature, and that only in its wild state.  He would willingly take us back to eating our meat raw, wearing the skins of beasts, and sleeping in the shelter of trees or a lair.  In society he saw naught but servitude, weakness, crime, and misery.  His complaints against it were all drawn from wild nature: the savage’s independence from men and human needs, his natural goodness, his bodily rigor.

But our hard Spartans have become effeminate Sybarites.  The other philosophers speak only of the arts and industries that multiply our needs and pleasures, and they should like to see us all floating through life in palaces of gold and silk.  Of frugality, temperance, and moderation of desires they no longer speak.  For man in society, life is reduced to producing for consumption and consuming to produce.  To them, society as a whole is divided into two classes: producers and consumers.  The philosophers of recent centuries also bitterly and arrogantly denounce conquerors and their wars of conquest.  Yet when they found these conquests profitable to their doctrines, they sounded trumpets to honor the conqueror, and in their philanthropy, benevolence, and humanity, they pardoned him for these appalling wars, whose success was secured by a profound disregard for mankind pitilessly sacrificed to the extravagant dreams of ambition.

Today these philosophers demand the independence of industry, the most dependent of all professions.  They see commerce as the bond of peoples and the guarantee of peace in the world, even though the jealousies of commerce have been the subject of all our wars for some time, as they shall be for all those waged in the future.  To commerce they attribute the spirit of liberty that has spread over Europe, although all the merchants, even the wealthiest of them, daily or even hourly shackle their personal liberty by pledging themselves as security for loans both large and small.

Today some would confuse industry and agriculture and even place them in the same rank in society.  Let us, however, distinguish them in their character and effects, and by their varying influences upon the mind and habits of men and the constitution of states.  This question is not foreign to the measure on primogeniture that has been submitted to the chambers, inasmuch as those who would establish or permit it for the land-owning family have never intended to extend it to the industrial family.

Agriculture feeds her children, but industry gives birth to children she cannot feed.

The child who comes into the world in an agricultural family finds his sustenance already assured, for the earth that his parents cultivate in his turn awaits him to give him is bread.

The child born into an industrial family expects his sustenance from the salary he will earn if a master employs him, and if his industry is not stricken by events that could make it falter, or shut down, or prevent the sale of its products.

The farmer lives from his produce even when he does not sell it.  The industrial worker cannot live unless he sells what he produces.

Thus, the agricultural family enjoys an existence independent of men and events, while the industrial family is dependent upon them both.

A farm is indeed a family whose head is the father.  Whether he owns or rents the farm, he busies himself with the same labors as his servants and eats the same bread, often at the same table.  The farm nourishes all its offspring.  It has occupations for those of all ages and both sexes.  Even the elderly, who cannot perform heavy labor, finish their careers as they began it and stay around the house watching the children and animals.

There is nothing similar to this in the industrial family, whose members work in isolation and often in different industries, and who do not know their master apart from the exigencies of his commands.  Industry does not nourish all ages and both sexes.  It does employ the child, and often so young that his health and strength are ruined.  The child may receive some instruction, but he is abandoned in his advanced years when he can no longer work.  Then the industrial worker has no bread except what he takes from his children’s salary or what he receives from public charity.

The farmer toils from the rising to the setting of the sun but never at night.  He rests on Sunday and takes up his work again on Monday.  The industrial worker works even at night in order to gain a higher salary, especially when he works at home by the piece.  Whether he rests on Sunday or not, overheated by his forced labor, on Monday he debauches.

The farmer works outside and standing up.  He strengthens his body by the hard and painful labor of the fields and exerts his intelligence upon the numerous details and variations in the culture of the earth, trees, and beasts.  He tames the animals and forces rebellious nature to submit to his care.  The industrial worker works hunched over and sedentary, turns a crank, makes the shuttle go to and fro, and pulls together the threads.  He spends his life in cellars or attics and, becoming a machine himself, he exerts his fingers, but never his mind.  It can thus be said that there is nothing less industrious than the industrial worker.

Everything improves the intelligence of the farmer and lifts his thoughts towards Him who gives fruitfulness to the earth, dispenses the seasons, and makes the fruit ripen.  Everything debases the intelligence of the worker.  He sees nothing above the master who employs him, or at best the inventor of the machine to which he is attached.

We can thus say that the former waits for everything from God, and that the latter receives everything from man.

The farmer tells his neighbors of his discoveries and new processes that he invents to improve his cultivation.  The industrialist and the merchant keep their speculations secret.  We can thus say that the agriculture that disperses men about the countryside unites them without bringing them together, while the commerce that crowds them into cities brings them together without uniting them.

The agricultural population is strong and vigorous, the industrial population frail and sickly.  Not long ago a judge in a small canton in Switzerland bitterly deplored the degeneration of the beautiful people of his country since workshops and factories had been established in it.

Nor am I afraid to advance that there are nowhere more beggars than in manufacturing cities and industrial countries.  England is the proof of this, for in spite of its immense fortune and widely extended industry, a large part of its inhabitants falls under the charge of the landholders.  Their poor-laws are an oppressive tax.  What does it matter that their poor are better clothed and better nourished than ours, if they are clothed and nourished only by public charity and parish offices? Continue reading →

Industrialism and the genesis of modern architecture

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Modernist Architecture — Positive Bases

The spatiotemporal properties of architecture that were developed by experiments in abstract art reached their highest expression in the work of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy.  Stepping back from our analysis of this development, however, we may witness a crucial conjuncture between the realm of abstract art and the other major positive basis for the existence of modernist architecture — industrialism (and more specifically, the machine). This conjuncture occurred on two levels. At one level, leading avant-garde artists and architects began to draw inspiration from the monumental improvements in both factory production and machine technologies, seeing in these an ideal of economy and efficiency.  On another level, however, the research into the abstract time of capitalism undertaken by the Futurists through their representation of kinetic dynamism and motion was advanced in a more systematic and precise form by the advocates of Taylorism, whose time-and-motion studies of labor established the foundation for scientific management in industry. Taylorism, as a science of the mechanics of movement and a means for the optimization of productivity, exerted huge influence over the modernists in architecture.  Moreover, the broader cult of the machine and of the engineer in particular provided the avant-garde with a positive image for the spirit of their age. The traditionalists, who remained lost studying the annals of architectural history and reproducing its forms, were thus blind to the most obvious feature of the modern epoch — industrialization. Continue reading →

Down with Art!: The Age of Manifestoes

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El Lissitzky's "New Man" (1923)

Note from the blogger: I tend to agree with the Marxist architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment of the various strains of the avant-garde as all aspiring to enact a Weberian “rationalization” of society, whether in it’s negative, nihilistic form (Dada, Absurdism) or in its positive, constructive form (Futurism, Functionalism, Constructivism).  But Eagleton quite rightly points out the politicization of modern art, as it appropriated and took on the form of political literature: the tract, and the manifesto.  He also notes the avant-garde’s tendency to associate with various anti-capitalist movements (Bolshevism, Trotskyism, and even Fascism).  All this corresponded to, after the death of the avant-garde in the 1960s (see Arthur Danto on this), post-modern art’s seeming apoliticism.  Just as modern art was heavily political, post-modern art is largely post-political, in the sense that the ideology of the “post-ideological age” took on in the 1980s and 1990s.  The following piece is by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, whose work I occasionally enjoy and at other times find problematic.  This particular work is a review of an upcoming book by Aleksei Danchev, though Eagleton’s article takes on something of a life of its own:

In the world of polite letters, literature is the enemy of programmes, polemics, sectarian rancour, the sour stink of doctrinal orthodoxies. It is the home of the unique particular, the provisional and exploratory, of everything that resists being reduced to a scheme or an agenda. This, one might note, is a fairly recent point of view. That literature should be free of doctrinal orthodoxy would have come as a surprise to Dante and Milton. Swift is a great writer full of sectarian rancour. Terms like “provisional” and “exploratory” do not best characterize Samuel Johnson’s literary views.

Nor do they best describe the views of the various twentieth-century avant-gardes, which set out to demolish this whole conception of art. From the Futurists and Constructivists to the Surrealists and Situationists, art became militant, partisan and programmatic. It was to be liberated from the libraries and museums and integrated with everyday life. In time, the distinction between art and life, the playful and the pragmatic, would be erased. There were to be no more professional artists, just common citizens who occasionally wrote a poem or made a piece of sculpture. The summons rang out to abandon one’s easel and design useful objects for working people, as some of the Russian Constructivists did. Poets were to read their poetry through megaphones in factory yards, or scribble their verses on the shirt-fronts of passing strangers. A moustache was appended to the Mona Lisa. A Soviet theatre director took over a whole naval port for several days, battleships and all, and commandeered its 300,000 citizens for his cast.

Theatre audiences might be asked to vote at the end of the play, or march en masse on the local town hall. From agitprop to poster design, art was an instrument in the service of political revolution. For some avant-gardists, there were to be no more permanent art objects, since they would only suffer the indignity of becoming commodities. Instead, one should create gestures, happenings, situations, stray intensities, events which consumed themselves in the act of production. “To the electric chair with Chopin!”, fulminated the founder of Mexican Stridentism. “The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline”, declares Kasimir Malevich in his lengthy Suprematist Manifesto of 1916, reproduced here. The most obscene word of all was “academic”.

In this cultural revolution, two broad currents can be distinguished. The more positive strain of avant-gardism sought to transform human perceptions in order to adapt them to the new technological age. Avant-gardes tend to take root in societies still in the first flush of modernization, when the oppressive aspects of the new technologies are less obvious than the exhilarating ones. History is now skidding by so fast that the only image of the present is the future. Nothing is more typical of these activists than a mindless celebration of novelty – a brash conviction that an absolutely new epoch is breaking around them, that twentieth-century humanity is on the brink of greater, more rapid change than at any time in the past (they were to be proved right about that), and that everything that happened up to ten minutes ago is ancient history. How one would set about identifying absolute novelty is a logical problem that did not detain them.

This fetishism of the future crops up on almost every page of 100 Artists’ Manifestos, deftly selected and stylishly introduced by Alex Danchev. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which as Danchev points out founded not only Futurism but the very idea of the artistic manifesto, celebrates “the beauty of speed”. “A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” A later Futurist proclamation incites the brethren to destroy all “passéist” clothes (“tight-fitting,colourless, funereal, decadent”) and invent futurist clothes instead, “daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines”. Like Romanticism, the revolutionary avant-garde was staffed by the young, full of contempt for their experimentally challenged elders. In its more flamboyant moments, of which it had more than a few, it raised adolescence to an ideology.

Revolutionaries singing the praises of technological progress is rather like archbishops recommending adultery. These cultural experimenters seem to have overlooked the fact that no social system in history has been more innovative and dynamic than capitalism, and that a credulous trust in progress was a stock belief of the very middle classes they sought to outrage. It is true that this faith was coming badly unstuck in the early twentieth century, and would finally lie bleeding on the battlefields of the First World War. Even so, turning the middle classes’ belief in technological progress against their own cultural conservatism was always a perilous tactic.

Scandalizing the bourgeoisie, whose grandchildren were to be charged fancy prices for the very works of art that did so, meant more than rejecting this or that convention. It involved an assault on the idea of men and women as autonomous individuals with rich interior lives. That ripe, Proustian interiority was to be ripped apart by an art that was externalizing, mechanistic and deconstructive. For the first time in the history of aesthetics, fragmentation and dislocation ousted the impulse to unify. The Old Man (private, spiritual, contemplative) was to be taken apart, and the New Man (active, collectivist, mobile, anonymous) was to be constructed in his place. This meant waging an unpleasantly macho campaign against moralism, realism and Romanticism, all of which were soggy with feminine feeling. The Futurist Manifesto ditches feminism along with libraries, museums and academies. The avant-garde was a robustly masculine affair; its hymns to lust and Deleuze-like cult of desire boded ill for anyone furnished with a uterus. A Manifesto of Futurist Woman encourages woman “to find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished”. There is a good deal of such sub-Nietzschean swagger in the current as a whole. The decadent values of pity and compassion – mere fronts for the predatory bourgeoisie – must give way to a certain spiritual brutalism.

Alongside the more positive strand of avant-garde revolt, with its complex relations to Bolshevism, Trotskyism and (in the case of Marinetti) Fascism, flourished a more negative, even nihilistic strain, which held that the cultural establishment could absorb attacks on this or that meaning; what it could not withstand was an assault on meaning as such. It followed that the most lethal revolutionary weapon was absurdity. In a period of savage irrationalism stretching from the Somme to the rise of Hitler, only the lunatic could be said to be sane. Reason itself was an oppressive force, and the title of madman was one to be cherished. Logic was the preserve of those incapable of creation. Since manifestos made a kind of sense, they, too, were to be junked. “No more manifestos”, demanded a Dadaist manifesto. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, announced another.

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A Cruel Irony in the History of Architectural Modernism

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Monument to Karl Liebkneckt and Rosa Luxemburg (1925)

It is a cruel irony in the history of architectural modernism that the Mies van der Rohe, who earlier in his career designed the monument to the fallen Communist heroes Karl Liebkneckt and Rosa Luxemburg, would (thirty years later) be the same man who designed the Seagram Building, one of the swankiest monuments to high-Fordist capitalism.  This may have been pointed out before, but it stands as a testament to the tragedy of architectural modernism in the twentieth century.

The Seagram Building (1958)

Ivan Leonidov's City of the Sun (1940s-1950s)

The transformation of utopia under capitalist modernity

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IMAGE: Ivan Leonidov’s
City of the Sun (1940s)
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Utopianism has always involved the imagination of a better world, a perfected society set against the imperfect society of the present. Whether as an object of speculative philosophical reflection, a practical program for social transformation, or an idle daydream, utopia has always evinced the hope that reality might be made ideal.

Underneath this general rubric, however, “utopia” can be seen to signify several related but distinct things. The term is commonly used to refer to that literary genre, deriving its name from Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia, which depicts various “ideal commonwealths.” Beyond this meaning, many commentators have identified these literary utopias as belonging to a broader impulse that exists within the very structure of human experience, of which they are but one expression.[1] Karl Mannheim, for example, described utopianism as a mentalité, writing that “[a] state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs…and at the same breaks the bond of the existing order.”[2] Others have linked the idea of utopia to more metaphysical foundations, explaining how the condition for the possibility of utopia is carried by the category of possibility itself. Understood in this way, a utopia could be an alternate social configuration that is imaginable either as a pure fantasy wholly apart from existing conditions, or as one that is potentially viable, somehow implied by those same conditions.[3] The former of these constitutes an abstract or merely logical possibility, whereas the latter represents a concrete or real possibility.

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