Agree to Disagree
Eric-John Russell
1.
Part of the lost legacy of the Baroque is a situation in which despite all peculiar ornamental effort, the center seizes attention without sacrificing focus. When a question is directly posed: ‘do we live in a society of the spectacle?’, a lukewarm answer can be given which proceeds uniformly. In this practical spirit which cannot bear an intensely differentiated position, Molière’s Tartuffe is simply a critique of religious hypocrisy; Watteau’s A Mezzetino merely a pastoral painting; Couperin’s Les Barricades mysterieuses an ode to feminine chastity. An alternative reading need proceed no further than the following comment to gather together an answer far more plentiful for a line of inquiry: “The majority of the wines, almost all the spirits, and every one of the beers whose memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes”. This seemingly facile observation contains within it both the commencing question put forward at a higher level and an answer which warrants no arbitration. The loss of taste can say as much about the object as it can, as we’ve learned from Kant, about the capacities of a judging subject. The concordant abasement of each side, which can be described as spectacular in the most precise meaning of the word, suggests that even if beauty were to appear, standing right in front of our noses, it would remain unrecognizable. The cheapening of the world need not simply refer to the devalorization of labor-power, which nevertheless continues unabated. There remain miseries far more difficult to decipher than the origin of profit.
2.
The merit of a concept is not to be diminished simply for its historical baggage, but when it is no longer capable of critically elucidating the manifest ebb and flow of the social contradictions and antagonisms that make up the essential whole. The criteria for abandoning a category cannot rest on the difficulty of its empirical verification, its alleged commitment to mere epiphenomena, nor simply as a feckless metaphysics found guilty by association. Whether considering aimless dissatisfaction, ambiguous malaise, unfurling neuroses, or deprivation of a full and vigorous experience of unhappiness—the unrelenting persistence of unacknowledged suffering in the present moment solicits a return to the question posed by Paul Mattick and the way it implicitly asks what it might mean to take something for an experience not experienced which, in so doing, excites within society morbid appetites. We thereby obtain from Mattick’s question an answer thoroughly unintended and yet without wanton disregard for what it asks which, in a word, concerns a moniker that conjures a form of social commensuration under the spell of categorial appearance forms. [...]
Eric-John Russell
1.
Part of the lost legacy of the Baroque is a situation in which despite all peculiar ornamental effort, the center seizes attention without sacrificing focus. When a question is directly posed: ‘do we live in a society of the spectacle?’, a lukewarm answer can be given which proceeds uniformly. In this practical spirit which cannot bear an intensely differentiated position, Molière’s Tartuffe is simply a critique of religious hypocrisy; Watteau’s A Mezzetino merely a pastoral painting; Couperin’s Les Barricades mysterieuses an ode to feminine chastity. An alternative reading need proceed no further than the following comment to gather together an answer far more plentiful for a line of inquiry: “The majority of the wines, almost all the spirits, and every one of the beers whose memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes”. This seemingly facile observation contains within it both the commencing question put forward at a higher level and an answer which warrants no arbitration. The loss of taste can say as much about the object as it can, as we’ve learned from Kant, about the capacities of a judging subject. The concordant abasement of each side, which can be described as spectacular in the most precise meaning of the word, suggests that even if beauty were to appear, standing right in front of our noses, it would remain unrecognizable. The cheapening of the world need not simply refer to the devalorization of labor-power, which nevertheless continues unabated. There remain miseries far more difficult to decipher than the origin of profit.
2.
The merit of a concept is not to be diminished simply for its historical baggage, but when it is no longer capable of critically elucidating the manifest ebb and flow of the social contradictions and antagonisms that make up the essential whole. The criteria for abandoning a category cannot rest on the difficulty of its empirical verification, its alleged commitment to mere epiphenomena, nor simply as a feckless metaphysics found guilty by association. Whether considering aimless dissatisfaction, ambiguous malaise, unfurling neuroses, or deprivation of a full and vigorous experience of unhappiness—the unrelenting persistence of unacknowledged suffering in the present moment solicits a return to the question posed by Paul Mattick and the way it implicitly asks what it might mean to take something for an experience not experienced which, in so doing, excites within society morbid appetites. We thereby obtain from Mattick’s question an answer thoroughly unintended and yet without wanton disregard for what it asks which, in a word, concerns a moniker that conjures a form of social commensuration under the spell of categorial appearance forms. [...]
