Jan+12th

January 12

Can works of art and literature contribute to changing history? Can they help take over power? Can they change the world? Power of the image; The aesthetization of Politics: Hitler’s propaganda; mobilization of the sensible toward fascism; (Collage as the antidote).

What is form, content, formalism? Technique, process, means of production? Godard: Still from //La Chinoise//: The content of the image: religion or ideology?

What is the relationship between THEORY AND PRACTICE? Party as the //framework// of political struggle; the content: is Marxist theory; the practice: toward the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lenin, “What is there to be Done?” The road to absolute freedom, for Lenin, is a disciplined party. What is the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat?” and where does this idea stem from? Marx: theory; Lenin: praxis Absolute rule of the people is defined as freedom. It goes with taking over power from the ruling class. The “vanguard”, for Lenin, had the role of turning the structure of power upside-down by leading the masses.
 * Q:** __Who constitutes the vanguard? What is the relationship between the vanguard and the party?__

“Freedom” is a great word, but under the flag of “freedom industry” the most rapacious of wars were conducted. Under the banner of “freedom of labor” workers have been robbed. The very same internal hypocrisy is contained in the contemporary phrase “freedom to criticize.” People who are truly convinced that they have advanced the frontier of science would not demand freedom for new ideas to coexist next to old, but to replace them…” à To replace THE OLD WITH THE NEW. “Social Democratic consciousness” is not natural to the workers; “The working class is dark, brutal, cryptic” (From Chris Marker’s //Grin Without a Cat//) Workers can only develop trade-union consciousness (to see and to fight for their immediate rights and needs, to fight the bosses and to put pressure into the government for labor legislations favoring them. What is **Socialism?** It is a theory that combines philosophy, history and economy, created by the intelligentsia: Specifically, Marx and Engels. It came from the development of ideas as well as from the growth of a worker’s movement (a combination of theory and practice ). So it must be brought to them (this consciousness) from the outside. “Revolutionary action” (is done by the intelligentsia: the development of ideas); and organization of tasks, the correction of previous failures. The working masses do not have an ideology of their own, so they need to adopt bourgeois or socialist ideology. Q: What is bourgeois ideology? Q: What is socialist ideology? For Lenin: there is not a “third” ideology. Bourgeois ideology and socialist ideology are ANTITHETICAL to one another as are the bourgeois class and the working class. (the middle class is known as the “petite-bourgeoisie”; but they cannot be in the middle;
 * Q:** What is the role of the “intelligentsia” according to Lenin?

à The workers cannot create an ideology of their own; so they need “trustworthy representatives” connected with an organization of revolutionaries that support the masses. It is a “memberless organization” Solid foundation of strong organization of revolutionaries: as the movement itself; this movement will realize the goals of Social Democracy and of trade-unions. What is the role of intellectuals, according to Lenin? à To accompany the proletariat (as the vanguard) in taking over power. à To create the new and to replace the old Two positions of the Party: Revolutionary and “attendistes” (to wait until the contradictions explode or sharpen and there will be a national movement)

“New Socialist reality” in Russia –explain. Aesthetic matching this new socialist reality: Vertov, Eisenstein, Rodchenko, Malevitsch, Mayakovski (Revolutionary Art) à What kind of aesthetic? Avant-garde of the 1920s: An art that would accompany this new revolutionary society; progress, industry, the workers, etc. à These practices were suppressed, waned away, forced to integrate with the Stalinist regime. à They were disbanded by the Central Committee In the 1930s Socialist Realism became the official art, an obligatory method. What does this mean? What is realistic form? Soviet Socialist Realism: A style (literature, visual arts, theater and cinema). à That Soviet art did not look like the art of the Capitalist West (decandent and formalist that rejected **the values of the past**) à Russian artist’s problem: The people were illiterate, uneducated; the Western avant-garde wanted to make //tabula rasa// with the past; destroy the old to bring in the new. The Russian artists: wanted to educate the masses //in their tradition//; so to somewhat incorporate the past. To appropriate the artistic heritage of the past. Malevich: was for this “western” revolutionary //tabula rasa// (not to save art collections); “not to block the path to the new conception of life.” Malevich: Believed that the new, revolutionary times should be represented by new, revolutionary art forms. (Celebrating revolutionary values: progress, socialism, the people) Hitlerism: “the masses”; Socialism: “the people”; Example: Malevich’s work, Tatlin and Vertov. Rodchenko, Vertov… the Russian avant-garde: argued: to create a NEW art in consonance, resonant, with the NEW society, obliterating the past. New form and new content.
 * 1917 Russian Revolution**
 * Boris Groys, “Educating the Masses: Socialist Realist Art”**
 * Realistic** in form, and **Socialist** in content.

à __The debate: Is it new social forms or their social USE or purpose?__ __What to do with the old, with tradition?__ à Having been taken away from the old ruling classes by the proletariat, the old art forms (heritage) had been put at the service of the new Socialist state; they became NEW because they were filled with a NEW CONTENT and used in a completely different context.

Distinction between PROLETARIAN and non-PROLETARIAN art: Is found not in the form, but in the USE of this form; (instrumentalization). Example: Trains are the same here and in the west; they have the same form; but the difference is that in Russia: The trains are at the service of the proletariat and in the west the trains are at the service of capitalism.

Socialist Realist forms: 1. To announce, anticipate and/or accompany the revolution. 2. To educate the masses. 3. To create the new aesthetic for the proletariat… for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Realism: Visual Language (or //form//) Socialism: Ideology or //content// + the cultural heritage;  New form; What is the content? New content at the service of the people. (Hitlerism: to show the people as ONE, united by blood and land);
 * Q: **What is the form and content of the avant-garde?

What is formalism? And why did Socialist Realism reject formalism?

Socialist Realism : A return to classical models of art-making. (to distinguish itself from ‘decadent’ modernist art. (Same argument Hitler would make for his exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’)

à **What were the __themes__ of socialist realism?** Parades, demonstrations, leadership, happy workers building the material basis of the new society. (Classical mimetic image). **“Revolutionary Development”**

à Stay away from a “mere depiction of facts” (Naturalism) à

Agent Grinets, D. [|Biography] Date 1937
 * "Thanks to the Party, Thanks to Dear Stalin for a Happy, Joyful Childhood" **

How to select the historical facts? “A fact as the raw material from which truth would emerge”

Factography: Vertov’s “Factory of facts” (3 Songs about Lenin?)
 * To give the image a future world; (the facts of Socialist life –Vertov)**

Is Social Realism realist in content? Why?

Socially useful art, art for the masses (for mass reproduction, distribution and consumption as opposed to? (Concentrated, individual contemplation)). Posters, color photography or cinema. (Isaak Brodsky) Mass distribution of art in Stalinist Russia. Officially established models. Not to produce commercial products, but to educate, inspire and guide the people. à Art had to be accessible to the masses on the level of form. (Content and goals were pre-determined and aimed at educating the masses). Greenberg: Mass culture in the West is the same as Socialist Realism

What is avant-garde art? Groys: Avant-garde artists wished to create a new public, a new type of human being, to change humankind, not art. The production of new images for a new public with new eyes.

Malleability of human beings; Capitalist mass-culture and Socialist Realism are put in the same level. (Production, reproduction, original and copy, quality and quantity) Socialist realism: Dreamers who would dream socialist dreams. To create a new human kind as a new public for their art (joint with political power) à Socialist-realist image production’s criteria: Struggle for a new society or struggle against censorship (after Stalin’s death)

What should the artist/writer do? Anticipate, accompany, envision the future liberated masses, accompany the revolution. Or: Be visually and formally sophisticated? Entretains; (This was deemed as bourgeois)

The autonomy of the poet: Is the freedom to write whatever he pleases. Leninism: does not grant the poet this autonomy, as he should put his practice to the service of a cause. The “bourgeois” writer: entertains and does not answer to the vanguardist call; he puts thus, his work at the service of certain class interests. à Which class interests? à Bourgeois writer: its antithesis is the writer who chooses to side with the proletariat on the basis of class struggle. Which, for Benjamin, puts an end to the autonomy of the writer. What is thus the problem or the contradiction here? The writer is called to put his service at the work of a cause but this hinders/obliterates/constrains his autonomy. If he is entirely autonomous, then he is on the side of the bourgeoisie (entertaining).
 * Walter Benjamin**, “The Author as Producer”

à A further contradiction: A writer’s or artist’s activity which is put to the service of class struggle, is called //tendentious// (or biased; the support of a particular viewpoint).

“Correct political line” (politically correct?) which is demanded of the poet.

Political line and quality: What is the connection? Tendentious position: A work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality; or a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.

“Political tendency” and fascism; For Benjamin, the idea or concept of the “political tendency” is useless. What is the relationship between “political tendency” and content? Or rather, how can we know the “political tendency” of a work? What is the “political tendency” of Avant-garde art? And of “socialist realism”? What does he mean by //quality//? What is the relationship between //quality// and //form//?

Somewhat cryptic statement by Benjamin: “The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality //because// it includes its literary //tendency//.”

à What is the relationship between form and content in political poetry? Benjamin takes a //dialectical approach// (or MATERIALIST CRITIQUE). The dialectical approach implies to insert the things at work (tendency, quality, form, content) //into their living social contexts//. Social conditions: Are determined by the conditions of production. To critique a work in terms of a (Traditional) materialist critique: WE must ask, how this work stands vis-à-vis the social relations of production of its time. à Does the work accept the relations of production (bourgeois)? à Does the work seek to overthrow the relations of production (revolutionary)

Benjamin’s method: What is the work’s //position in the relations of production of its time//? By this Benjamin means: TECHNIQUE With the idea of //technique//, Benjamin seeks to go beyond the opposition between form and content, tendency and quality. Tecnique: it can be progressive or regressive. New set of relations is highlighted by Benjamin: The “correct political tendency” and “progressive literary technique.” Form and genre in relationship to technical factors affecting the present;
 * PRAXIS/POIESIS/TECNE**

Content: as subject matter; form: as form of organization; Facts and information;

Benjamin’s idea of **The Author as Producer**: What does he mean by this? Newspapers: belong to capital. It is controlled by the bourgeoisie. Left-wing intellectuals //bourgeois left: What does he mean by this distinction? To express sympathy for the workers is not enough. To work on the basis of one’s sympathy for the workers is not enough. To ascribe to the principles of Marxist-Leninism is not enough. To be on the side of the proletariat is not enough. “Logocracy” is the rule of intellectuals; Intellectuals are in between the classes. There is no basis for their orgaization; they operate on the principle of common sense. Their effect can never be revolutionary. How to support the struggle? To join in or to agitate with? The “intellectual” is a type of person defined by his opinions, attitudes, dispositions (But not by his position in the process of production); The intellectual is “beside” or in front of the proletariat. Beside or in front of the proletariat: as a benefactor, an ideological patron; For Benjamin such a position is impossible and it must be rethought, and his position should be considered as part of the process of production. Forms and instruments of production: (For the intellectual: the media, literature, art) For Benjamin: it is necessary that the producer transforms the FORMS AND INSTRUMENTS OF PRODUCTION. Praxis, poiesis, tecné. What is a producer? Progressive intelligentsia: one interested in freeing the means of production and serving the class struggle. Brecht: he made the demand not to supply the apparatus of production without… changing it in accord with socialism. Works: To transform certain institutes and institutions. à Is the position of the “Author as Producer” Sustainable today? You probably have heard or been taught about this essay today and the notion of the “Artist as Producer” as it has been incredibly influential in art since the 1960s. Mention some ways in which artists have become producers, minding their position in the process of production: à Institutional critique (70’s and 80’s); à Practices of// positionality // à To seek to change institutions or entire fields of knowledge, for example. à Does this idea still hold? In a way, the model of the author as producer has predominated in the past 40-50 years. à Artist as ethnographer or anthropologist (Aware of his position within cultural processes) What do we make of the Capitalistic machine, which is resilient to interruptions… produces transparency?
 * A political tendency has a counterrevolutionary function as long as the writer has solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes (tendency), NOT AS A PRODUcER.**

à Technical innovations; à **Difference between SUPPLYING THE APPARATUS of PRODUCTION WITH INFORMATION or KNOWLEDGE and/or TRANSFORMING IT.** A hack writer : à Improves the apparatus and puts it at the service of the interests of socialism. Means of production: Radio and the illustrated press.
 * Benjamin**: Introduces the term “hack writer”

à What did Dadaism do, according to Benjamin, that was revolutionary? à IT “tested” art from its authenticity (Still life form tickets, spools, cotton…) RUPTURES OF TIME. Daily life; duration. à Photomontage: (John Heartfield) à Photomontage: Both records and TRANSFIGURES; à What does it mean to ‘transfigure’? To transform into something more beautiful or more elevated. More// nuance//, modern; à This can go wrong as well: to aestheticize poverty; To give images and texts revolutionary value by breaking the barrier between writing and image; that the photographer’s caption “wrenches” the image from modish commerce and gives it revolutionary use-vaule. Writers should take up photography too. Transcending specialization is revolutionary.// Umfunktionierung: //(functional transformation) “Photography whereby poverty is made an object of consumption” (Or violence; show Dorothea Lang… photographs of the tenements; photographs of violence.

à To wrest images from their being mere objects of consumption; struggle against poverty or war as objects of consumption; Images of violence and horror we saw next class: “Glamour” vs. “Rawness” How can we relate it to what Benjamin calls “Transforming the means of production?” Or “to work on the means of production”? “Cultural Producer” à A political tendency is a necessary but never sufficient condition for the organizing function of a work. à To induce other producers to produce and to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. à Pirate radio and television; alternative information venues. à To turn CONSUMERS INTO PRODUCERS (spectators into collaborators) à Relational art or relational aesthetics; participation art.

A third and last part of Benjamin’s essay: the one that pertains to Brecht, has been taken less into account: Brecht’s Epic Theater A theatrical apparatus; In Brecht: Theater entertains and educates; Brecht went back to the most elements in theater; a podium; changed the connection between stage and public, text and performance, director and actor. The principle of interruption: (of action); To distanciate; to create astonishmpent; Theater: Does not reproduce situations but discovers them;
 * Epic Theater: Portrays situations rather than develops plots**.
 * To expose what is present; not to fill the public with feelings but to alienate it and to point at the contradictions in which the public lives.**
 * Convulsion of the diaphragm, rather than convulsion of the soul**

Should art: Entretain, scientific knowledge, etc. Intellectual as defined by Lenin and Benjamin’s response; What is “revolutionary” work according to Lenin and Benjamin? Means, process of production? Technique; education, entertainment; Brecht: what does Benjamin see in Brecht’s Epic Theater that is revolutionary? Means, process of production, technique. “For whom is the work?” (the question of address); Socialist realism Brecht: does he mention socialist realism? What is Benjamin’s diagnostic on Socialist Realism? Education or entertainment? Vanguard, avant-garde? What is the relationship between socialist realism and power?
 * Collage (break down of ‘realistic’ image)**

Brecht: “To move, to teach to delight” (a social function of art as the embellishment of life, science and knowledge as the sources of pleasure). Science-knowledge: not as something static but to bring it into movement within theory and practice. “Proposals, lessons and fables” Didactic art or “useful art”; use of irony. Estrangement-effect: A suspension; the acquisition of scientific knowledge as entertaining; the v-effect: estrangement, defamiliarization, separation; to make us look at something with new eyes: first, general familiarity of a habit (we are numb perceptually); Techniques: Quotation, showing you the character you are playing and its traits; shutting off of empathy or sympathy; Storytelling in theater versus theatricality; anecdotes vs. speeches. Emphasis on social class and critical self-consciousness; Confrontation of the characters with moral dilemmas (fables): THIS IS something Sit-comes took from Brecht; moral fables. The collective re-education; Brecht: to demonstrate how capitalism functions; Distanciation devices: placards, projected images, characters addressing the audiences directly, music and lighting ‘out of place’; disconnected episodes; to frustrate the viewer’s expectations of entertainment. No romantic resolution and de-identification; social satire; à De-familiarization of militantism; Benjamin: demands that the writer thinks or reflects on his position in the process of production What does godard do, for example? à The proletarianization of an intellectual hardly makes a proletarian; because education turns one into bourgeois; educational privilege; although the revolutionary intellectual appears as the betrayer of his class of origin. à To betray one’s own tribe (Action at the Israeli consulate)?

Author as producer and activism? Image makers today: their work is instrumentalized or ‘free’? To which cause? To be a revolutionary intellectual/artist/writer: is it the same thing as being an activist? What is the relationship? To which class does the ‘activist’ belong to? What is her relationship to the process of production? What is her position within the process of production? And her relationship to// technique//? What are the techniques, (mediums) and genres available to the activist today?

Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein”

Why is theater so important? How did we define representation last class? Make sometime appear; to render present the absent. THe stage: PRECISELY REGULATES THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THE STAGE AND THE VIEWER. Brecht: What kind of distance?

Representation: is not directly defined by imitation; Brecht: the burden of meaning and pleasure bears on each scene, not on the wole; there is no final meaning; Eisenstein is the same; in Eisenstein:// no image is boring//; Painting: Can only tell an instant and thus this instant has to be chosen very well; (the pregnant moment); Brecht’s thetare and Eisenstein’s cinema: are a series of pregnant moments; Brecht: makes gesturres, the gest, social. Indicating certain attitudes… DistanciatioN: Brecht presents a tableau for the spectator to criticize; The meaning begins with the social gest; A film about “drugs”; drugs as the subject; but it is hollow; there is no social gest; drugs lead to impotence, suicide;


 * ALL MILITANT ART IS REPRESENTATIONAL;**

Unity of revolutionary form + Content (//La Chinoise//); artistic value and advanced politically; to fight in two fronts: Theory, practice, revolution and art; What is the relationship between theory and practice in Lenin? The intellectual writes the theory… theory precedes practice. Same in Socialist Realism; In Benjamin: “ARTIST AS PRODUCER”; the weight is put in practice; not as “political” practice but as revolutionizing technique (Should we accuse Benjamin of being a formalist? The producer’s awareness within the relations of production; ‘useful’; his valorization of Brecht); Brecht: Is pure practice that leads to or is in relationship to theory; theory and practice resemble one another; “Dictatorship of the proletariat” = dictatorship of the proletariat; revolutionary form and content;