Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content: A Review, Cont'd

It makes me very happy that the first part of my review of Agamben's The Man Without Content (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) has provoked such an intense interest on the part of my readers. This has become the most popular post in the past 6 weeks. I have to warn my readers, though, that a significant chunk of Agamben's book is dedicated to a very painstaking analysis of the Ancient Greek terms central to his analysis. As a result of reading the book, I now understand some Greek words. In a way, this analysis of terminology employed by Greek philosophers becomes quite redundant, which in my opinion, is the main weakness of The Man Without Content.

As some of my readers observed correctly, you cannot discuss aesthetics without addressing the issues of class. Agamben dedicates quite a lot of time to analyzing whether Marxist theory is helpful to the clarification of the issues surrounding aesthetic enjoyment. Agamben rejects the Marxist-based perception of artistic production:

The privileged status of art in the aesthetic sphere is artificially interpreted as the survival of a condition in which manual and intellectual labor are not yet divided and in which, therefore, the productive act maintains all its integrity and uniqueness; by contrast, technical production, which takes place starting from a condition of extreme division of labor, remains essentially fungible and reproducible.

This attitude to art is, however, fairly new in historical terms. For Agamben, it is based on a decidedly incorrect and artificial approach. He reminds us that the Ancient Greek philosophers had a completely different view of differences between art and labor:

The Greeks, to whom we owe all the categories through which we judge ourselves and the reality around us, made a clear distinction between poiesis (poiein, "to pro-duce" in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein, "to do" in the sense of acting). As we shall see, central to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being.

The real difference between art and a non-artistic result of our productivity lies in art's central capacity to bring into being something radically new. Art's privileged status, says Agamben, is a result of art's power to create something out of nothing. Today, we have unfortunately forgot about this crucial ability of art to create something out of nothing. Agamben points out that the tradition of storing art in museums and art collections of private individuals robs art of its role as an act of creation. The moment you attempt to contain art in a museum or a collection, you transform it into an occasion for aesthetic enjoyment or, as happens more and more often, an opportunity for the spectators to practice their aesthetic judgement. Thus, art stops being a subject and becomes an object. It is only valuable as long as we can turn it to our use as a trigger to our critical analysis.

The reason why this new attitude to art was formed lies in the changing attitude towards work. We all know that the Greeks did not hold working in a very high regard (to say the very least):

The Greeks were prevented from considering work thematically, as one of the fundamental modes of human activity besides poiesis and praxis, by the fact that the physical work necessary for life's needs was performed by slaves. However, this does not mean that they were unaware of its existence or had not understood its nature. To work meant to submit to necessity, and submission to necessity, which made man the equal of the animal, with its perpetual and forced search for means of sustenance, was thought incompatible with the condition of the free man. As Hannah Arendt rightly points out, to affirm that work was an object of contempt in antiquity because it was reserved to slaves is a prejudice: the ancients reasoned about it in the opposite direction, deeming necessary the existence of slaves because of the slavish nature of the activities that provided for life's sustenance. In other words, they had understood one of the essential characteristics of work, namely, its immediate relation to the biological process of life. 

According to the Greeks' way of thinking, one had to deserve the right to be considered a human being. The way to achieve that was by making oneself as different as possible from an animal. While animals are ruled by their biology, human beings can attempt to free themselves from this enslavement to physiological processes. (In my view, this is the central idea behind the origins of feminism - see Beauvoir's The Second Sex - which allows feminism to claim as its origin such an unlikely place as the Ancient Greek philosophy.)As we can see, for Agamben this understanding of the reasons behind the privileged status of art is completely artificial. The philosopher reminds us that the way in which the thinkers of Ancient Greece understood art did not allow for such facile and reductive understanding of art and production:

This vision of work vs art is completely transformed in subsequent historic periods, claims Agamben:

Work, which used to occupy the lowest rank in the hierarchy of active life, climbs to the rank of central value and common denominator of every human activity. This ascent begins at the moment when Locke discovers in work the origin of property, continues when Adam Smith elevates it to the source of all wealth, and reaches its peak with Marx, who makes of it the expression of man's very humanity.

We can see how true this analysis is if we observe the way artists relate to their own creative tasks. The legend of Balzac who asked to be tied to an armchair in order to remain as productive as possible continues today in the perennial efforts of artists to keep producing regularly and always achieving higher quality of their product. As a result, the role of art in our lives is transformed in the ways outlined previously. This is, of course, a very dangerous thing to happen:

In the work of art man risks losing not simply a piece of cultural wealth, however precious, and not even the privileged expression of his creative energy: it is the very space of his world, in which and only in which he can find himself as man and as being capable of action and knowledge.

This is, in my opinion, the central part of Agamben's message. What we have lost as a result of our approach to art is a place where we can truly come to existence as human beings.

Food for thought:

I would love to know how my readers would answer the following questions:

1. What are the reasons behind the privileged status of art, in your opinion? Do you agree with Marx or with Agamben in this respect?
2. Do you agree with the Ancient Greek philosophers in that being human requires a break with the dependence on "the biological cycle of the organism"?
3. Does work make us human (as Marx maintained) or does it make us less human (as the Greeks would have it)?

Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content: A Review

The philosophy of aesthetics normally does not interest me very much. However, like everything else written by this great thinker, Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) overcame my resistance to the subject of aesthetics.

For Agamben, aesthetics presents both a great impediment to the fulfillment of human destiny and the only hope of achieving it. He begins his fascinating study by discussing the relatively recent origins of the idea of good taste and aesthetic sensibility. It is not until the mid-XVIIth century, says Agamben, that the distinction between good taste and bad taste appears. It is at that same point in history that a strict boundary between art and non-art begins to be drawn. From that moment, a work of art increasingly transforms for the spectators into an opportunity to practice their good taste and exercise their aesthetic judgement.

The appearance of the notion of bad taste is, obviously, attendant on the rise of the idea of good taste. Agamben points out that

Today the existence of an art and literature whose sole purpose is entertainment is so exclusively attributed to a mass society, and we are so accustomed to seeing it through the psychological condition of the intellectuals who witnessed its first explosion in the second half of the nineteenth century, that we forget that when it first arose . . .  it was an aristocratic, not a popular, phenomenon. And the critics of mass culture would certainly be setting themselves a more useful task if they started asking, first of all, how it could have happened that precisely a refined elite should have felt the need to create vulgar objects for its sensibility.

In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting subjects Agamben discusses in The Man Without Content. For the obvious reasons, I spend a lot of time with people who are literary critics, art critics, etc. Largely, our entire profession consists of enjoying, contemplating, and analyzing works of art. Usually, the best way to distinguish a seasoned colleague from a novice in our craft is by their attitude towards mass culture. The more secure an art critic feels in his or her vocation, the easier it is for them to confess their intense enjoyment of Elizabeth George's mysteries, the music of 50 Cent, or the reality television. While the 1st year PhD students react with indignation (mostly, completely fake) to the question whether they enjoy mass entertainment, literary critics of international renown happily show you their mystery novel collections or the DVD sets of their favorite soap. Thus, it was good to see Agamben discuss how popular culture had its origins in the preferences of the intellectual elites. I would have wished to see him explore this subject further, which he, sadly, decided not to do.

Another fascinating point that Agamben makes in The Man Without Content (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) has to do with the radical transformation that has taken place in the very nature of the enjoyment of artworks:

The work of art does not satisfy the soul's spiritual needs as it did in earlier times, because our tendency toward reflection and toward a critical stance have become so strong that when we are before a work of art we no longer attempt to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempt to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment. . . The work of art is no longer, for modern man, the concrete appearance of the divine, which causes either ecstasy or sacred terror in the soul, but a privileged occasion to exercise his critical taste, that judgment on art which, if it is not actually worth more than art itself for us, certainly addresses a need that is at least as essential.

In my experience, at least, Agamben's observations couldn't be more true. In a museum, I often find myself standing in front of a work of art, composing in my head a critical narrative about the painting I am observing. Many a play has been spoilt for me by this obsessive need to accompany the act of watching a theatrical performance with a mental composition of a review explaining its meaning to an imaginary audience.

This manner of relating to art has eventually led to a very similar approach to nature, especially since our direct experience of nature has been reduced in number and quality by the advances of civilization:

While we are no longer able to judge a work of art aesthetically, our intelligence of nature has grown so opaque, and, moreover, the presence in it of the human element has grown to such an extent, that sometimes, in front of a landscape, we spontaneously compare it to its shadow, wondering whether it is aesthetically beautiful or ugly. . . Thus we find it natural to speak today of "land conservancy" in the same way that we speak of the preservation of a work of art, both ideas that would have struck other eras as inconceivable. It is also likely that we will soon create institutes to restore natural beauty just like those for the restoration of works of art, without recognizing that such an idea presupposes a radical transformation of our relationship to nature. What used to present itself to aesthetic judgment as absolute otherness has now become something familiar and natural, while natural beauty, which was, for our judgment, a familiar reality, has become something radically alien: art has become nature, and nature, art.

What distinguishes Agamben from most contemporary philosophers is his reluctance to accompany such beautiful insights by obnoxious moralizing. Too many thinkers would have grasped this line of reasoning as the perfect opportunity to rant against the "evils" of progress and civilization. Agamben, thankfully, avoids this trap.

[To be continued...]

Part II of this review is located here.