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From: blp Category: Art Date: 31 March 2008 Time: 09:25 AM Review: J:Well I hate nostalgia, you're right, because it's just liking yourself (loving your own youth) or rejecting change, and making that into an ideology,. Me: No, sorry, before we go on, you've misunderstood the term 'ideology' as it's being used here. The idea is that ideology is always unconscious (an unconscious propagation of dogma, probably through behaviour) and, despite the protestations of Blair et al. still with us. The idea that I'm nostalgic for ideology is precisely to miss the point. I'm alluding favourably to the process of identifying it. J: You like Rodchenko because he makes art for art's sake. And then reject Tilmans because his photos are fake, ie induce sentimental nostalgia for non-existent moments (surely something formal or abstract there) but all I sense from you is nostalgia for ideology. Whatever you 'sense' from me, the distinction I'm making is between Rodchenko's overt fakeness, which, in a Godardian sense, is realism (this real thing right before you now through which some other reality is mediated) and Tillmans' repressed, unacknowledged fakeness, which purports to be one thing while actually being another. J: And I have been reading some New Left texts from 1969 and they seem to be trying to break from the inertia brought upon by the conservative/nostalgic mindset, things used to be better, cant be changed for the better. Even though they were living in exciting times, most people were defeatist/nostalgic then. Some of the new left weren't and neither should you be, and neither should i be nostalgic for the new left. Me: Don't worry. I'm not. But the idea I'm getting from Zizek, however poncey you think it is, is that today's defeatism precisely boils down to insisting that things can't be changed for the better because attempts to make things better are in the past, have been decisively discredited, always lead to the gulag or the concentration campt etc. Surely you've noticed that today's conservative, since Thatcher, is not just a traditionalist but a distinctly uncomfortable mix of traditionalism and an almost modernist iconoclasm and triumphalism, the kind that dignifies terms such as 'radical' and 'blue-sky thinking'. To say that Rodchenko's simply in the past and liking him or feeling that there is something valuable to be learned from him is just nostalgia is to insist on a version of the superior present moment that is not necessarily the true one. The pictures are present to us. It's also to disavow the nostalgia in Tillmans that you've already admitted to. To suggest that using texts, images or events from the past as a way of understanding/critiquing the present is nostalgia is almost to rule out the possibility of any critique at all since all potential critiques are in the past as soon as they are uttered. It's a misunderstanding, perhaps a willful one, of the term nostalgia. What criteria do you have for saying we must be more accepting of something because it was done more recently? What process of history or progress proves to us that looking back to Rodchenko's strategies is simply a pointless, destructive process of nostalgic yearning? J: The whole Zizek poncery about ideology/dogma just boils down to you saying people nowadays are superficial and unselfaware, which is what every older nostalgic generation says about every younger generation. ( and think about that isn't superficiality akin to art for art's sake, leaching out the meaning and revelling in the aesthetics (like our youth who dress up as punks, goths, nerds whatever) rather like Rodchenko, who ignores his subjects suffering and the inequality of his time to make beautiful photos). Me: As I understand it, this formulation of ideology we're discussing says that people are always unselfaware, so I suppose, if it is the case that would-be radicals always criticise the people of their time for this, it wouldn't be surprising. In fact, however, Zizek says something like the opposite: where Marx says 'They are doing it, but they don't know they're doing it', he turns it round to say 'They are doing it and they know it, but they do it anyway.' Actually, if that is what he's saying, I'm not sure I totally agree. I think unconscious processes are still at work (actually, I'm pretty sure he does too) and it was those that I was talking about in Tillmans' work. (I've made this case at least twice, so I won't go over it again). So: Are you saying you *don't* think people are unselfaware? To whit., are you disputing the existence of the unconscious, or of unconscious processes? You seem to be accusing me of a sort of sour mean mindedness towards the present. I thought I was engaging in criticality, the purported purpose of this site - not to be vacuous and say nothing or be mindlessly celebratory. But I don't think I'm being mean and I think the kind of misanthropic old codger disgust you impute is anywhere in anything I've said. At least I don't use words like 'poncery'. And this critique, or Zizek's anyway, is precisely about what you say this site is for: making things better. The whole thrust of his argument is to say, as I've already said above, that at this point in time we are in a state of uncritical stasis or regression or passivity or depression because we have been and continue to be sold the idea that the mere process of critiquing with a view to improvement is an old-fashioned one and, worse, a profoundly dangerous one. // To move on, this 'art for art's sake' term is introduced by you and, rather than just accept it and let you build arguments on it, I'm going to reject it. Do you really think formalism is just the same as aestheticism and Rodchenko can be dismissed as some Wildean aesthete? Rodchenko's subject matter is the revolution and industrial society's means of production. He sees that it would be hypocrisy to address that subject matter without alluding to his own means of production. Again, it's an attempt at showing a totality and making the art work itself something present rather than a distanciating allusion to some other absent present, inducing nostalgia. You allude, not without merit, to the absence of suffering in his work. Zizek would probably say, and I would agree, that such depictions are suspect because they act as a means for comfortable intellectuals and other sophisticated urban types to have their suffering done for them and feel virtuous vicariously. Think of those Benetton ads in the eighties showing AIDS victims and sufferers from starvation. They advertise the idea that we are a caring society. Still, Rodchenko's got issues. Much as we are asked to celebrate a sort of end of history, Rodchenko seems to be asking us to do the same. Even the very photos that Stalin condemned for using odd angles look like celebrations of the revolution. This is one of the very fascinating things about them; that his formal/aesthetic devices so clearly have meaning, even if it's disputed, rather than simply being for art's sake (a position that also has a less clear meaning). J: What's new? Actually, I think the answer to this question, or an attempt at an answer, is in what I've written above, but I'll try to spell it out: it's the anti-critical promulgation of the notion of a post-ideological end of history. We've had the critiques and the attempts at a better society during the twentieth century. We no longer believe, as a result, that we or society in general are unaware of the political or aesthetic processes that shape us, yet we have also lost faith in the critiques to get us out of the mire and we are actively scared off the attempts to build fairer societies.