It's about the prize

In the Economy of Prestige, James F. English continues Bourdieu’s (and Weber’s) work of disenchantment. Bourdieu demystified ‘pure’ art’s illusion of transcendence by identifying its inner logic as one moment in a dialectic of merchandise and signification, money and art, bourgeois and avant-garde. This antagonism generates the cognitive pre-conditions necessary for the field of cultural production to exist and allows for symbolic value to be consecrated on its products. English isolates a specific moment in the process of consecration, the attribution of artistic and literary prizes, and demystifies it by exposing its unacknowledged rules and dialectical workings. His main idea is that works of art receive symbolic value, not through the awarding of prizes, but through contempt for the awards process itself: that critics rail against misguided awards committees incapable of recognizing true art presupposes that the latter exists and maintains the unconscious collective belief (illusio) that art is a special commodity owing its prestige to the fact that it inhabits a realm above crass political or mercantile interests. The prize is an example of symbolic value production, in which value is conferred onto that which lacks it intrinsically. In the symbolic economy, products such books or paintings have little value as physical objects; what counts is that they be recognized as valuable, which is neither automatic nor intuitive but constructed by institutions, among them the prize industry, that allocate worth onto that which is otherwise worthless. Prizes maintain the illusion that recognition of good art is intuitive, self-evident; when they go to the wrong pearson (such as Sully Prudhomme and not Tolstoy, or Larry Heinemann and not Toni Morrison), the resultant scandal—“the instrument par excellence of symbolic action”—confirms our belief that artistic greatness announces itself while obscuring the fact that artistic value is a cultural commodity socially produced by critics, professors, award committees, by all those agents with vested interests in believing in it. Distaining the prize industry reassures us that art has value; or rather, it reassures those of us who need to believe that art is valuable. I am one who needs such an illusion.

It's about the money

Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of artistic and literary production would seem to support the claim that, in the post-Enlightenment France, art has replaced religion. By analyzing the dialectical opposition between the logics of money and art, Bourdieu expands on Weber’s characterization of rationality as either instrumental or substantive, the former being oriented toward economic efficiency, the latter toward ultimate ends whose value is judged according to religious or metaphysical worldviews. Weber saw modernization as the progressive rationalization of all aspects of social life, a process in which instrumental rationality becomes embodies itself in capitalism and substantive rationality dissolves into autonomous cultural value spheres (Bourdieu’s fields), each with its own logic. Modernization for him was also the disenchantment of the world, or the de-sacralization of social life in which “the old mysteries of religion are clarified in the cold light of scientific day”. Bourdieu’s sociology, which investigates the unthought, pre-reflexive conditions underlying social practices, participates in this disenchantment and his analysis of symbolic goods de-mystifies art much like Enlightenment thinking demystified religion.

What is striking in Bourdieu’s analysis is just how much the logic of ‘pure’ art functions in secular France like that of religion in pre-modern societies. Bordieu views schools as homologous to churches, both of which, in Weber’s words, "found and systematically delimit the new victorious doctrine and defend the old against prophetic attacks, establish what has and what does not have sacred value, and make it penetrate into the faith of the laity”. Something of the Protestant work ethic, the impetus behind capitalist modernization, survives in the (anti-) economy of pure art, which must appear disinterested in money order to make money: “The vision that makes of asceticism in this world the condition of health in the hereafter finds its principle in the specific logic of symbolic alchemy that maintains that investments will not be recouped unless they are (or seem to be) operating at a loss”. Avant-gardism, which “offers no other guarantee of its conviction than its indifference to money”, thus only appears as the new asceticism. The logic of pure art partakes in Weber’s substantive rationality as residue of the pre-modern and pre-enlightenment in a fully rationalized world, but the artwork’s ‘economic angelism’, its claim of transcendence, of obeying a telos superior to the merely instrumental, of existing as the metaphysical purity of the thing-in-itself (l’art pour l’art), is an illusion. This illusio is constitutive of art’s very mode of being; the appearance of transcendence is its fundamental law. Art obeys a theological logic and must be permanently produced and reproduced by celebrants and believers whose conviction is based on a collective misrecognition that art is not all about the money. This is the only way Editions de Minuit’s 1952 publication of Beckett’s En attendant Godot could make money, and making money, even if it must be deferred as the symbolic capital of consecration is accrued, is the reason why was published in the first place. There is nothing outside of instrumental rationality.

Bourdieu does not explain why this post-Enlightenment transfer took place, why the illusion of religion was replaced by the illusion of art. Could it be that, imprisoned within the iron cage of capitalist-instrumental rationality, we have no choice but to collectively generate illusions to make it bearable?

Pastoral de desengaño

I use the above as title for this last blog entry on 100 años because I think it is suggestive of the book as a whole. A pastoral is a literary genre portraying an idealized version of country life. From its early days as an utopian Eden where death is unknown and things have yet to be given names, to its final days as a dystopic Sodom of decadence and corruption, the story of Macondo is one of progressive disenchantemtment, of a pastoral gone wrong. It is one replete with biblical references; from paradise to paradise lost, Macondo is the site of an epic deluge, of spiritual decay and final apocalypse. When José Arcadio (II) squanders Ursula's hidden treasure by transforming the Buendía house into a decadent paradise of "equivocal pleasures", one of which includes bathing in champagne with naked adolescent boys, the reference to Sodom is clear and one might suggest A Hundred Years of Sodom as an alternative title. (In a book whose female characters conform so firmly to traditional gender codes, the use of homoerotic evocation to denote sin and foreshadow biblical apocalypse is not really surprising). Yet Macondo is not destroyed for the sin of homosexuality (which is only hinted at), but rather for having been founded in bad faith as an attempt to free its founders from the shame of incest and murder. This unresolved shame condemns the successive generations of the Buendia clan to seek out solitude and silence as a way to avoid communication, change, truth. Members of this clan rarely change, remaining two-dimensional static entities caught up in "un engrenaje de repeticiones irreparables, una rueda giratoria que hubiera seguido dando vueltas hasta la eternidad, de no haber sido por el degaste progresivo e irreperable del eje" (471). Once the truth is finally known, once Aureliano Babilonia draws the curtains to the city of mirrors and deciphers Melquiades' parchments, nothing can stop the ants' final invasion and the wind from erasing the memory of Macondo and its melancholy inhabitants forever. Sometimes repetition is preferable to change, silence to truth, especially when the latter threatens to overwhelm. Fortunately literature exists as a means of documenting the compulsion to repeat, and by doing so, breaking it. Perhaps there would be less solitude were literature not relegated to cargo class.

A few last words on repetition in art:

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the [symbolic] repetitions of death, through which we make sport of our own mortality.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

Opium of the Masses

Marx used the term opiate of the masses in reference to religion, but I think think it applies equally well to Mexican telenovelas, a cultural phenomenon that inspires a cult-like following and which, like mainstream Catholicism, diverts attention away from the unjust social conditions so characteristic of Mexican society through a highly seductive deployment of beauty and money. Despite (or because of) its charm, a show like Corazon salvaje perpetuates the pernicious racial and class divisions that separate Mexico into working mestizo masses and privileged white oligarchies, whose legitimacy it shamelessly celebrates. The reactionary politics of Corazon salvaje's producer, Televisa, are well-known, the company, which is the world's largest Spanish-language media firm, having recently been criticized for partial coverage of (losing) left-wing Presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the last Mexican elections. Corazon salvaje as a cultural product is one moment in an ideological superstructure whose function is to preserve the status quo and block progressive social change. As for those who affirm the counter argument that Televisa soaps are harmless fluff and that spectators are far too clever to absorb their ideological biases, I hope you be right!

Plus que ça change...

All this talk in class about repetition and difference got me thinking about the philosophic dimensions of 100 años, and specifically the concept of eternal recurrence. The latter refers to a cosmological theory according to which the exact history of the cosmos, being cyclical and not linear, endlessly repeats itself. Marquéz's book affirms eternal recurrence and at the same time denies it. It is both dynamic and static, moving forward while it looks back, proliferating difference while reproducing the same. Its treats time, as both linear and cyclical, in the same way it treats its material, as both realistic and fantastic. Cyclical teleology is here magical realism's structural counterpart, a different expression of the same phenomenon, namely the dialectical interplay between European (linear) rationality and Native-American (cyclical) cosmology.

Eternal recurrence was taken up by Nietzsche, who, unconcerned with its truth or falsity, uses it as a heuristic device whose affirmation allows him to formulate what he considers the correct attitude toward life. Ideally, we should respond to being told that we will have to live our present life again and again with joy and not despair. Despite its repeated sufferings, we should love life enough to respond joyfully to the truth of eternal recurrence and be willing to repeat the whole process eternally. 100 años presents a seemingly endless proliferation of Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos whose (often tragic) character traits are transmitted, like their names, from generation to generation. The exuberance with which Marquez represents this epic disaster seems to suggest, in Nietzschean fashion, that life, despite being a never-ending succession of catastrophes, is worth living over and over again.

Chupete on the Rocks

literature: written works, especially those considered of superior quality or lasting artistic merit.

To paraphrase the OCD, literature is, in the strictest sense, a work comprised of writing, a fortiori if judged to be of superior quality or lasting artistic merit. The first characteristic is objective, while the second two concern aesthetic judgement and are thus subjective. In light of this, is Quino's 10 años con Mafalda literature? Regarding the first characteristic, the answer is unequivocally yes: since 10 anos is a work comprised of writing, it is necessarily literature. Regarding the second two characteristics (superior quality, lasting artistic merit), I would say equivocally yes to the first, equivocablly no to the second. Within the comic strip / historieta genre, Mafalda seems, if not superior, then at least better than average: definitely better than Charlie Brown, but not as good as Bizarro or The Far Side. Malfalda is of lasting merit (we're still reading her years after she was put to rest), but this merit is probably more social than artistic: Malfalda is worth reading today, not for being aesthetically pleasing, but for her world-weary humanism and her bitter but gentle humour.

100 años as Gesamtkunstwerk

In Marquéz's obra maestra, the recurring phrase "muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento" (or variations thereof) seems to function as a leitmotif, a musical term used to refer to a recurring theme denoting a particular person, place or idea. Wagner's use of leitmotifs (Grundthemen) allow him to bind together the disparate material of his sprawling operas into a coherent whole. Cien años is similarly sprawling and its epic scale, cyclical structure and textual richness bring to mind another meisterwerk: Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Both spin out the destinies of successive generations of protagonists (3 in the latter, 6 in the former), both end apocalyptically. Perhaps Marquéz's interest in filmmaking inclined him to use such a technique (Wagnerian-style leitmotifs in soundtracks are common as structural elements in films), in which case Cien años could indeed be considered a kind of Gemantkunstwerk, or synthesis of different art forms.

Another idea: could the 1oo years of solitude refer to Ursula´s 1oo or so solitary years? She is after all the matriarch who binds the Buendía family together, a woman who alone suffers "la mortificación de la guerra, la ausencia de Aureliano, la brutalidad de Arcadio y la expulsión de José Arcadio y Rebeca" and many more indignities.