Modernism Ep07 ⟩ “Culture as Nature”

Culture as Nature: When Capital Becomes the Environment

This week Hughes turns from the artist formerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: cities, commodities, advertising, television, celebrity, electronic noise, shopping malls.

Yeah, yeah—human beings have always lived inside culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hours ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian Deep Time when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language, tools, institutions, and signs—has there been.”

What changes under “late” capitalism is the scale and character of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industrially produced, endlessly reproduced, commercially administered, and finally dense enough to confront us as a kind of second nature. So that’s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things, but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising], the perceptual tongs that grok it, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the MIND industry.

Art now competes with signs engineered to seize the eye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: “Pictures educate; signs discipline.” Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis survives.

Pop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garbage and starting eating it: Rauschenberg’s junk and image-glut, Johns’s flags and targets, Warhol’s repetition and celebrity, Lichtenstein’s comics, Rosenquist’s billboards, Oldenburg’s swollen consumer objects. In music, back in the 80s, this was called “sampling”; today it’s called “composing.”

Anyway, all your favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check this out —

Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet, for instance. But when Monet painted his haystacks and lily- ponds, his specific aim was to show, in the most resplendent detail of nuances, that phenomena are not standardized. His “repetitions” were done to glorify the eye, to show how it could discern tiny differences, and how these differences added up to a continuous alteration of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today, we have sameness within glut, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the difference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteenth century, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.

And speaking of Warhol, check out this piece of crap that sold for $71 million at Christie’s. Can you see the $71 million in it? If not, you have vision problems. Price is, after all, our civilization’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.

Then, because he took a sociology class once, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us to experience the world as montage: war → toothpaste → celebrity → catastrophe → game show. One of the old avant-garde dreams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage, simultaneity, collision, discontinuity.

Unfortunately, capital owns the montage machine and the machine runs under a certain imperative—i.e., M—C—M′.

Very sadly, Robert Hughes died before the really funny part, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the mediation is no longer merely in the air, like culture and space, but in the thing. The world reaches us today already converted into information: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the crappy Apple Maps, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires, wars, hurricanes, friends, presidents, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto the same glowing rectangle, which now rests permanently in front of our eyes.

So Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature, and then also put a screen in front of it, and then also trained the cognizer that interprets it.

By the end of this, the best art history episode of all time, Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the message.” Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still judge; questions of taste, truth, choice, and moral responsibility for images remain unavoidable. Pop, in his account, helped strip art of its claims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dominant image-making power. And so …

The avant-garde died when art ceased to control society’s responsibility for images.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

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