Continued from ENTFERN PART #1
“Also, likewise, Moses taught, not by painting but by writing, [...] not by painting but by writing for future generations. […] You can remain the venerator of artificial colors; we are the skilled venerators of secret meanings.”
“Idem quoque Moyses... non pingendo, sed scribendo edocuit […] non pingendo, sed scribendo saeculis post futuris. […] Tu fucatorum venerator esto colorum; nos veneratores et capaces simus sensuum archanorum.” Libri Carolini1
I’m going to use another list than that provided by Jewish Voice for Peace, another set of names to write and forward to my senators in memory and protest of the murdered of Gaza. The JVP list, unfortunately, gives me too few details: who were these people, how did they live and die? My list comes instead from a group called Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, men and women who, until recently, worked in libraries and museums and rare book collections in Gaza. Colleagues once, now shadows, “more shadow than a shadow… the shadow that will come and come again into your sun-filled life,” you asshole politician.
Not that I value the lives of those who work in libraries or museum or book collections above the life of Djouamaa Ahlem, who disappeared somewhere between Annaba and Sardinia; or José Erasmo from Mazatenango, last seen in the Sonora desert. As Hanna Arendt points out, when a Nazi insists that certain lives be valued more than others it’s a tacit way of stating that other lives are valued less.
And it ain’t just Nazis anymore. In a fine article, the type you could only wish an art historian had tackled, Greg Grandin, a Yale historian, writes:
“Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality.
It would be more accurate to point out that the punctum, the emotional hook, the element designed to promote a connection between the producers of art and their public, consists of the privileged condition of unwogability: not-being-Arab.
Of the posters, Grandin adds,
“These flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement… It’s the generic sameness of the posters, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking.”2
Except I wouldn’t use the term “martial,” to define the aesthetic; “regimented” is more like it, the regimentation that underlies much of the art produced in support of the ideology of Capital since the ‘sixties, following a process I call Warholization. There is an eerie similarity between the rows of nearly identical hostage posters and Warhol’s series of nearly identical images of media personalities or flowers or electric chairs. The punctum is external to the form itself; these posters might as well be advertising a popular brand of soup—oh, right:
Meanwhile the designers present themselves, as the opportunity requires, as “street artist,” “visual poet” or “design team;” in reality they’ve placed themselves at the apex of a system of production in which creative labor is reduced to the so-called “necessary” minimum. To quote Harry Braverman,
“Every step in the labor process is divorced, so far as possible, from special knowledge and training and reduced to simple labor. Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor... This might even be called the general law of the capitalist division of labor. It is not the sole force acting upon the organization of work, but it is certainly the most powerful and general.”3
The Hero of Capitalist Production is the “influencer,” the “creative,” removed as far as possible from the process of production; the technician who wipes out children not for work but recreation. As mentioned earlier of Zoya Cherkassky’s show at the Jewish Museum, there is no audience in the traditional sense, only the projected response of an imaginary audience. The political messaging is not in the content, but in the form itself, form whose true function is the imposition of an aesthetic of regimentation through affective blackmail.
If, as I’m suggesting here, the social meaning of the performance of art is in the form itself, then it’s time to abandon those practices that are called “political” by those most desperate to enforce conformity to a capitalist aesthetic under cover of a radical or progressive message. To every museum or gallery sponsoring these meaningless messages of inclusiveness: I’m talking about you. The political utility of art doesn’t lies in the message to be delivered but in a sense of form itself as a constructive principle, what Aristotle might have called a “formal cause.”
This is the aesthetic that unites artists with the lowliest of workers. The form is constructive to the extent that it integrates all at once those values that are repressed under capitalism.
“The lightening of work becomes itself a means of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from their work but their work from content. All of capitalistic production is similar to the extent that it’s not only a work process but a process for the valorization of capital.”
„Selbst die Erleichterung der Arbeit wird zum Mittel der Tortur, indem die Maschine nicht den Arbeiter von der Arbeit befreit, sondern seine Arbeit vom Inhalt. Aller kapitalistischen Produktion, soweit sie nicht nur Arbeitsprozeß, sondern zugleich Verwertungsprozeß des Kapitals, ist es gemeinsam.“4
Labor without valorization may be, among other option, that labor that’s not measured in time. not measured because it has no ends or end. Mourning immeasurable.
The substitution of affective labor for capital becomes for us, as for so many before us, the defining aspect of aesthetic value.
Today, February 26, is the deadline for mailing these names to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. I was tempted not to bother, since either have, for my purposes, abdicated their humanity. Then I remembered that these names would be read by staffers anyhow. And from staffers there may be some small hope.
WOID XXIII40b
February 26, 2024
Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini), Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Concilia, Bd. II. 30: “Supplementum,” ed. Ann Freeman with Paul Meyvaert (Hannover: Hahnian, 1998), pp. 305 & 307.
Greg Grandin, “Transformed Into Mist. How to Read the Israeli ‘Kidnapped’ Posters,” The Intercept, November 28 2023; accessed February 25, 2024. https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/kidnapped-posters-israel-latin-america/
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 73-74.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Band I, in Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1966), pp. 445-446.