I thought "Art: An Enemy of The People" by Roger L Taylor was a good idea for a book. Stewart Home names it as one of his texts of inspiration. Its a tough read. It doesn't quite answer my uneasiness about Art and Class. Give it time.

Today I reviewed some of Steven Connor's work. His most recent essay on his site is called "Doing Without Art". It mentions a few people, mainly Badiou, Jean Paul Sartre and Ellen Dessanayake. The discussion veered towards concepts of Inaesthetics.

Connor's conclusion:

"What to Do Without Art

Let me conclude by stating baldly what the advantages might be of living in a world in which the notion of art had lost all its mystical and wish-fulfilling accretions and had dwindled back into the poor-but-honest condition of naming something brought about through the exercise of art or skill. There seem to me really to be three.

The first is that we might be able to pay more discriminating attention to the various constituent powers, qualities and effects that are characteristic of the different arts – narrative, imitation, organisation, and so on. Here we might be cheered by a remark of Vernon Lee’s that she hoped to ‘obtain from art all that it can give, by refraining from asking it to give what it cannot’ (Lee 1883, 13). The second is that we might be able to pay more rewarding attention to the kinds of artifice and artistry in actions and practices that are not recognised as, or only intermittently allowed to be, arts. The third is that we might be able to make out more clearly and subject to informed and informative analysis the many blunders, illusions, sleights of hand and wish-fulfilments that have constituted the long history of belief in the powers of art – along the lines of post-religious examinations of religious thinking.

Given what I said earlier about trying not only to do without art, but also to do without the sweet pathos of doing without it, it would be agreeable if this were to result, not in a permanent vigilance, or hermeneutics of suspicion, in which we kept the superstitious denunciation of art and the aesthetic stoked up into incandescence, but rather a hermeneutics of permission, in which things were allowed to be, and become, as interesting as we could make them."

I guess he is saying that all will be illuminated and not merely "the special". That, I suppose, is as close to political as his essay gets.

Part of his reference to "doing without" quotes Sartre from his War Diaries: Notebooks From a Phoney War.

"In order to maintain my decision not to smoke, I had to realize a sort of decrystallization; that is, without exactly accounting for myself for what I was doing, I reduced the tobacco to being nothing but itself – an herb which burns. I cut its symbolic ties with the world; I persuaded myself that I was not taking anything away from the play at the theater, from the landscape, from the book which I was reading, if I considered them without my pipe; that is, I rebuilt my possession of these objects in modes other than that sacrificial ceremony."

When discussing Dessayake's argument of the intrinsic human propensity to set things apart, Connor says:

"But, if Ellen Dessanayake is right, then there is, after all, a single, essential feature of art, that allows us to posit for it a particular and necessary power. Like magic, as in the operations of the placebo, ‘art’ would stand for the very belief in the power of art. I have to acknowledge that, if this is really the power of art, a power that depends upon ‘art’ precisely being empty and without consistent predicates, then we might well be a little worse off and not better off doing without it There might well, that is, be something that we would no longer be able to count on, in the same way, perhaps, as if we forgot or abandoned the use of algebra and no longer had the capacity to manipulate the emptily indeterminate x and y.

Actually, though, what we would no longer be able to count on would be the faith, or the fear, that there was only one such mode of setting things eccentrically aside from themselves, without which the world would be condemned to a dreary, serial self-similitude. What I take from the argument about art’s capacity to confer specialness is what it may intimate of the many other ways we have, and have yet to invent, for othering things from, or into themselves. And in fact, the worst thing about giving art this unique privilege of creating specialness is precisely that it seems to encourage or even require us to reduce everything that is not art to featureless clinker."

Connor refers to Badiou and others' "astonishing willingness to reinstate the mystical authority and, even more implausibly, to proclaim the political promise of the aesthetic." Reading the wiki page on Badiou, particularly the section on the Handbook of Inaesthetics, I am referred to examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and Fernando Pessoa in relation to Badiou's view of the link between philosophy and art, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them."

Now I have found something. The Works of Fernando Pessoa were unknown to me until now. One of his works in a strange connection to Sartre's thoughts on smoking is called "Tobacco Shop"

"But now a man's gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I'm getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
And about to write these lines, which say the opposite. "

Elsewhere in "Tobacco Shop", Pessoa writing as Alvaro De Campos writes:

I am nothing.

I will never be anything.

I cannot wish to be anything.

Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Fernando Pessoa-himself, who as another aspect of Pessoa's multipersonality heteronyms stands apart from Pessoa himself, writes in his "Autopsychography" about the theme of art and artifice:

The poet is a faker

Who's so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

All I previously knew of Pessoa was a photograph of him with Aleister Crowley in 1930. A photo I and others thought was of someone else. Some say it isn't Pessoa at all but James Joyce. It could be just another chess player.



The wonderful Journey Around My Skull blog makes mention of this:
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2008/07/aleister-crowley-and-fernando-pessoa.html

from wiki:

"His interest in mysticism led Pessoa to correspond with the occultist Aleister Crowley. He later helped Crowley plan an elaborate fake suicide when he visited Portugal in 1930. Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's library shows that he possessed copies of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral, 129-130^"

^{Finally, our man John Gray, writes of Pessoa in Assault On Authorship:}

"for the most part, Pessoa remains as he was during his lifetime: an obscure, almost inexistent figure, among whose many aliases are to be found some of the most authentic voices in European literature."

Even Gary Lachman has something to say.

The film was originally a segment of the fantasy anthology film Flesh and Fantasy (1943), an interesting movie about the occult made by Jules Duvivier . The footage was excised from the final print and expanded into an independent feature. The movie, which consisted of four loosely related episodes that deal with the supernatural, was cast with a plethora of acting talent, including Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, and Barbara Stanwyck. The episode that received the most acclaim, however, was one that featured Alan Curtis and Gloria Jean. It was by far the best-received episode, and Gloria got the most acclaim. Not long after the preview, the powers that be at Universal inexplicably announced that Gloria's sequence would be cut from the film. Months later, Universal decided to expand the sequence and make it into its own picture, which it eventually named "Destiny". from imdb

Communists, Witches and Homosexuals
In 1809 a malicious child accused her women teachers of having “an inordinate affection.” The resulting scandal was reported in a chapter entitled “Closed Doors,” or “The Great Drumsheugh Case” in a book by William Roughead, published in 1930.
Lillian Hellman, a 26-year-old unknown writer from New Orleans, took this event and wrote the highly acclaimed The Children’s Hour. It opened in New York 65 years ago this month and ran for 691 performances.
The play’s revival enjoyed success again in the 50s, ironically around the same time that Senator Joseph McCarthy (the malicious child?) brought charges against Hellman, Arthur Miller and others for associating with Communists. Like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Ms. Hellmann’s play is not so much about Communists, witches, or homosexuals as it is about the damage wrought by slander and a gullible public, too willing to see the accusation as more important than the accused, too willing to condemn without proof.
- Dr. Len Radin

The Sofa: A Moral Tale (French: Le Sopha, conte moral) is a 1742 novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.

The story concerns a young courtier whose soul in a previous life was condemned to travel from sofa to sofa as a sofa in search of true love and not to be reincarnated in a human body until a man and a woman sincerely in love with each other had consummated their passion on "his" sofa.

Many of the characters in the novel are satirical portraits of influential and powerful Parisians of Crébillon’s time. For this reason the book was published anonymously and with a false imprint. Nevertheless, Crébillon was discovered to be the author and, as a consequence, he was exiled to a distance of fifty leagues from Paris.....

....The hero (in the opera) is a dissolute young Prince called Dominic, whose grandmother is a witch who can do magic spells. Don’t ask me why – Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote the libretto, based on a French story, apparently at her husband’s suggestion. Despite being a witch, Grandmother wants Prince Dominic to settle down and be respectable so (naturally!) she turns him into a leatherette sofa. The spell will only be broken when someone has sex on it. It’s hardly a serious curse, given the fact that all Dominic’s friends are obsessed with sex in multiple forms. This leads to many comic gags which enliven the action. Three girls sit down, talking about men. Prince-as-sofa is overcome, his head popping up between the cushions. His hands (or rather two different stagehand’s hands) reach out to paw the girls who of course don’t know he’s there. Since they’re singing a parody of the Rhinemaiden’s song, it’s hilarious.

Bless the weather that brought you to me
Curse the storm that takes you home

"Do you agree with me that the British people have a right to know if we have been visited, and if so, when you become prime minister will you seek to lift the veil of secrecy and give the public the truth that they deserve and that has been covered up for all these years?"

Mr Cameron laughed and replied: "I'm convinced we have been visited by alien life forms - and one of them is the trade secretary Peter Mandelson."