"is not at the same time"

Now this is a smart point from T.J. Clark, interviewed in the Brooklyn Rail...

Rail: Right at the start of the book, in the Preface, you say a few words about the difference between what you’re doing in Afflicted Powers and The Sight of Death and ‘the alternative currently on offer in so much of the Left academy.’ It’s pretty clear that you haven’t much sympathy for what passes these days as Left art history. Why not?

Clark: I think it’s stuck with an out-of-date sense of the issues. As if it mattered any longer—as if it had any present political point—to prove for the umpteenth time that what we poor suckers had imagined was a difficult and double-edged picture of the human condition was really, hey presto!, just another instrument of ruling-class oppression… Here’s Bruegel for you—provider of sneering moralistic services for a bunch of bourgeois Puritans. Where does one start with this? Maybe by looking back at the canonical quote from Walter Benjamin, and reminding oneself of what it did and did not say. It did not say that “There is no document of civilization which is not really, when you look at its origins and function, a document of barbarism.” It said: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This is a dialectical thought, not an anti-canonical put-down. The work of art is a document of civilization and of barbarism. The job of the materialist is to think the two identities—the two kinds of belonging to history—together. Not to reduce one to the other. A materialist will presumably be interested in what it was, in the sets of possibilities offered by a specific medium, a specific practice, that opened the space in which a jolly denunciation of peasant foolishness became something else.

(via 3quarks)

I love Clark's description of the humanities status quo, and I love - and share - his sense of the possible direction out...

(My wife wrote once in awhile for the Rail back when we were of, yes, Brooklyn. Quality publication, and it's nice to see them pulling down great interviews like this one. Someone should add it to our roll...)

Comments

[Matt]

Nice find.

[Matt]

Though I noticed you stopped quoting (perhaps deliberately) right before the kicker:

And always in the back of my mind is the question: Where does the Left actually get its picture of the humanity that class society stifles and travesties if not, in part, from Bruegel and Poussin? Is it all there in the pages of Marx and Foucault? I don’t think so (neither did Marx). Or is it that Left art historians lead such rich and unalienated lives that they simply don’t need their picture of humanity enriched by other people’s representations? That must feel good…But all of this, in any case, is so remote from the questions posed by actual image-war going on around us—that’s the point. The “canon question”… The “great art question”… The sins of museums… Wake me when it’s over.

Yup.

[CR]

No - not deliberate. I like that stuff too. I was just particularly interested in the discussion of Benjamin that all. A simple point, but rather earth-shaking (sort of) in its implications for those of us that take WB seriously.

I hate, how to put it, undialectical readings of Benjamin. Clark has made me take note of a little strand of un-dialectial naivete in my previous reading of that line...