The first time as masterpiece, the second time as kitsch
In his 1869 preface to the second edition of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote:
The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,” have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been little noticed and still less understood.
Stendhal and Balzac leap immediately to mind, with Dumas père as the counter-example (recording the dominant trend and willing a counter-trend). As for the last line, the final version of War and Peace was being published as Marx was writing, and translations of it and of Crime and Punishment (1866) did not appear until after his death. But the existence of these novels testifies to the depth and acuity of Marx’ insight here, and only in the context in which his remark places them can their full meaning emerge.
As it happens, the word kitsch started to be used in Germany in its modern sense a little before this second edition was published, that is, a handful of years after the coup d’état in France on 2 Decembre 1851, half a century before the word was imported into English. 2 Dec 1851 — known to us as the expiration date of the profundity, pith, and propulsion of the historical forces tossing up the 18 Brumaire, Year VIII (9 November, 1799). 2 Dec 1851: a date on which was set in motion a tremendous mental revolution in France, homeland of bcbg. Tellingly, Marx’ most famous words about 19th century politics deploy the metaphor of art, specifically, of the stage: in the resolutely modern age, amidst industrialization and the consolidation of capital as the dominant form of political power, the coup d’ètat and installation of Empire repeats a past tragedy as farce. This describes an evacuation that echoes one of the most famous passages of the manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. That relation being the perverted, pared down individualism of ‘egoistical calculation’ and the infinitely potentially dispossessing mediation of the ‘cash nexus.’
After about a century, progressive academics in the capitalist world had learned to mock Marxists intellectuals for commencing an explanation, as I will commence here, by noticing this temporal proximity of the artistic kitsch to the democratic imperial farce is not random.
We have come to the end of this trajectory now, the abstract reified mediation has achieved, at least in consciousness and projected praxis, the complete dispossession, and the expropriated species-mind has debuted as the apotheosis of kitsch.
AI IS THE ZENITH OF KITSCH.
It threatens to expand until it disappears effectively by consuming all. (The goal is far off practically but vividly envisioned, and the path to it is clear.)
Proper thought = revolutionary communist consciousness = totalizing, and so does good art and literary criticism. AI and all that accompanies it is the PSEUDO-TOTALIZING, the universal vitiated meretricious plagiarism, the pseudo-spinach consciousness.
I think I posted this before, but here (again perhaps) is this plain, beautifully insightful opening of Transit, by Rachel Cusk, on some kitsch in the email inbox, but this time I will let the quotation go a little longer to show the canny link to gentrification. Gentrification, that is violent enclosure kitsch.
An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.
She could sense – the email continued – that I had lost my way in life, that I sometimes struggled to find meaning in my present circumstances and to feel hope for what was to come; she felt a strong personal connection between us, and while she couldn’t explain the feeling, she knew too that some things ought to defy explanation. She understood that many people closed their minds to the meaning of the sky above their heads, but she firmly believed I was not one of those people. I did not have the blind belief in reality that made others ask for concrete explanations. She knew that I had suffered sufficiently to begin asking certain questions, to which as yet I had received no reply. But the movements of the planets represented a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny: perhaps it was simply that some people could not believe they were important enough to figure there. The sad fact, she said, is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. What the planets offer, she said, is nothing less than the chance to regain faith in the grandeur of the human: how much more dignity and honour, how much kindness and responsibility and respect, would we bring to our dealings with one another if we believed that each and every one of us had a cosmic importance? She felt that I of all people could see the implications here for improvements in world peace and prosperity, not to mention the revolution an enhanced concept of fate could bring about in the personal side of things. She hoped I would forgive her for contacting me in this way and for speaking so openly. As she had already said, she felt a strong personal connection between us that had encouraged her to say what was in her heart.
It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human. As a result her sympathy and concern were slightly sinister; yet for those same reasons they also seemed impartial. A friend of mine, depressed in the wake of his divorce, had recently admitted that he often felt moved to tears by the concern for his health and well-being expressed in the phraseology of adverts and food packaging, and by the automated voices on trains and buses, apparently anxious that he might miss his stop; he actually felt something akin to love, he said, for the female voice that guided him while he was driving his car, so much more devotedly than his wife ever had. There has been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface was the distillation not of one human but of many. Many astrologers had had to live, in other words, for this one example to have been created. What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: he recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt.
It was this same friend – a writer – who had advised me, back in the spring, that if I was moving to London with limited funds, it was better to buy a bad house in a good street than a good house somewhere bad. Only the very lucky and the very unlucky, he said, get an unmixed fate: the rest of us have to choose.
I read somewhere that this word twee has gone out of fashion. It was ubiquitous in the aughts. It names one type of kitsch — Hitlerian pastoral, Laura Ashley, the fussy tchotchkis of mocked little Englanders, the ducks on the wall, the figurines that the Christlike heroine of Dogville collects. It implies the pov of a class superior to make the judgement, with a hint of annihilating domination. But the dominant style of American kitch is principally sadistic and violent — Caleb Carr, Cormac McCarthy, the Coen Bros, The Wire, the Sopranos, Quentin Tarantino, et cetera et cetera, which does not imply such a superior or recognize one apart from itself. You can see these valences wedded in gentrification/extermination.
to be continued….