20 and 23 June

Tuesday 20th

Although outwardly quiet, my weekend was convulsed by two intellectual earthquakes. But why do I put it like that? Earthquakes are destructive, at least in the short term, and nothing was destroyed in my mind except for some inherited constraints, the sudden absence of which allows me to see farther and wider than ever. Both upheavals will have a great impact on the writing project — which is why, I think, they occurred at all. The pressure that revising the writing project has had on the jumble of ideas in my brain sometimes seems equal to the task of crushing coal into diamonds. As things fit better together, they are altered. My stock of metaphors cannot keep up.

Very brief summaries, then. First, and arguably more important, I responded to an essay in the Book Review with a statement. I mumbled it the first time, but not the second. Adam Kirsch’s piece about criticism and democracy is good so far as it goes.

A critic is just a reader or viewer or listener who makes the question explicit and tries to answer it publicly, for the benefit of other potential readers or viewers or listeners. In doing so, she operates on the assumption that the audience for a work, the recipient of a gift, is entitled to make a judgment on its worth. The realm of judgment is plural. Everyone brings his or her own values and standards to the work of judging. This means that it is also, essentially, democratic. No canon of taste or critical authority can compel people to like what they don’t like.

But I saw that it must be taken further. The goad was probably buried in the preceding sentences:

Yet as anyone who has received an ill-fitting or unsuitable present knows, the thought is not the only thing that counts. Once a work of art emerges from its creator’s study or studio, it becomes the possession of anyone who interacts with it, and therefore it is open to judgment: Do I actually derive pleasure and enlightenment from it?

We look to critics to tell us whether something is good or bad — and then we go ahead and do exactly as we please. I think that we have outgrown this understanding of criticism. We don’t need Leavises or Blooms to separate the wheat from the chaff, because, metaphors of nutrition aside, one man’s chaff is another man’s wheat. And what’s wheat today may become chaff next year. Critical judgment must shed its binary character and become, instead, relational. (This is NOT the “same thing” as relative.) For the critic, confronted by a work of art, or anything else, from which anybody derives pleasure — the critic’s pleasure is incidental — the question is this: Where does the item, whether an idea or a baseball bat, stand with relation to everything else? Where does it go?

Where do you put it, I mumbled. Then I said it aloud. Where do you put it?

The final mystery of the writing project cleared up instantly. The last section will provide a floor plan of the World, or at least some considerations that ought to be borne in mind in the process of laying it out. This is the critic’s job, and as it is also a kind of housekeeping, it is never done. For all the apparent stability of durable monuments and even of the old books in libraries, the World is constantly changing. No one critic can keep up with more than a fraction of it. (Critics may well find that in future they spend their time talking not to “laymen” but to other critics.) No critic has the last word, and seldom is heard a disparaging one. More anon.

***

About the other bit of excitement I shall say rather less, because I haven’t reached the mumble stage yet. It was brought about by a book that I carried back home from storage last week. A ticket stub that I’d used as a bookmark suggested that I got tired of the book in 2007 and set it aside, but I don’t remember reading a word of it before. It was one of those treasures, so often more promising than delivering, that I used to pick up on the sale tables in the Museum’s bookshop. It’s John North’s The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance.

I’ve always liked Holbein’s double portrait of the French ambassadors who conducted a special mission to Henry VIII in 1533. It has some of the appeal of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: the flamboyant courtier on the left and the discreet clergyman on the right are a fine pair of salt and pepper shakers. And then there is all that impressive gadgetry littering the shelf on which they lean! What does that stuff do, and do the two guys know how to make it work? What is it supposed to tell us about them? I must say that I got over the “charm” of the anamorphic skull in the foreground many decades ago. It is of course a memento mori, but, now I learn, that’s not all. In North’s almost delirious unpacking, it is also a marker of Golgotha, for the entire composition is in part a meditation on the Crucifixion. According to North, the astronomical and time-keeping devices on the top shelf provide the picture with the timestamp of 4 PM, Good Friday 1533. But the very idea of putting precision instruments to such liturgical use is somewhat outlandish, and the association with the darkest day in the Christian calendar (and yet the brightest?) is certainly, given the face of the picture itself, occult.

Whether or not North’s enthusiasm runs away with him — whether or not the hexagrams and the horoscope square that he locates, tacit in the design of the picture are “really there,” or were actually intended by the painter (I find it difficult to doubt) — I found his exploration infectious. My own enthusiasm has a different cast. Most educated viewers would probably regard The Ambassadors as a picture of “Renaissance men,” distinctive, modern-ish individuals conversant with the latest scientific equipment. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But even educated viewers might slip into forgetting that the cosmological views of these bright-looking fellows would have been stoutly antique. Nobody, in 1533, seriously questioned the geocentric understanding of the universe. The earth was still at the center of things, and God still peeped through the little star-holes in the outermost sphere of the firmament. Whatever their style, these men belonged, intellectually, to the Middle Ages. It would be another century before men of their stamp seriously considered what we now take for granted about outer space.

But what made the shift inevitable is right there beside them: those instruments. Those precision instruments. When I was taught the history of science in college, it was as a succession of Kuhnian paradigms. The impact of tools on paradigm shifts was not stressed; tools were for engineers. (We might indeed have been consciously aping the condescension of medieval thinkers.) But a thorn was planted in my mind by what I learned, a seed called phlogiston. From time to time in my adult life I would be annoyed by my inability to remember just what phlogiston was, and I would go back and read James Bryant Conant’s Case Study on the subject, only to lose my grip on phlogiston all over again. Eventually, I realized that phlogiston theory was done in not so much by a better idea as it was by Lavoisier’s precision instruments, especially his vacuum chambers. Oxygen would not have been discovered without his battery of devices. How did people learn to make them? This was a field that had little to with scientific theory. And wasn’t it curious that Lavoisier was a contemporary of James Watt, who put precision instrumentation to such different use?

So The Ambassadors shows us, like no other picture I can think of, the past and the future in one glance. That they were hopelessly muddled when Jean de Dinteville (the man on the left) took his new painting back to Polisy, in the neighborhood of Troyes, is embodied in North’s description of a book that Kepler would write early in the next century about a new star in Cygnus, a constellation that Holbein’s painting foregrounds.

Three generations had passed since The Ambassadors had been painted and still Kepler did not consider it incongruous to write a book of more than two hundred pages in which theology, astronomy, and revisionist astrology were intermingled from beginning to end. (325)

For the moment, I have reached a sense that something links the development of precision instruments in the West with the demand for political liberty — that the connection between the two sets of revolutions that culminated at the very end of the Eighteenth Century was a matter not of big ideas but of material tools. More anon.

***

Friday 23rd

How to say this in as few words as possible? The revolutions are over. Will they be undone?

Prior to 1800, almost everybody alive was a peasant. This was a constant, everywhere. For all the changes in empire, religion, population density, and all that stuff that we call “art history,” most people died where they were born and did the same chores that their parents had done. And nothing that anybody did had much of an impact on Planet Earth. Attempts to control the endless cycles of war and peace, of feast and famine, were fruitless.

Looking back, we can make out, sometimes clearly, sometimes only dimly, the developments that would break those cycles at the end of the Eighteenth Century. As the revolutions approached, it was obvious to attentive minds that great change was in the offing. But why the revolutions took the form that they did is less interesting than their simultaneity.

There were two sets of revolutions. The political one, erupting first in the future United States and then in France, overturned old régimes and experimented with new constitutions. There was a great deal of violence — far more in the United States than Americans like to think. There was reaction. Unlike all previous revolutions, however, these political upheavals sustained their momentum and were not put down.

The technological revolution began in Britain. It, too, might be thought of as two revolutions rather than one, for the development of the steam engine and the growth of cotton mills were independent for several decades before being harnessed — as a solution to labor problems, not just for the sake of technology. The climax of this revolution was the railway locomotive, a steam engine on wheels.

Between them, these revolutions changed almost everything about life as the old peasant class had known it. Interestingly, the thin crusts of privileged, powerful people that were as immemorial as the peasantry were able to use the wealth that the revolutions put in some of their pockets to preserve and even intensify old modes of life. That is what conveys the illusion, when we look back over the Nineteenth Century, of a continuity, through all the revolutionary turmoil, of luxury. For ordinary people, however, society was suddenly dynamic, by which I mean that children no longer necessarily followed in their parents’ footsteps. Wherever the old ways of doing things — traditions — stood in the way of revolutionary change, they were torn down and swept away. The past disappeared into merely personal experience. Perhaps because things changed so quickly and constantly, adaptation was often superficial. Beneath the resilience, old habits of thinking and longing persisted. The increase in prosperity was accompanied by an increased sense of loss.

Many former peasants fared much worse in the new revolutionary world. More dangerous than political violence were the insalubrious tenements into which urbanized laborers were herded. Antagonism between laborers and employers exceeded anything seen between peasants and their masters. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, it was generally understood that the revolutions could not be left to laissez faire outcomes. The first half of the Twentieth Century saw major, sometimes disastrous attempts to lessen the brutality of the revolutionary world. New revolutions undertook to continue the work of the old, on the political and technological fronts alike. Many of the new measures were horribly drastic, and a terrible war ensued. But when it was over, the peasant class and its successor proletariat had disappeared. So, except for ornamental purposes, had the relics of the old ruling classes. Everyone, circa 1950, was middle class, or about to be. Everyone was a consumer.

But for everyone to attain consumer equality would require unprecedented growth. The only way to assure such growth would be to remove all controls on markets. Free trade alone could bring prosperity to all.

The result, as we know, has been not universal prosperity, but an unsustainable mess of environmental degradations. Almost as bad are the signs that the revolutions are over. Instead of spreading among the population, wealth puddles in dense concentrations. And the labor that increased global prosperity during the technological revolution’s heyday is everywhere being performed by machines. Are we too dazed and confused to move forward? What does moving forward look like? Is equitable ecological prosperity possible? Are we on a slide back into the ancien régime?

In case you’re having trouble imagining such a reverse, let me remind you that many Tuscan peasants on the eve of the revolutions were descended from highly literate, sophisticated business families whose fortunes had been undone by the depredations of war and empire centuries earlier.

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2017 at 2:05 pm.