Gimme More: On Sianne Ngai’s “Theory of the Gimmick”

SIANNE NGAI IS KNOWN for her close attention to the overlooked, the fringe, the marginal. Her first book, Ugly Feelings(2005), was a taxonomy of “minor” emotional-aesthetic responses like irritation and paranoia. Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) centered on the “zany,” the “cute,” and the “interesting.” With these two works Ngai was credited with making the study of aesthetics — albeit under the banner of “affect theory” — sexy again.

In her third book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, Ngai delves further into her longstanding preoccupations: first, the economic underpinnings of aesthetic judgment; second, the way affective judgments are built into nomenclature. (When we say someone’s “cool,” we convey nonchalant admiration; when we call a movie “cheesy,” we come off as knowing, jaded.) For Ngai, the critic’s task is to tease out the two, thus making apparent what gets obscured in the judgments we toss off. Although the subject of Theory of the Gimmick is unsexy at times — there is more than a little on transvaluation and reification — it marks a culmination of Ngai’s work as a critic. Not only does Ngai open up suggestive new lines of inquiry here, but she also completes a critical trilogy begun 15 years ago.

Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence. The book’s argument starts from the simple premise that the gimmick is “simultaneously overperforming and underperforming,” confounding our normal estimations of labor, value, and time. Ngai distinguishes the gimmick from its kin — kitsch, camp, conceptual art — making the case that, although superficial resemblances may bind the gimmick to these categories, the calculations of worth and cheapness it involves us in set the gimmick apart as a specifically capitalist form.

In a series of Kantian-Marxian “antinomies,” Ngai sketches out the gimmick’s contradictory, capitalistic nature: the gimmick simultaneously saves labor/does not save labor; works too hard/too little; is outdated/newfangled, dynamic/static, unrepeatable/reusable, and transparent/obscure about capitalist production. These antinomies are the book’s guiding thread, reiterated and elaborated throughout. They make some of Ngai’s more cryptic-seeming pronouncements intuitive: “The moment in which the gimmick arouses critical response is therefore simultaneously a dissipation of criticality.” “A gimmick that is necessary […] must by definition be trivial.” The gimmick’s capitalist DNA allows for

such reversals [which] are endemic to the world that gives rise to the gimmick’s compromised aesthetic. Like capitalism itself, in which paradoxes like planned obsolescence and routinized innovation abound, the gimmick is a […] fundamentally unstable form.

Capitalism, which ceaselessly generates more work while making workers obsolete, is the gimmick’s progenitor and twin.

The gimmick’s ubiquity, like that of capitalism, makes it similarly hard to pin down. Ngai follows Susan Sontag’s lead in “Notes on ‘Camp’” by personifying her object of study: the gimmick is loud and embarrassing, pestering and diverting like a precocious child. Theory of the Gimmick is never dry because it has the quality of the hunt, even when Ngai arrives at abstract formulations or locates the social value of the gimmick by wading through devalued aesthetic responses (annoyance, embarrassment, amusement). Ngai’s study lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work; her rigorous economic analysis, combined with her flair for the memorable epigram, makes the prose rangy and zippy. (She would have plenty to say about adjectival characterizations like these intrinsic to book reviews.)

More : https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gimme-more-on-sianne-ngais-theory-of-the-gimmick

Text by  Andrew Koenig

Going Postal :A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

I QUIT TWITTER and Instagram in May, in the same manner I leave parties: abruptly, silently, and much later than would have been healthy. This was several weeks into New York City’s lockdown, and for those of us not employed by institutions deemed essential—hospitals, prisons, meatpacking plants—sociality was now entirely mediated by a handful of tech giants, with no meatspace escape route, and the platforms felt particularly, grimly pathetic. Instagram, cut off from a steady supply of vacations and parties and other covetable experiences, had grown unsettlingly boring, its inhabitants increasingly unkempt and wild-eyed, each one like the sole surviving astronaut from a doomed space-colonization mission, broadcasting deranged missives about yoga and cooking projects into an uncaring void. Twitter, on the other hand, felt more like a doomed space-colonization mission where everyone had survived but we had to decide who to eat. Or like a drunken 3 AM basement fight club, a crowd of edgy brawlers circling each other, cracking their knuckles, waiting for an excuse. Only, it didn’t have any of the danger, or eroticism, or fun you might expect from a fight club.

It seemed obvious that unless you were passing around a GoFundMe link, no good could come from social platforms at that moment. The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself, and it was hard to think of a worse time to be doing so. It wasn’t like you were going to get a job thanks to a particularly incisive quote-tweet of President Trump; in the midst of a lockdown, your chances of getting laid based on your Instagram Story thirst traps plummeted. The already paltry rewards of posting disappeared, while the risks skyrocketed. And yet: people kept on going. Founders and executives at companies with “empowerment” brands posted vague bromides about social justice to their Instagram Stories, unwittingly calling attention to systemic racism and sexism at the companies they oversaw. An editor I vaguely know posted his salary and was swiftly accused of acting like a creep to women he’d worked with; a writer at the New York Times took to Twitter in the middle of a fraught meeting to condescendingly castigate her peers, thereby alienating herself from her workplace to the point of resignation. A student at Brown tweeted a long, excoriating list of the scions of wealth and privilege who had matriculated alongside her, and then capped it off by revealing that her mother is the president of ExxonMobil Chemical—like an aristocrat rushing to the front of a crowd of sans-culottes, shouting “don’t forget about me!” 

By Max Read 

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, Brooklyn, NY: Verso

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2703/a-psychoanalytic-reading-of-social-media-and-the-death-drive-24171 

We Margiela

New York - The man, the myth, the legend that is Martin Margiela has inspired a level of fandom in the fashion industry usually reserved for musicians who’ve died too soon. It has only surged since he stepped away from his eponymous company almost ten years ago. While an exhibition in Paris currently presents a greatest hits from the maison’s archive, here in NYC the North American premier of the documentary “We Margiela” telling the story of the origin of his label shows at the Fashion Institute of Technology. A congregation of followers in statement eyewear, nicely tailored coats, hair pinned behind ears, bearing those four white stitches on the nape of their neck file quietly into the auditorium like members of a sect. Someone taking his seat can be heard saying, in awe, “Look at this. We’re all still standing on his shoulders.” Yet none of those gathering would recognize their charismatic leader if he brushed against them later as they spill out onto West 27th Street.

Made up of intimate interviews of the original members of Margiela’s team, with voiceover from his trusted business partner/alter ego, Jenny Meirens, who passed away last year, the documentary offers a deeper understanding of facts that have been known for years: that Margiela vetoed all photos of his face, allowing only his hands to be seen: that everyone who worked there wore a white lab coat emphasizing the egalitarian spirit of “We”, and that his aesthetic, as described by one loyal staffer, was a result of, “Belgian taste, no pretensions, no concessions.” In this age of hyper-recognizability, his anonymity must be truly unfathomable to the new generation of devotees, which surely only augments the myth of him. How could there ever be his like again?

We Margiela: the people behind the man

“Underground doesn’t exist today,” says Lutz Huelle, the house’s knitwear designer hired straight from school when, he admits, none of his classmates even knew the name Martin Margiela. Images of Margiela’s early chaotic shows from the late 80s, staged in dark clubs featuring awkward-looking wan-faced women plucked from the streets stomping by a front row of non-VIPs are best appreciated when we think of the fashion landscape of the time: glamour and supermodels, designers Christian Lacorix, Thierry Mugler and Emmanuel Ungaro (It would be five years before Marc Jacobs would create his grunge collection for Perry Ellis and get fired.) We learn that no one, including the two founders, received much of a salary, but the passion for the work was all encompassing. Stanislas Maryshev, from the maison’s sales department remembers it this way: “You melt in the story. There were no halfway people” Another who remained through the subsequent change of ownership and creative direction describes tearfully a sensation even today of being “in limbo.”

We Margiela: the people behind the man

“Underground doesn’t exist today,” says Lutz Huelle, the house’s knitwear designer hired straight from school when, he admits, none of his classmates even knew the name Martin Margiela. Images of Margiela’s early chaotic shows from the late 80s, staged in dark clubs featuring awkward-looking wan-faced women plucked from the streets stomping by a front row of non-VIPs are best appreciated when we think of the fashion landscape of the time: glamour and supermodels, designers Christian Lacorix, Thierry Mugler and Emmanuel Ungaro (It would be five years before Marc Jacobs would create his grunge collection for Perry Ellis and get fired.) We learn that no one, including the two founders, received much of a salary, but the passion for the work was all encompassing. Stanislas Maryshev, from the maison’s sales department remembers it this way: “You melt in the story. There were no halfway people” Another who remained through the subsequent change of ownership and creative direction describes tearfully a sensation even today of being “in limbo.”

Margiela revolutionized modern fashion

Perhaps the most poignant takeaway from the film is the comedown associated with belonging to this close-knit community. Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Factory which sent ripples of change across contemporary art and culture, Maison Martin Margiela’s output revolutionized modern fashion, blowing up everything we thought we knew and reassembling it. But while it could be argued that Warhol removed the soul from the creative process, Margiela firmly instated it at its heart, and this ultimately led to the original maison’s demise. Prolonging that cloistered harmony became impossible the more success Margiela acquired, outside demands weighed heavily on Meirens, and financial concerns intruded. Margiela sold the company to Diesel in 2002 but remained as creative director until 2009. Inge Grognard, the house’s make-up artist, recalls the moment when she knew Margiela had left the building, just upped and quit his company,: it was when she spotted Rihanna backstage at a show. Celebrity endorsement and red carpet dressing were the antithesis of Martin Margiela and irrefutable evidence of the abrupt system change that was about to shake the house. An especially touching moment examining the nature of identity comes through in the words of a loyal member of the “We” who reflects on the experience of being left behind: “There was nothing we could claim for ourselves. You can take away the worth of the individual.”

The argument is made that it is this nebulous quality that appeals to so many. The Martin Margiela phenomenon marked a moment in time when corporate glitz and branding were taking hold that permitted us to privately project whatever we wanted to believe about ourselves onto a blank white rectangular label, onto the whitewashed exposed brick interiors of his stores, even allowing us to do so still on the white screen with white subtitles which appear throughout “We Margiela” as Meirens speaks as if from the great beyond. In Margiela’s work there was a silence that allowed us to figure ourselves out, great presence in the absence. Almost a decade later, this presence has only become stronger, yet there have been no sightings of him ever reported, and he offers us no possibility of social media stalking. And still we melt into the story, no halfway people.

Jackie Mallon,

Thursday, 19 April 2018

https://fashionunited.uk/news/culture/film-review-we-margiela/2018041929178

Haltung als Handlung - Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit

Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) ist eine Sturmtruppe zur Errichtung moralischer Schönheit, politischer Poesie und menschlicher Großgesinntheit. Das ZPS gehört zu den innovativsten Inkubatoren politischer Aktionskunst und steht für eine erweiterte Form von Theater: Kunst muss weh tun, reizen, Widerstand leisten. In eine Begriffsallianz gebracht: aggressiver Humanismus. 
Die Publikation stellt erstmals alle wichtigen Aktionen des künstlerischen Kollektivs in Buchform vor und hinterfragt deren Arbeit zudem in fünf Essays namhafter Autoren – Karen van den Berg, Florian Malzacher, Mely Kiyak, Raimar Stange, Florian Waldvogel – mit unterschiedlichen theoretischen Fragestellungen. 
Ein Interview von Raimar Stange mit Shermin Langhoff und Jakob Augstein  beleuchtet schließlich die Aktionen des ZPS gleichsam aus der Außenperspektive.
Grundüberzeugung des ZPS ist, dass die Lehren des Holocaust durch die Wiederholung politischer Teilnahmslosigkeit, Flüchtlingsabwehr und Feigheit annulliert werden und dass Deutschland aus der Geschichte nicht nur lernen, sondern auch handeln muss.

Haltung als Handlung - Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit

hg. von Raimar Stange, Miriam Rummel, Florian Waldvogel

http://editionmetzel.de/buecher/haltung-als-handlung-das-zentrum-fuer-politische-schoenheit.html

Between the Private and the Public, the Intimate and the Political

Kostis Velonis’s sculptural work often refers to historical events and art historical movements, while his markedly political work has at the same time a very personal aspect. He creates narratives characterized by the linking of personal stories with the reworking of past happenings. His personal experiences and reference points inflect his theoretical pursuits, and historical leaders and literary heroes often play a leading part in his newly invented scenarios. Velonis’s sculptures have a modest character, and they are usually made of wood, cardboard, small objects, and materials from the natural environment, which the artist finds and reuses in a process of bricolage. His works often transmit emotions such us loneliness, failure, melancholy, and uncertainty.

Kostis Velonis’s solo exhibition A Puppet Sun is organized by NEON and curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos. It is on view through January 14, 2018. It features twenty-five new works that the artist conceived for 11 Kaplanon Street in central Athens, responding to the history and architecture of the building. This neoclassical residence has a remarkable history. It was constructed in 1891 and first occupied by Pavlos Kountouriotis, the first president of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–35, the second period in modern Greek history where Greece was not headed by a king). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zouzoula family acquired the residence, and the ground floor became the office of the politician Apostolos Zouzoulas, one of the founders of the People’s Party. Between the 1910s and the 1920s the building served as party headquarters. Later, during the authoritarian Metaxas Regime (1936–41), it was transformed into a residence for female students.

Kostis Velonis and Daphne Vitali in conversation

Mousse Magazine. Between the Private and the Public, the Intimate and the Political : Kostis Velonis

http://moussemagazine.it/private-public-intimate-political-kostis-velonis/

Kwaito's Promise

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.
           
Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2016 http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo23290913.html  

Unsung heroes of Athens cityscape

Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens is a book for those of us who, blinded by the classical wonders of the Acropolis, have never given much thought to the nondescript cityscape below.

This is not about architect-led building design but an effort to understand the positives of Athens’ 20th century urbanism, warts and all. The heroes of the book are the polykatoikia – the prolific post-war apartment buildings that were built at impressive pace using reinforced concrete frames with masonry infill.

While their white facades, flat roofs and horizontal lines bore some similarities to the forms of modern architecture, these were, as author Ioanna Theocharopoulou points out, extremely simplistic versions. Polykatoikia differed from modern architecture in important ways. Not only did they lack the modern movement’s political and aesthetic agenda, they relied on informal ‘quasi-craft’ processes of construction and avoided innovation, precision and standardisation. Typically they had commercial uses on the ground floor with a marble lobby and staircase leading to a few floors of balconied apartments above. A roomier version was popular in middle and upper middle class areas, often with a maid’s room and a penthouse.

While there were exceptions, the design of this building type was the domain of the builder rather than an architect. It was, says Kenneth Frampton in the foreword,  ‘built for the people, of the people, by the people’.

These were ultra-desirable as symbols of modern city living, especially when combined with the then groundbreaking domestic appliances. This was lifestyle living, 1960s style, that represented progress, optimism and access to ‘the good life’.

The book sets polykatoikia firmly in the context of the preceding century as well as the strife of war and civil unrest of the 20th, and the densification and expansion of Athens. We learn how home ownership swelled as these apartments were constructed as joint ventures between developer and landowner. Typically this involved replacing 19th century neoclassical villas that had gone firmly out of fashion, with the landowner donating the land in exchange for a few units in the new development. In time, the migrant tradespeople working on the developments would become those buying the apartments.

There was a culture of ‘craftiness’ with regard to construction, with the 1955 Building Code legalising existing illegal construction and itself prone to amendments and deviations. Self-built humble dwellings on the city outskirts in time became ‘up-lifted’ to larger buildings as their rural immigrant owners  acquired the money to build polykatoikia and become landlords themselves. Here, the author draws links with the work of Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental practice today in designing homes that facilitate incremental construction and expansion.

Rather more interesting, to me at least, is the account of the social dimension of the polykatoikia and their representation in popular culture. Photos show women involved as labourers in the construction of the apartments but it was inside that they really held sway as interior stylists and consumers. Of course they were still doing all the housework, even if they did now wear a mini-skirt and wield an ultra-modern vacuum cleaner. Men, we learn, might have their own ‘masculine corner’ or room where they could relax in a comfortable leather armchair. Some might even have their own bachelor pad apartment.

Polykatoikia were important as representing a new idea of modern life and of Greek identity, and in doing so, says Theocharopoulou, blurred the previously separate realms of ‘informal/formal, local/foreign, traditional/modern’.

This informative – although sometimes a little dense – book closes with a look at some of the more innovative, recent architect-designed polykatoikia buildings and consideration of how a new generation of civic minded urban activists are responding to Greece’s financial crisis and huge influx of refugees. Some are renovating abandoned polykatoikia as housing, proving once again the resilience and adaptability of these buildings. Faced with such economic and social challenges, Athens needs the resourcefulness, wit and economy of means that this unlauded building type embodies. 

Text by Pamela Buxton

Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens by Ioanna Theocharopoulou, foreword by Kenneth Frampton, Artifice

https://www.ribaj.com/culture/builders-housewives-culture-pamela-buxton

Don’t Overthink It

Matthew B. Crawford’s first book, the best-selling Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), established him as a polemical champion of the superiority, mental and moral, of manual labor over the kind of employment typically sought by college graduates, including any work done on a computer and in a cubicle. For some readers, the fact that the author had earned a doctorate in political philosophy and also owned a motorcycle-repair shop lent a certain kick-ass authenticity to his enterprise. Now ensconced at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Crawford is back with a heady argument against headiness, and to aid him he invokes as models a couple of artisans and an array of regular guys—short-order cooks, hockey players, and, of course, any dude who knows his way around a Harley. In The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, he doesn’t just herald the soul-cleansing properties of skilled craftwork. He indicts the philosophical tradition that he believes has robbed us of the world beyond our muddled, misdirected minds. Crawford calls this tradition the Enlightenment, though his description of the European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries distorts it almost beyond recognition.


By Rebecca Newburger Goldstein

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/dont-overthink-it/389519/

The Art of Administration: On Greg Barnhisel’s “Cold War Modernists”

Here is a list of some major players in Cold War Modernists, Greg Barnhisel’s fascinating and meticulously researched history of modernist art and literature’s role in Cold War diplomacy: the American Artists Professional League (AAPL); the American Federation of Arts (AFA); the Committee on Public Information (CPI); the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF); the International Information Administration (IIA); the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA); the United States Information Agency (USIA); the United States Information Service (USIS); and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations, which, by way of a complicated transliteration, adopted the acronym VOKS.

Imagine all of the paperwork produced by one of these benignly titled groups: the mission statements and monthly summaries, official memos and interagency notices, budgets and projected spending reports. Then imagine the size of the file cabinet needed to house all of the documents for it and all of the governmental, quasi-governmental, and philanthropic organizations that dealt in foreign policy and cultural diplomacy between the rise of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall (or, to take the slightly more manageable time frame at the heart of Cold War Modernists, between the Truman and Kennedy administrations). This will give a sense of the archive from which Barnhisel culls his study. And now imagine the time and patience it would require to find, request, and read this material, and make it say something about the fate of modernist literature and art after their initial spark in the 1910s and 1920s.

Text by Donal Harris

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-art-of-administration-on-greg-barnhisels-cold-war-modernists

Το εκθεσιακό πρότυπο του σουρεαλισμού στη σημερινή επιμελητική πρακτική

“Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme”, Galérie Beaux-Arts, Georges Wildenstein. Paris, 1938

Μια σειρά από πρόσφατες επιμελητικές προτάσεις φαίνεται ότι αμφισβητούν την παραδοσιακή σχέση της μουσειολογίας με το ερευνητικό της αντικείμενο. Αυτές οι επιμέλειες τείνουν να απαρνούνται ένα συγκροτημένο πεδίο και εγείρουν ζητήματα αμφισβήτησης ενός καθολικού ερμηνευτικού μοντέλου. Ωστόσο, στο πέρασμα από τη συμβατή στη «νέα μουσειολογία», οι επιμελητές εξακολουθούν να αναζητούν πειστικές θεωρήσεις του αντικειμένου τους. Θα μπορούσε κάποιος να ισχυρισθεί ότι υπάρχει μια δέσμευση επιστημονικότητας ή και ψευτοεπιστημονικότητας, με την έννοια της συμβατικής επανάληψης της πληροφορίας σε ένα αναμενόμενο πλαίσιο αναφορών που ακολουθούν τις «μόδες» της εποχής;

Αν το μουσείο σήμερα αξιολογείται ως ένας χώρος συστηματικής έρευνας, εκπαίδευσης και πλήρους τεκμηρίωσης, ενώ παράλληλα η κυρίαρχη τάση της επιμέλειας ακολουθεί το πρότυπο αυτό ακόμη και εκτός του αυστηρά οριοθετημένου πεδίου του μουσείου, εκείνο που προκύπτει είναι ότι κάποιοι επιμελητές κουράζονται από το φαινόμενο της υπέρχρησης της εκπαιδευτικής διάστασης του αντικειμένου τους, και ανάμεσα σε άλλες επιλογές αναζητούν στα εγχειρίδια της πρωτοπορίας προτάσεις που αντιπαρατίθενται στο «εγκυκλοπαιδικό» βάρος του διαφωτισμού. 

Ένα εύλογο ερώτημα, που θέτει ζητήματα ηθικής της διαχείρισης του εκθεσιακού αντικειμένου, είναι για το εάν ένα συμβατικό κατά τα άλλα έργο μπορεί να εκτεθεί μ' ένα αιρετικό επιμελητικό σχεδιασμό, αποκτώντας μια διάσταση που να εξυπηρετεί τις ανάγκες των επιμελητών, πέρα από τις δικές του προθέσεις. Ωστόσο, είναι ευνόητο ότι αυτό συμβαίνει συχνά και δεν είναι απαραίτητα κακό ως «τέχνασμα», στο βαθμό που το έργο ανοίγεται σε διαφορετικές αναγνώσεις, που αναβαθμίζουν την υπόστασή του με αφηγήσεις που μπορεί να ήταν συμπληρωματικές ή χαμένες στο υποσυνείδητο της εικαστικής γραφής.

Διαβάστε περισσότερα
http://avgi-anagnoseis.blogspot.gr/2015/07/blog-post_1.html
ΑΝΑΓΝΩΣΕΙΣ: Το εκθεσιακό πρότυπο του σουρεαλισμού στη σημερινή επιμελητική πρακτική : Αμετρία,  επιμέλεια έκθεσης: Nicoletta De Rosa, Alessandro Pasini, Tomaso Piantini, Πολύνα Κοσμαδάκη, Γιώργος Τζιρτζιλάκης, Μουσείο Μπενάκη
κείμενο : Κωστής Βελώνης

DMY Design Spots 2015: Pet Market at Galerie erstererster

Much as we adore our pets they can be troublesome. Be it the cat the refuses to move from your bed, the dog that chews your shoes, pillows, newspapers et al, or the sweary parrot embarrassing us at every (inopportune) moment. If only we could distract them. Maybe we should treat them better? Or at least treat them to better possessions, to objects that meet a standard of functionality and design quality that we demand from our objects. We’re not averse to claiming our pets are family members, why not put as much consideration into the objects they use on a daily basis as we put into those used by our other family members?

Open Cage by Dominik Hehl, as seen at Pet Market, Galerie erstererster, Berlin

Such, or at least similar, thoughts form the background to the exhibition Pet Market currently showing at Galerie erstererster in Berlin.

Pet Market began as semester project at the Kunsthochschule Kassel under the direction of Tanja Seiner, who is also curator of the exhibition. “I became aware that we are increasingly sharing our living spaces with animals, that there appears to be ever more pets in our lives”, explains Tanja, “and so I set my students the task of design a product for pets and humans, not just an object for the pet alone, not just an object for the human alone, but an object for both.”


https://www.smow.com/blog/2015/06/dmy-design-spots-2015-pet-market-at-galerie-erstererster/

http://petmarket.world

What is it Good For ?

Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord playing the Game of War, 1977.

By Nathan Heller
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2071

Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 – review

Paul Ginsborg’s masterly and original account puts family life at the centre of revolution and dictatorship

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/25/family-politics-domestic-life-devastation-and-survival-paul-ginsborg-review

Text by Lucy Hughes-Hallett 

Turn Down for What?

Turn Down for What?

By MALCOLM HARRIS

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/turn-down-for-what/

Personalized Ideology (or Ideology Personified): Silva's Mood Economy

Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization.  Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus. 

In the past few weeks I have returned again and again to the idea of "negative solidarity" that I outlined on this blog. I found myself mentally bookmarking news reports and articles that seem to be evidence of hostility to any collective organization for wages or benefits, not to mention larger or more structural transformations. The affect of ressentiment, the distinct sense that someone somewhere was benefiting at your expense, seemed prevalent. (Of course the "someones" in this situation are always those on social welfare programs, state employees, etc., never capitalists, investors, etc.) However, negative solidarity risked having all of the characteristics of what Althusser called a "descriptive theory," a sophisticated sounding recasting of what one already knows and thinks. The dangers of descriptive theories is that they provide a moment of recognition, ("That is it, dude; totally,")but no way to move forward. So the question which I returned to again, is how to account for the genesis and constitution of negative solidarity, how to move beyond description. This is a question of socio-political theory, but it is a necessary precondition of political action as well.  Negative Solidarity is in that sense another name to the barrier of any politics whatsoever. 

It is perhaps for this reason that I only had to read a few sentences describing Jennifer Silva's Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty before I decided to buy it. I read it eagerly, starting it on the plane over Thanksgiving and finishing it during the brief break between the end of classes and the onslaught of grading. 

Silva's certain concern, her central thesis, is that the current economic transformations, which could be broadly described as a combination of neoliberalism and austerity, have produced a new adulthood, a new subjectivity, that is individualized, psychologized, and therapeutic.  As Silva writes, 

"At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment widespread of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health. Rather than turn to politics to address the obstacles standing in the way of a secure adult life, the majority of the men and women I interview crafted deeply personal coming of age stories, grounding their adult identities in recovering from their painful pasts--whether addition childhood abuse, family trauma, or abandonment and forging an emancipated, transformed and adult self."

Drawing from a series of interviews of young working class individuals in Richmond, Virginia and Lowell, Massachusetts, Silva paints a familiar picture of lives that go from school, to military, to community college, and sometimes back home, passing in and through these institutions without every constituting the traditional linear arrow of familial home, school, work, marriage. etc. As Silva argues the linear narrative of life is then constructed not in terms of career, marriage, and family, but in terms of past trauma and present victory. As Silva argues,

"I make sense of the phenomenon of the phenomenon of therapeutic adulthood through the concept of the mood economy. I argue that working-class men and women inhabit a social world in which the legitimacy and dignity due adults are purchased not with traditional currencies such as work or marriage but instead through the ability to organize their difficult emotions into a narrative of self-transformation."

On this reading a mood economy would offer a different sense of validation and compensation, one that fills the void that is left not only from the markers of progress on the standard middle class biography ("time's arrow" in Sennett's sense) but from monetary compensation in general. In place of the standard biography of job, marriage, and children, or even the quantitative accumulation of wealth, there is a biography which charts its victories and defeats on a much more intimate scale, on overcoming addiction, abuse, or simply the ever important "taking responsibility" for oneself and one's actions. What is interesting about Silva's book is that she presents this narrative less as some kind of new found concern with inner life, with all of its positive valuations, than as an isolation, people turning away from politics, community, and love, turning into the infinite morass of their feelings and history. 

In this way Silva's "mood economy" is similar to a particular articulation of what I have called, following Frédéric Lordon an "Affective economy." As Lordon argues one of the primary goals of the organization of affect and the imagination, these two things never being too far apart for a Spinozist, at least in a hierarchal society, is the simultaneous "elevation" of the puny objects and goals left to the majority, the workers in capitalism,  and the denigration of any systemic change as impossible. As Lordon argues inCapitalisme, Désir, et Servitude: 

"Symbolic violence consists then properly speaking in the production of a double imaginary, the imaginary of fulfillment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convince them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire. ‘For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do’ (EIIIDXXVIII) Here is the passionate mechanism for converting designation into self-designation put to work by the (social) imaginary of powerlessness."

Read along these lines Silva's "mood economy" offers an even more meager reward than even the consumer society. No longer is the promise one of buying things the ultimate capture of desire, compensating for a life sold away in labor, but the promise of "self-help, of organizing one's hopes and desires. In austerity there is no longer the promise of endless accumulation, but endless introspection--which comes much cheaper. An insipid spiritualism supplants a decadent materialism. It just so happens that the central watchword of this spiritualism is responsibility, the subject it produces is infinitely responsible for every lost job, for debt, for a tattered world of community and relations. The self-help subject is the perfect subject of a contemporary labor situation we demands responsibility and flexibility. 

In this way Silva's conception of a "mood economy" is in some sense similar to Rob Horning's analysis of the virtual compensations of social media, the retweets, likes, and reblogs that give us a sense of validation. In each case "economy" or "compensation" functions as a kind of consolation prize, these economies function to paper over the decline of real wages and actual connections with others. Our rewards get smaller, and with each spiral inward the idea of changing the system becomes harder and harder to imagine. 

As much as Silva's book could be used to chart a kind of psychic economy of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a kind of diminishing returns of psychic investments, its focus on interviews, on the narratives individuals construct of their own lives, also sheds light on contemporary politics. The idea that social welfare damages responsibility, that it encourages the laziness of the unemployed, has been been around at least since Reagan's "welfare queen" and shows no sign of waining as a powerful political idea (or ideology).  The idea that one should be held responsible and accountable for the loss of their job would seem to be absurd, especially after the current recession. However, Silva's analysis suggests that the calls for "personal responsibility" from elected leaders resonate with the personal narratives of responsibility being constructed in front of television sets and in the pages of the latest self-help bestseller. As Yves Citton argues in his book Mythocratie, political myths, the narratives of nation and party, can only function, can only take hold, if they in some sense capture and resonate with the narratives through which individuals make sense of their own lives (and vice versa). A population turned inward, turned towards the narratives of past trauma and present responsibility, will thus be more receptive to a politics and economics of personal responsibility, no matter how economically incoherent it is. 

Thus, to conclude by invoking the epigraph above, over thirty years ago Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus, critiquing the conservative individualism at the heart of psychoanalysis, perhaps it is now necessary to write the necessary follow-up, Anti-Oprah. Of course the point is not Oprah, or any specific guru, but the entire tendency to turn ever inwards in moments of crisis, constructing our defeats and victories in the interior space of feelings and narrative. That space is a cage. 

text by Jason Read

http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2013/12/personalized-ideology-or-ideology.html

The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Can Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century-Review

The nation state, the construct that has dominated global politics and diplomacy for two centuries, can no longer meet the needs of citizens. This is the stark conclusion of a former high-flying British diplomat who quit the Foreign Office in disgust over Iraq and who has since worked with emerging governments in trying to assert themselves on the world stage.

y the book

Carne Ross takes up where Naomi Klein, Noreena Hertz and others left off. This is an impassioned, idealistic critique of the state of global politics and the deepening rift between those with power and those without. One of the book's strengths is that he seeks solutions, though I wasn't always persuaded of their effectiveness.

Most of all this is a mea culpa. It is refreshing for a non-fiction author to be so brutal about himself. Ross was one of an elite corps of diplomats, fast-tracked to a high position at a relatively young age. He would probably have received a top ambassadorship – with all the baubles of status and comfort that he admits he found attractive – had he not jumped ship.

As the lead official at Britain's mission at the United Nations in New York dealing with Iraq, Ross was responsible for implementing policy on weapons of mass destruction and the pre-war sanctions regime. He contends that the Brits and their allies knew pretty much all along that Saddam Hussein did not possess significant WMD. Therefore, in his view, the sanctions were unjustified punishment of a people who suffered widespread privation. Ross cites experts' estimates of an "excess mortality rate" of over 500,000 children under the age of five. "Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility. This was my work; this is what I did."

It is when people feel dissociated from the consequence of their actions that harm is done. The author recalls Stanley Milgram's famous laboratory experiment from the 1960s, which showed how easily humans could obey orders to torture, giving electric shocks to other participants. This, Ross argues, showed not just the pernicious effects of authority upon moral conduct, but something even more revealing: "the fact that the volunteers who administered the electric shocks, crucially, were told that they had no responsibility for the results".

At the heart of the corrosion of public life is the time-old relationship between politics, power and money. Ross details the pernicious influence of lobbyists, which he argues pervades Whitehall as much as it does Washington DC. While the argument is not new, the details are engaging. From McDonald's to Pepsi, from Kraft Foods to BP, rules were bent to accommodate corporate interests. I was particularly struck by the exemption granted to Wrigley chewing gum during the imposition of sanctions against Iran. The gum, Ross tells readers, "was classed as 'humanitarian aid' and thus exempt from sanctions, permitting millions of dollars of sales".

Yet, in its desire to cover the gamut of evil-doing, the narrative loses impact. One minute readers are taken to Kosovo, the next they are told about David Cameron's Big Society. Then from Iraq they are in US healthcare. Still, this is an important contribution to the debate. Ross bravely advocates the term anarchism (a positive absence of distant, top-down leadership), which he differentiates from anarchy, the absence of rules and the onset of chaos. He seeks a new form of engagement which borrows from the right an appeal to individual enterprise and self-expression, and from the left a sense of solidarity and community.

He concludes with a nine-point manifesto for citizens to regain control of the decisions that affect their lives. It includes: work out the priorities that affect you and pursue them; identify "who's got the money and who's got the gun" (in other words, where the power resides); do what you can when you can (for example, don't wait for asylum policy to improve); help an affected family (as his parents did first for a Czechoslovak student escaping the Soviets, and 30 years later for a Zimbabwean fleeing Mugabe).I am not convinced that they add up to a whole, but the individual parts are compelling.

It comes down to on-the-ground change. The most illuminating example Ross cites is the experiment conducted in Porto Alegre. In 1989 the Brazilian city was one of the most unequal in Latin America. It then embarked upon "participatory budgeting", with citizens encouraged to join debates about local spending priorities. Some 50,000 of its 1.5 million citizens take part. Apparently the number of schools has increased fourfold, while provision of sewerage and water is now comprehensive.

His message to the elite is that if they do not listen and act, they will face the consequences: "The less people have agency – control – over their own affairs, and the less command they feel over their futures and their circumstances, the more inclined they are to take to the street."

Text by John Kampfner 
Source : The Observer, Thursday 8 September 2011

Failing Better: Ian Hamilton and The New Review

If you could travel back in time to a particular literary era, like Woody Allen’s characters in Midnight in Paris, where would you prefer to drop in? The New York of Mailer and Capote? The Paris of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald? Not me. I’d defy all the glamour and glitz and go to soggy ’70s London. Specifically, I would waltz into the Pillars of Hercules, an ancient pub on Greek Street in Soho, and report to the poet, critic and editor Ian Hamilton, who would no doubt be holding down the fort at the bar, an emperor-sized scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other (they didn’t call him High-Tar Hamilton for nothing), and ask to review a book for his monthly magazine, The New Review. Its offices were just upstairs from the pub, but all the real business was completed bar-side. There in the Pillars I might encounter Martin Amis or Ian McEwan, Jonathan Raban, or Clive James, possibly even an ageing and manic Robert Lowell, ensconced by wide-eyed admirers. With any luck, I would become audience to one of Hamilton’s celebrated witticisms, like the one about the young poet who came down from Oxford to write for the magazine. According to legend, Hamilton took him downstairs to the pub at 11:30 in the morning and bought them two large scotches. “Oh no, I just can’t keep drinking,” the poet demurred, “I must give it up, it’s doing terrible things to me. I don’t even like it anymore.” To which Hamilton indignantly remarked: “Good god, man! None of us likes it.”



Karl Miller once remarked that you could write an anthology of Hamilton’s pub-sayings. Accordingly, much of the written material concerning him tends toward the personal-anecdotal: everyone seems to have their favorite Hamilton-zinger. Julian Barnes, for instance, whose go-to drink in those days was a gin and bitter lemon (hardly a pub-drink), recalls that “the first time Ian offered me a drink in the Pillars and I told him what I wanted, he didn’t react, no doubt confident that he had misheard me. He was generously willing to stand me the round, but unable to pronounce every word in case the barman got the wrong idea. ‘Large whisky, pint of Old Skullsplitter, a gin and …you say it.’ ‘Bitter lemon,’ I admitted, completing the order and my shame.” Hamilton makes a fictional cameo in Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow as the “charming, handsome, litigious, drink-drenched, debt-ridden, women-infested Neil Darlington,” and in North Face of Soho, the fourth of his so-called “Unreliable Memoirs,” Clive James devotes a couple of pages to his old friend and editor. One and a half of those pages are devoted to his old friend’s sexual success, which was by all accounts considerable. “At the height of his pulling power,” James writes, “he never had to do anything to get a woman he wanted except fight off the ones he didn’t, so as to give her a free run to the target.” Hamilton’s good looks, in collusion with his poetic air and understated cool, caught the attention of more than just a few women. But there was an attractive darkness, too; an ironic, reserved demeanor that hinted at something broken or damaged. “He had the knack of embodying self-destruction in an alluring form,” James writes. When the two of them did a reading together in Oxford they were approached by a gorgeous young student. Smitten, Clive James invited her to drop by at the Pillars when she was next in London. When she did, James greeted her enthusiastically at the bar. “Is he here?” was all she said to him.



It’s tempting to romanticize this kind of set-up, what with all pub-hub and boozy camaraderie, but it shouldn’t keep us from acknowledging the achievements of the magazine itself. Hamilton, though fearless, was a dream-editor. He launched his first literary journal, Scorpion, when he was in the sixth form at Darlington Grammar School, skipping class to ensure its distribution and getting in trouble for publishing it on the same day as the official school magazine. “It was an anti-school magazine,” Hamilton said. He would have much rather been playing soccer (a life-long passion; he was a self-professed “soccer bore”), but a heart condition prevented him from joining in with his fellow classmates. “I reached for my Keats,” he said. “I developed a kinship with sickly romantic poets who couldn’t play games.” When asked what eventually happened to that heart condition, Hamilton observed wryly that “it went away as soon as I started drinking.”

His editorial breakthrough arrived in the form of The Review, a journal bulging with poetry that followed the failure of Tomorrow, a “rather awful magazine” he’d launched in 1959 while a student at Oxford. The Review appeared in part because of the money Hamilton owed the printer of Tomorrow – a pattern that repeated itself with The New Review. Along with like-minded poets such as John Fuller, Colin Falck, and the American Michael Fried, The Review established a reputation for its acidity and combativeness. “I saw myself protecting poetry against the pretenders, the charlatans, the fakes,” Hamilton explained. It lasted 10 years. During that time, Hamilton moved to London and became the Times Literary Supplement’s poetry editor, not to mention a published poet himself. A pamphlet, Pretending not to sleep, had appeared in 1964 as part of a special edition of The Review, while his debut collection The Visit was published by Faber & Faber in 1970.

When it was revealed that the cultural magazine Encounter, launched in 1953 by the poet Stephen Spender, was being covertly funded by the C.I.A., Spender left in protest, as did other high-ranking officers like the late Frank Kermode, and steps were taken by England’s Arts Council to launch a counter-Encounter. After years of meetings and lunches (presumably to discuss next week’s meetings and lunches) the project ultimately failed to materialize, but a sizable amount of money had been put aside and was, in Hamilton’s words, “just lying there.” Charles Osborne, the Council’s literary director, didn’t object when Hamilton suggested the funds be used to re-launch The Review as a monthly magazine. A year later, in April 1974, the inaugural issue of The New Review appeared, featuring contributions from Robert Lowell, Clive James, Al Alvarez, and Martin Amis, among others.
The magazine, with its glossy pages and design-conscious format, immediately caused a stir. This was the time, as Hamilton explained it, of widespread labor protests and Edward Heath’s three-day work week, and here was a large, baronial litmag priced at 90p an issue. “It did come under a lot of fire on all the waste-of-public money issues — which was bollocks, because public money paid only for about half of any single issue,” Hamilton said. The money was a mixed blessing at best. The Council’s Literature Panel, a committee made up of fellow writers, turned out to be a pharisaical outfit. “The truth is that when you give a bunch of writers any kind of money-muscle, they go slightly mad,” Hamilton wrote in a later essay printed in Granta:
And when you put them on committees that give money to other writers, they go madder still. I can hear their voices now: “Mr Chairman, on a point of order, I feel it my duty to observe…” And this would be some foppish, dreamy-faced poetaster fresh from a three-absinthe lunch. But nearly all of them behaved like this. Wild-eyed anarchic novelists would transmute into prim-lipped accountants. Tremulous lyric poets would rear up like tigers of the bottom line. Book-reviewers who, I knew, lived in daily terror of being rumbled by the Revenue were all at once furrow-browed custodians of public funds.

Of necessity, Hamilton became one of literature’s great hustlers, jingling with money knowhow. “Knowing how many days pass between a final notice and a cut-off, knowing much time you gain with a carefully-phrased ‘WAFDA pdc’… such information is the small change of a life that’s sometimes financed by small change.” When the poet Craig Raine worked as books editor on Fridays, he once met a bailiff on the stairs who asked him if he was Ian Hamilton. Raine took him upstairs to the office and asked Ian Hamilton if he’d seen Ian Hamilton. “No,” Ian Hamilton said, “You just missed him.”

Hounded by debt collectors, pressured by printer’s fees, fearful that the Arts Council would come through on its threats to pull their funding (not to mention more local troubles, such as the mental illness of his first wife and their eventual divorce), Hamilton was ever under intense strain. “He was the only person I knew who was sued by his own solicitor,” Christopher Hitchens recalled. On one occasion his thick, dark hair began to turn white and fall out in clumps. Eventually it grew back again.
In 1999, two years before his untimely death at age 63, the Cargo Press published a festschrift, Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems and Reflections, in which many of Hamilton’s old friends and contributors paid homage to the man who took a chance on their work and half-destroyed himself doing so. In his contribution to the book, Ian McEwan memorably evokes what it was like in the Pillars, amid all the fumes and vapors and drink:
In The Pillars I met “my generation” of writers — male, born in the late forties — and made friendships that will last me a lifetime — among them Amis, Barnes, Raine, Fenton, Reid. Most of us had yet to publish our first books. We read each other with close, gossipy attention. It was a given that there was nowhere as good to place a story or poem as The New Review – at least, until the Amis-Barnes era began at The [New] Statesman. If this was a literary clique, it was remarkably open. I took various friends along who weren’t really writers at all, but Ian treated them as though they were and gave them books to review. Anyone, it seemed, could wander in and get a drink. Junkies came in to shoot up in the lavatories upstairs. If you wandered in too often, you were likely to be given an unpaid job. Mine was at a desk in a corner of the packing room on the second floor. Ian asked me to read the short story slush pile and tell him if there was anything worth his consideration. It took me two weeks to discover that there wasn’t.



McEwan goes on, like practically everyone else who contributed to The New Review, to emphasize the central importance of Hamilton to the magazine. Despite a reputation for being coolly reticent with praise, and devoutly more butch with dispraise (he apparently once told a writer that, if torn into small strips, his piece might serve nicely as cat litter), he was an editor writers were eager to please. He encouraged them to do their best — even if they weren’t getting paid (which they often weren’t). “There was no house style at all, but it had the personality of its editor, who was both hugely enthusiastic and encouraging and capable of scowling sardonically at what he thought was phony,” the writer Jonathan Raban recalls. “Hemingway famously said, ‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit-detector,’ and was what Ian provided for us.” Scanning its back catalogues, The New Review’s quality is glaringly obvious: fiction by Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Jim Crace, Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and John Cheever; poetry by Tom Paulin, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Zbigniew Herbert; essays and reportage by Jonathan Raban, Frank Kermode, John Carey, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, and Germaine Greer. There were special features on Scientology, Jaws, and the IRA; entire plays by Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht; interviews with Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal. There was a recurring satirical column by Edward Pygge, a fictional name used to poke fun at the Modish London Literary World.

In The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, a small book published in 1976, Hamilton looked closely at some of the most influential of the 20th century’s little magazines: The Little Review, Poetry, New Verse, The Criterion, Partisan Review, and Horizon. What characterized them were “small resources, small respect for the supposed mysteries of ‘how to run a business’, small appeal outside a very small minority of readers.” It’s hard to shake the sense that Hamilton, whether he is writing about T. S. Eliot and The Criterion or Geoffrey Grigson and New Verse, was also writing about himself and The New Review. He would definitely have sympathized with Eliot’s complaints to John Quinn in a letter of 1923: “I wish to heaven I had never taken up The Criterion… It has been an evergrowing responsibility… a great expense to me and I have not got a penny out of it: there is not enough money to run it and pay me too… I think the work and worry have taken 10 years off my life.” And no doubt he must have been a little inspired by Grigson’s sardonic willingness to make enemies, even of his friends. Just as practically all poet-contributors to New Verse would eventually see their own work savagely debunked in its pages, so Hamilton never shied away from publishing reviews that were critical of the writing of friends or contributors. Before John Carey’s panning of Clive James’ The Metropolitan Critic appeared in The New Review’s pages, Hamilton showed James the typescript over drinks at the Pillars. “In the name of editorial integrity,” James wrote, “he not only didn’t mind making enemies, he didn’t mind hurting his friends either.” James, however, didn’t hold a grudge: his second collection of essays, published five years later, bore the title At the Pillars of Hercules.
“Each magazine needs a new decade,” Hamilton wrote, “and each decade needs a new magazine.” Clearly The New Review was the magazine of the ’70s, and though he believed that the ideal lifespan of a little magazine was 10 years, it only ever made it to five. The Arts Council pulled the plug in 1979 and The New Review collapsed under a ton of debt. Hamilton remained in financial rubble for years to come, though eventually made a living from his journalism and, later, as the author of acclaimed biographies of Robert Lowell (Robert Lowell: A Biography) and J. D. Salinger (Ian Hamilton, being Ian Hamilton, was naturally sued for In Search of J D Salinger — by Salinger himself). He wrote learned and entertaining volumes about the lives of writers and their biographers – Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 (1990); Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992); A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (1998); Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets (2002) — as well as several volumes of essays and reviews, not to mention two books on Paul Gascoigne, the once-controversial English soccer star. “I think every book I’ve written has some strong autobiographical element in it. That seems to me okay,” he told Dan Jacobson in the London Review of Books shortly before his death.



Nothing was more autobiographical than his poetry, and turning from the wry, self-deprecating voice of his journalism to the spare, somber voice of his verse is something of a shock. His deeply personal subject matter — his father’s illness and early death when Hamilton was just thirteen; his first wife’s mental illness; his divorces and disappointments — are not, like the later poems of Robert Lowell, evoked with all the reticence of a tell-all tabloid spread. Instead, Hamilton’s poems are like eavesdropping on one half of a private conversation. Stripped of personal context, whatever private crisis was there has to be inferred by the reader — Hamilton remains stoically silent. But the emotional intensity, though sparing, is anything but:
I am dumpy, obtruse, old and out of it.
At night, I can feel my hands prowl over me,
Lightly probing at my breasts, my knees,
The folds of my belly,
Now and then pressing and sometimes,
In their hunger, tearing me.
I live alone.
The poetic voice comes as a jolt when compared to the prose, but the two are in no way contradictory. They are contained in each other. In a little analysis of the “none of us likes it” quip that I opened with, the critic James Wood rightly observes that the joke implies a “stoical tragi-comic world…a picture at once funny and sad.” Hamilton was funny in the way of a proverb from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Excess of sorrow laughs.” His self-deprecating tone is amusing and charming but, like the tip of the iceberg, is sustained by the bulk of private terrors submerged beneath it. In the long interview he gave to Dan Jacobsen in the London Review of Books at the end of his life, the same note is struck again and again. Of The New Review he says: “Looking back, I think I should probably have done it differently, but I didn’t, so there it was. And it still looks pretty okay to me and has some really quite good stuff in it.” When you look at those back issues, pretty okay and quite good are not exactly phrases that leap to mind — nor do they seem to be phrases Hamilton deployed merely out of a sense of false modesty. The New Review, after all, was a result of serial failures, and in the end must have seemed like something of failure to its creator, too. When it folded and he left the magazine racket for good, he went on to occupy an uncertain ground as a sometime-poet and occasional-biographer. There would have been plenty of occasions for the intense self-doubt he admired in Matthew Arnold. In his book on Arnold, published very late in his life, he put a quote of the poet’s at the beginning that he was very fond of:
It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits — and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.



Posterity isn’t usually kind to editors, biographers, critics, or even poets. Hamilton was all four, sometimes by accident, always by virtue of his wit, intelligence and quiet rebelliousness. Still, he very likely saw himself frittered away piecemeal and, if not exactly as a failure, then as less than he imagined himself. It’s fair to say, I think, that he made a career of his many failures: his failure to become a soccer star, his failures in the magazine business, the private failures that fuelled his poetry. He tried, he failed, and then he failed better. At certain moments we may wish to acknowledge the inevitability of this — in writing as in life. Those of us who lack the madcap artistic genius of a Lowell or a Salinger, and whose greatest gift to literature may simply be to serve it, will often feel that we have courted failure. Though he was not a genius or a great artist, Hamilton served literature by setting a great example (The Lowells and the Salingers of this world are hardly exemplary). In a kinder world, his achievements would have yanked him from the penury of posterity. But no matter. I still want to time-warp back to the Pillars, when Hamilton, in the words of his poem “Returning,” was at his best:
Dear friend, I wish you could have seen
This place when it was at its best,
When I was,
But it isn’t far. It isn’t far. Come with me.

By MORTEN HØI JENSEN, June 7, 2012
Source:www.themillions.com