The Big Win

The Big Win: A Modern Morality Tale is Barnaby Barford’s latest piece, showing at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. Barford – who is yet to have a Wikipedia page (and is therefore curiously anonymous for an international prize winner) – satirises in a series of dioramas about the size of a fish tank the hopes and dreams of the sordid British public. Well, one element of our public at least.

In a modern-day Dickensian narrative, a takeaway- and TV-addicted Rab C Nesbitt-type antihero wins the lottery, lives it up for a while and, inevitably, squanders it. It provides the art-going public with a brief platform from which to condescend. BP (Burning Py-izz-ire) would prefer a slightly broader critique, which incorporates the lazy hypocrisy of the art-goer himself, who sniffs at "Rab" here and then on departing the gallery delves deeply into the Propasphere ("Propaganda sphere") - more deeply, because he knows not where he swims.

Is The Big Win "classist"? Probably. But then it sounds eerily like the life of Michael Carroll, sans some of his anti-social abuses (when truth trumps art, art's missing something).

And then we ask: but is it art? Well, it has a clear enough message. Is that the point?

The discussion of art in terms of its meaning, rather than the beauty of its execution, the real riddle of modern art and why most of it – Duchamp’s bog, Schwitters’ shit-house – baffles the bourgeoisie and bores the working class, came about after Kant (Clement Greenberg).

Fucking epiphany

I introduce to you a welcome moment from my life. Writing on Wittgenstein's existentialism reminds me of one of the first great 'epiphanies' of my life, where everything seemed to resolve itself of its own accord, as if the problems resulting from the imprisonment in my own consciousness suddenly seemed solved. I experienced for the first time the truth of Nietzsche's Dionysian experience. This clip = Genius plot-structure + genius soundtrack + unabashed nationalism (Herodotean/ Periclean nationalism, not the nationalism of the present day, which is a proletarian and self-abasing attempt to grasp votes) + purity of ideal. I am still grateful to the moment in November 2003 when I stumbled accidentally upon this film. It proves the truth of Hegel's philosophy of the master-slave dialectic, that the truth is on the side of the happy man (Ch.4 of the Phenomenology).

NOTE: there is actually dialogue in the theatrical version.

Wittgenstein's early existentialism

When Wittgenstein said early on in his career that 'The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43) he was following his doctrine of 'hard' solipsism to its logical extreme. What he meant, in his inimitable way, was that the life-circumstances of a person - a happy man, say - is entirely informed by personal, privative experience, and that when an unhappy person seeks to solve his or her problems, he or she thinks firstly of the external conditions that go with - or were formative to - the life of the happy person, and secondly thinks that the internal conditions of his own life refer to a ground of experience that is universal (which Kant called 'transcendental apperception') and universally translatable, i.e., the person denies or simply does not recognise the fact that solipsism - that one's thoughts and feelings are in fact one's only concrete reference point - is the actual blunt fact of consciousness. This does not imply that the person is in fact the only 'real' mind in the world, as Cartesian solipsism does, or that knowledge is impossible, as the Pyrrhonists thought.

We recognise in this that we are tied by the neck with the millstone of the experience of our own solipsism and with the frustration of failing to break out of ourselves. Whereas this sounds pessimistic, it is in fact the key to the overcoming of the Angst of existentialism, of the problem of Sisyphus. Sisyphus's problem is that he is trapped in his own consciousness, a consciousness that is shackled to the eternity of a self-defeating object. What will solve Sisyphus's problem is if he ceased to be who he is, either by transforming his identity, or in the extreme sense, by ending his life. The other alternative, the one Camus advocates, is to take to the absurdity and make it part of oneself, as one triumphs over a disability in accepting it. Of course, one may try to transform the material conditions of one's life, but that brings us back to the first point of the unhappy man above, that he projects the conditions of his failing life into a future state of affairs without accounting for the problem of his own solipsism. It is summed up in the proverb: 'When you go on holiday, you take your problems with you'.

What, then, is Wittgenstein's solution? It is one with his view of philosophy - you strive to dissolve it, not attempt to solve it as if it were a problem of mathematics or science. Its dissolution comes from within consciousness and according to the conditions of its existence, but not as a formula, or even as a piece of poetry. It is really rather a feeling, completely pre-linguistic and pre-cognitive. Psychoanalysis fails (and Wittgenstein talked about this at Cambridge in the 1930s - see the book Philosophical Occasions 1912-51) because it attempts to deal rationally with the life-conditions of the individual, as if a series of propositions about that person's experience could untangle the problems of a person's life and show him how best to live on. Wittgenstein tries to show that those classes of propositions dealing with the materiality of the world fail utterly to express the privacy of the mind, which is where the problem lies. Where they succeed, we are talking again about something that you and I can talk about, and what you and I can talk about can be understood, at least in some way, by others, through the mechanics of translation and linguistics.

'The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?... There are indeed things that cannot be put into words' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.521-6.522).

The decline of friendship and the rise of 'acquaintanceship'

Whatever Friendship might be, its postmodern replacement, 'Acquaintanceship', is mutual pleasure-seeking. The bonds of affection go no further than this. Friendship, of course, doesn't even base itself on mutual agreement. Where friends compromise with one another, acquaintances are based on agreement on the most superficial things (favourite film, songs, beer, clothing label, etc) because mutual acquaintanceship would be compromised and doubtless dissolved if core values (spiritual, political, ideological) were ever discussed. The advantage in this is that it frees people from the obligations of friendship. The disadvantage is that it frees people from the responsibilities of friendship.

The Problem of Modernity

I'll characterise Modernism after the fashion of Habermas. We are living in Modernity’s shadow, the shadow of the completeness and exhaustion of all forms of life, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who chillingly finds himself bored and sated with heaven as with hell and everything in between. We are at once trapped by the bureaucratisation of all life, to which we can offer no original contribution (Weber's point), and by the stunning emptiness of this bureaucratisation, whose grip is not so firm that it provides a set of values by which we can live as people used to before the 'curse' of rationalism. Modernity is:-

The fleetingness of time and experience (recognition that fashions become outmoded, that one will oneself be outmoded; that history marches on and the past is simply 'left behind');

Revolutionary (rebellious) spirit of the age - we see countless rebellions against the strictures of our civilisation. We see liberal revolutions against the lingering traces of a feudal or aristocratic order (1789-1848); socialist revolutions against capitalism, against property (1848-1917; the latter continues in a rejection of consumerism); nationalist revolutions against the entire discourse of modern life (against capitalism and socialism) (1923-45); bourgeois counterrevolutions against the radical revaluation of modern morality by Fascism and Communism (1939; 1945-1991); uprisings against the social order (May 1968), etc ad nauseum. Every rebellion takes it upon itself to revolutionise and subvert, or to defend and make permanent, the rational order of life.

Longing and yearning – for myth (return to the gods of the blood; Völkisch yearning for unity), for community (Gleichschaltung; yearning for consensus); and the longing for freedom from history or authority (Marxist, anarchist).

Belief that one is in a state of perpetual ‘crisis’;

Overcoming ‘closed’ systems of knowledge and representation – refusal to accept the canon of arts, sciences and morals;

Irony and cynicism;

The ‘sin’ of having too much knowledge to cope with it meaningfully (as in Goethe’s Faust), and its poignant obverse, the torture of not having enough knowledge to solve all of the world’s problems.

If one views Modernity thus denuded, one can look on it like a comedy. This is a cast list of a comedy. I hold no truck with the perpetual revolutionaries; I want to laugh at them. The choice is either to struggle against the inevitable discourse of Modernity or to wait for its collapse, as Nietzsche did (and which Spengler predicted).

Escapism and Pascal

Shockingly, I have developed an interest in escapism that I had not cultivated since childhood. A child's escapism is - if we push the fact of the resourcefulness and creativity of children aside - partly attributable to the fact that it does not have mastery over itself in a way that the fully self-conscious adult does.

Pascal wrote that if we spent as much of our lives dreaming as we do living in the physical world, then the dream-world would be as important and as real as the actual world. For my part, I am still struggling with the work-life balance - 8 hours work + 2.5 hours commute; 6.5 free time; 7 hours sleep. My free time is only 61.9% as real as my 'dead' time, as the Situationists put it.

'Life is a dream a little less inconstant'.