Fraudulent Philosophy - Stanley Cavell on the Modern in Art

Why is it that certain ideas become outdated more quickly than others – even if they are especially designed to show what it is to be ‘up to date’ as in Stanley Cavell’s writings on modernism in art?  Does this have to do with the general wasting away of  ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of which Cavell is a major proponent? (see T.P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy”, 2002, online)  Could it be that those ‘methods’ applied to art naturally share the same fate?  Or are there more general laws of obsolescence at work?  How do ‘logics die’ even when they are not logical?

A consequence of Cavell’s imposing sincerity of intention or meaning upon the artist and the work of art is his claim to expose certain works as fraudulent. (in: “Music Discomposed”, Must we mean what we say?, Cambridge 2003)  He describes this claim as “empirical”, arrived at by his experience with works of art and artists of his time – ‘contemporary with the claim’.  He thus applies it only to what he judges to be modern art  – not to the past history of art, nor art in an atemporal plane.  Cavell’s criteria are not transcendental in the Kantian sense, meaning the apriori conditions of the possibility of aesthetic experience; he seems to be demanding of modern art that it make it possible for him to ‘believe’ it.   

His case for sincerity or fraudulence in art, something in itself intangible, not perceivable in the work,– rests on his particular use of  ‘intending’ or ‘meaning’ in a work of art.  He borrows this idea of art and sincerity from Tolstoy’s “What is Art?”.  The writings of Krenek on certain theoretical aspects of the “new music” are his main ‘exhibit’.  Cavell dismisses these writings as ‘fraudulent’ and by a vertiginous leap in his argument concludes that Krenek’s music is also fraudulent.  It is Krenek’s “philosophizing” which annoys Cavell – composers should compose and leave ‘philosophizing’ and magazine articles to the ‘professionals’.  But Cavell has nothing to say about Krenek’s music – or even how it reflects his ‘fraudulent’ theories.  This does not prevent him though from appropriating Krenek’s themes of “composition, improvisation and chance” as the structure for his own musings on composition and the modern.  (“But I was discussing some writing now current about the new music.  Perhaps I can say more clearly why it leads, or has led me, to these various considerations by looking at three concepts which recur in it over and over – the concepts of composition, improvisation and chance.”
“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p. 193)

Against this idea of an artist or work of art meaning or intending something ‘x’ which he has to convey outside of the work itself to Cavell or any other interrogator, I would suggest the work of art has the form of an axiom and of a fact or as Badiou would say – an event.  Cavell or any other critic is only an adjunct of the art event – in this case of Krenek’s music and his reflexive process of composition.
 Cavell’s ‘meaning’ follows art and not the other way around. The art axiom creates a disruption or a voiding of received meaning, what time or history do in other ways.  The intention of the artist is that the work exist – nothing more or less.  If it exists it is not fraudulent.  Something always happens.

Maurice Blanchot who like Krenek questions the traditional romantic idea of ‘inspiration’ - says about the literary work of art in “The Space of Literature”: “However, the work – the work of art, the literary work – is neither finished nor unfinished: it is.  What it says is exclusively this: that it is – and nothing more.  Beyond that it is nothing.(…)The work is without any proof, just as it is without any use.  It can’t be verified.” (University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 22)

Cavell insists on some other meaning, not expressed by the work itself, which must satisfy his demand for sincerity.  But he only demands that ‘modern art’ pass his sincerity test.  ‘Traditional’ or established art is exempt.  Amongst the moderns – John Cage and Anthony Caro belong to Cavell’s protected species – perhaps on advice from the art critic Michael Fried.  Although certainly Cavell would not deny that even the judgements of ‘traditional art’ are in a constant state of flux.  What do Wordsworth’s effusions mean today even for the diehards of English romantic poetry or Ruskin’s condemnations of ‘the pestilential art of the Renaissance’ for neo-Victorians?  And why is it that only “(…)the experience of the modern is one which itself raises the question of fraudulence and genuineness(…)”? (“A Matter of Meaning It”, op. cit. p.214) Something Cavell takes to be “an obvious but unappreciated fact” (ibid.) – how is something both ‘obvious’ and ‘unappreciated’?  But if it were an obvious fact (and perhaps it is) - then the “experience of the modern” in philosophy is also overshadowed by questions of the fraudulent and the genuine…

Cavell is a Beckmesser who says what I cannot ‘hear’ or ‘see’ does not exist.  Lurking in the background of his not ‘hearing’ and not ‘seeing’ of certain modern art is Cavell’s presumption that art and religion are closely related if not identical – and that they are both exposed to belief or disbelief.  He expresses this negatively: “For religious experience is subject to distrust on the same grounds as aesthetic experience is (…)”(“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p.191)  He thus transfers the ‘tests’ of his ‘empirical’ claims to the religious sphere, deftly evading verifiability. Once safely ensconced in religious sensibilities he then claims that modern art with all the emotions it arouses (especially hostility and disgust) must be treated as one does persons not objects.  “In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in effect claiming that the answer to the question “What is art?” will in part be an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons.”(op. cit. p. 189)

Paradoxically, although the universal tendency of modern art is towards abstraction or the ‘unhuman’ (especially music – the subject of his remarks) Cavell in his claims about fraudulence and genuineness (sincerity) in art retreats in the opposite direction - further into anthropomorphism.  (Cavell has imperceptibly widened his net to include all of art without further justifications.) 

His “aesthetic experiences” interrogate the ‘conscience’ of the artist.  Avant-garde art though defines itself as an ‘experimental’ production of new existences (art bodies).  His rules for modern art are mere private evaluations originating in incommunicable quasi-religious experiences – they have no hold on what art is.

One could say that Cavell is himself a victim of his desire to name everything at any price, a drive or obsession which Badiou calls ‘evil’.  How else is one to regard his insatiable lust for meaning of meaning of meaning and so on endlessly from a work of art?  Is this a Wittgensteinian stance?  Wittgenstein saw all meaning rather as indeterminate and necessarily admixed with elusive degrees of falsehood (fiction, myth).  In a similar spirit Wittgenstein confided to his publisher von Ficker that the most essential part of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus is what he had not written.  Would Cavell ‘the new Wittgensteinian’ have demanded that he spell it all out for him? 

The Spirit of Algebra

1.  A saint’s body is the locus of religion, sex and cruelty.

One can say of a saint’s body what Rilke said about Rodin’s “the Muse” (the Inner Voice) 1896 – “Never was the human body so bent by its own soul.”

 A saint suspends the duality of body and soul – res corporea and res cogitans.  Even for medieval ontologists it must have been obvious that a saint in particular a martyr is not bound by this traditional split of logos and bios.  The pain of holiness writes itself directly on the saint’s body.  The saint’s body is a tractate on being where the arabesque of holy flesh undermines the distinction between theme and digression.

You cannot measure pain, but pain itself is a certain quantity.  A saint is its number.  Christ on the cross is the highest number, because his pain is the quantity of all the sins – especially the sin of holiness.  The Christ number is equal to the total of his sleepless nights – the number Pascal wanted to imitate.  He said: Jesus will be in his death agony until the end of the world.  One is not allowed to sleep until the Crucified One returns.

“Allgebra Du bist Musik: Allgebra Du bist Gott(…)Und nun liebe Mitmenschen: Die Stimme Gottes ist Menschenstimme und heißt Allgebrah.”
(Algebra you are music: Algebra you are God(…) And now dear fellow humans: the voice of God is a human voice and is called Algebra.)
Adolf Wölfli, From the Cradle to the Grave

Saint Adolf II (artist and lifetime patient in the Waldau Clinic in Berne) was the supreme avant-garde of numbers.  In Adolf Wölfli’s trans-galactic Swiss capitalist number system, St Adolf II is the “great-great-God” of his “St Adolf=Giant=Creation”, an interchangeable term for his immeasurable imaginary capital or “building fund”.  The highest number of this ‘new creation’ is “Zorn” (rage).  “Oberon” is the second highest number and already signifies catastrophes, which exceed telling.  St Adolf of the ‘new creation’ is a much higher numeral than ‘algebra on the cross’ of the ‘old creation’.  Wölfli propels his abyss upwards into countless new heavens unlike Pascal who locates his groundlessness more conventionally in the nethermost regions.


2.  The childhood of a saint need not be saint like; nothing about a saint need be saint like except the wish to be one.  I don’t think one is ever a saint without wanting to be one, because who but a saint would want to be a saint?  A saint need not be a martyr but he or she is always in some way unhappy.  One must have a talent for unhappiness, for one cannot be happy in emulation of someone (Christ or the Führer) who was the embodiment of extreme unhappiness and disappointment.  (‘God why have you forsaken me?’)  This would be insulting.  A saint is someone who chooses unhappiness willingly, wholeheartedly.  Unhappiness comes in endless variations; a saint though cannot just wait around for it to happen, he or she must attract or invent it.
Is the pursuit of unhappiness merely the reverse of the pursuit of happiness?  Does one need one’s will to do it?  Need it be a task, a work, something requiring energy or is it a strong urge towards the cessation of activity?  Illness is the most convenient state, it is an inactive activity.  Except - one must not strive to regain one’s health.

 Thérèse of Lisieux’s ‘doctrine of the little way’ merely translates the universal fact that greater human misery is composed of an assortment of little miseries, pinpricks, splinters, tormenting thoughts.   Her method is to turn this fact into a virtue towards sainthood – magnify each tiny irritation until it is ‘as big as a cross’, seek it out, don’t flee it, throw yourself into the arms of your tormenter – yourself.  You can do all these misdeeds to yourself because you are not one, not alone.  Who is then to say what your will actually is, how can there be only one will, if this other force can frequently disarm or disable you?  You live surrounded by enemies, counter wills and they are all inside you.  A saint intuitively knows how to turn the life-destroying negatives into
saint-producing positives.  This is the power of the saint’s Algebra-God.  When the first blood came bubbling over Thérèse’s lips whilst lying in bed on Good Friday, indicating tuberculosis, she felt deep joy at ‘His first call’. 

3.  What is the difference between a saint’s unhappiness and the ordinary kind?  Could it be that a saint does not indulge in the sin of Schadenfreude?  Although a saint-to-be is often befallen by ‘scruples’ – a sort of scurvy of the soul, when he or she is haunted by guilt for all kinds of phantom sins.  The thought alone signifies the possibility of sin and hence is a disguised sinful thought.  Kierkegaard calls this “the sin of despairing over your sins”. 

A saint is not pleased by someone else’s misfortune, but she is not displeased either.  Especially if the other’s unhappiness is a result of the saint’s own quest for unhappiness or even instrumental to it.  Thérèse was somehow pleased when her father suffered agonies of mental derangement and paralysis, which led to his death.  She wanted to see her parents and relatives in sickness; her reasons were of course the purest.  It brought them closer to everlasting life. Or was her father’s suffering and death a prelude to her sainthood and thus pleasing for her?  The whole family was attuned to sainthood – she and her sisters were nuns in the same Carmelite order in Lisieux, the father had tried to be a monk but was not accepted; the mother was also rejected by a convent.  One sister (in both senses) was the Mother Superior who instructed Thérèse to write her religious autobiography.  All the energies of this family seem to have been deflected towards the manufacture of generic religious pain in the same fastidious way they conducted their lace making and watch making business.

Whatever pleasure a saint-to-be can gain from the pain of others it is not extraneous to her sainthood, otherwise she is not a genuine saint.  She must leave physical existence and its upkeep behind her with all its rivalries and gratification.  A saint’s way of being as a progressive cancellation of her existence most exactly fulfils what Heidegger calls “Sein zum Tode” (being-toward-death).  Suffering and pain is a saint’s only food, so he or she would have no reason to resent any amount.  He or she chooses pain.  Pain and suffering remove a saint-to-be from the normal drives of ordinary humans.  Although finally, he or she will exchange all of that pain in a future world for the ultimate nihilism of sainthood.

4.  The law of fear has been replaced by the science of love.  “I hope that one day you will swoop upon me, and carry me off to the furnace of love, and plunge me into a glowing abyss, that I may become forever its happy holocaust…I implore you, cast your eyes upon a multitude of little souls; choose out in this world, I beg of you, a legion of little victims worthy of your Love.” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul)

The autobiography of Thérèse of Lisieux unfolds the potent negative egotism of “not wanting” anything, - the use of will to destroy will, otherwise known as “the negation of Will” (Verneinung des Willens).  She is stuck by a sister pinning on her scapular, says nothing, goes around with the pin in her flesh all day.  Montaigne tells a similar story about a peasant boy who hid a fox under his coat in front of a gamekeeper, while it gouged his stomach.  Burnt and unwanted food was “good enough for Thérèse”.  She never wore stockings; her sandals were tied with hemp.  Being alive was for her “exile”, loving Love, victim of Love.  Her disease has no name, she reports about spitting blood, one hour to undress, being always cold, willing to wash clothes next to the hot stove in summer, she did a lot of laundry, after a while even relishing the sprays of dirty water another nun ‘accidentally’ splashed over her face.  She was in charge of the sacristy linen.

She punishes herself for rebellious surges against the “discipline”, “sharp correction” and “voluntary penance” prescribed by the Rule of the Carmelite Order, by devising her own chastisements.  She wore a cross with iron spikes next to the skin, but gave it up when it caused a sore.  Some suggest she beat herself with whips made of nettles.  Like in any prison all objects are potential weapons or means of escape – for Thérèse escape could only be from the ‘exile’ of life.  (One wonders though as in the case of Pascal – where do the specialized instruments come from, what smith fabricated them, was there a local or central ecclesiastical production, catalogue, supplier in Rome?)  Some torture was intangible, ambient – she could not bear the noise of a fingernail grinding against the tooth of another nun.  Instead of reproaching the nun, she turns this into ‘fingernail music’ and yet another sweet funeral march.

The convent household was brutally efficient – whilst she lay in her long death struggle, her death pallet was brought into the infirmary and placed next to her white curtained bed.  She saw herself as a cheap toy of the child Jesus, a little ball he throws into the corner after poking a hole in it.  As Vita Sackville-West commented – Thérèse’s martyrdom was itself a nursery game.
She even questions if she is a “true mystic in the sense of Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross” – her raptures were “deliberate, not supernatural”, suggesting Thérèse may have suffered from a form of hysteria “closely associated with mysticism, in some cases taking the form of a transference of the love instinct (…)Psychologists go so far as to use the word erotomania.” (The Eagle and the Dove, London, 1945, p.140)  Sackville-West is “infuriated” by the mawkishness, tawdriness, ordinariness of this childish “lowbrow” sainthood, which offered ‘littleness’ as its highest virtue.  But that is precisely Thérèse’s genius of the commonplace – her invention.  She was the first ‘kitsch’ saint – the first saint of mass production.  (She was named co-patron of France together with Joan of Arc in 1944.)

Thérèse refers in her autobiography to it being the ‘century of inventions’.  She must find a “lift” (ascenseur) to sainthood, no need to climb the staircase step by step – she just has to make herself little and He will lift her up in his arms to where He is.  When describing the “bridal day” with her “divine Husband”, the day she took the veil, Thérèse evokes “a veritable rhapsody of italicised littleness” (Sackville-West).  She was “the little Holy Virgin presenting the little flower to the little Jesus.  Everything was little on that day.” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul)

She created the impression that any ordinary child could ascend straight from the nursery into sainthood – the ‘Lift to the Scafffold’.  She is the first generic saint – just one ‘little victim’ out of an indefinite multiplicity of littleness.  Her sainthood is a function of quantity – the quantity of infinitely progressive littleness and its infinite supply.  Is this sainthood something ‘new’ in the long history of Love – an event of Love, one of the four conditions of truth according to Badiou?  (what Schopenhauer calls “the metaphysics of sexual love”)  The amorous encounter between Thérèse of Lisieux and the Child Jesus?  A saint’s ‘Liebestod’?

She wanted all the tortures of all the saints.  When her coffin was opened, the body was not incorrupt as is told of other saints.  Even her bones were wasting away, as if the illness had gone on posthumously.  A sweet fragrance is said to have issued from her human dust, staying around the grave for months, miracles happened after her death - a paralytic child sat on her coffin and jumped off cured.

Classic S&M

S&M is more spiritual than sexual deviance.

What does it really matter if Hitler shot himself or swallowed cyanide?  Why should there be a controversy about it and why should his orderlies claim he shot himself, giving different points of penetration, right temple, left, mouth?  Mohnke, who was questioned by the Russians about it said he took cyanide and the orderly was supposed to come into the room to administer the coup de grâce.  Mohnke (still alive in a village around Hamburg) was also in charge of the summary executions of the traitors, like the womanizer Fegelein who was supposed to have been Eva Braun’s secret lover.  He had no trial because he couldn’t stand up and was “shot like a dog”, they said he didn’t want to be lumped in with the “suicide maniacs in the bunker”.  One wonders why Mohnke was allowed to live, or the others in the bunker like the secretaries, maids and cooks – why did they not all have to join in the dying?  Only Goebbels and his pack of children?  Hitler had them come in and condole with him the day before he died finally.  In the end they were not able to burn the bodies properly.  Why marry at the end – is this a German custom, like Koenig marrying his Gspusi (he met her at the spa) just before the end, but he wasn’t taking her with him and she had some hope of being awarded his pension?  Hitler’s arm hung down limp at his side, as if paralyzed, his hair was white and he walked with a stoop – he said the words “National Socialism is dead. We lost the game.  It is time to die.”  Mosley said something to the effect of the first part – but concluded it is time to become European or win Europe etc.  Hitler was moved by the death of Mussolini, he poisoned himself a day later, Mussolini was strung up with his mistress Claretta by the feet, he looked distorted they say, she strangely at peace.  Did Hitler know about this?