#robert pippin

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Adorno, Aesthetic Negativity, and the Problem of Idealism

It is at this point that, because of this negative dependence on Hegel, it matters a great deal that Adorno has misidentified the heart and soul of Hegel’s Absolute Idealism.

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[…] the conditions necessary for law and political order are doubly morally problematic. First, there can be no law unless the lawless are eliminated, controlled, but given what the lawless are willing to do, this violent elimination cannot itself be just or fair, cannot play by the rules. Valance is ambushed, shot down from the dark. Second, it seems that a civilized order must view itself as founded by heroic and unproblematic violence, so this truth about the founding must be hidden by a lie. Apparently a victory over Liberty Valance (over unconstrained ‘liberty’ as an absolute ‘value’) by Tom Doniphon would just be one more episode in a cycle of violence, revenge, and intimidation. Valance must be killed by a representative of a new order; his death must mean that. So since Tom is unseen and quickly vanishes, everybody can think that Ransom Stoddard killed Valance and so can distinguish this act of violence from a personal one by associating it with Ranse’s ideals, can believe that the rule of law and democracy triumphed. Violence before there is law is unavoidably lawless, but if it is for the sake of law the paradox can be lessened if not eliminated.
[…]
Ranse proposes to Hallie that they not resettle in Washington but come back to Shinbone for their final years. She answers as if very moved, and confesses that her ‘heart is here.’ She also remarks as she looks out the window that what was once a wilderness is now a garden, and she asks a question that seems to take in all of modernity, and thereby becomes a deep and disturbing question to the audience, the answer to which is not obvious: ‘Aren’t you proud?’
Somehow that at least does not seem to be important for Ranse, as if the technological and engineering and commercial accomplishments do not touch the real issue, don’t of themselves prove anything about what has really been achieved. Robert Pippin, “Who Cares Who Shot Liberty Valance?”

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Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate Hegel’s point is to imagine situations of greatly heightened alienation. I apply for a job to be a telemarketer. However, my role in the job seems to me more like a theatrical performance. I don’t believe any of the people I call should buy the condo time-share I am supposed to be selling, and it is dispiriting to be hung up on and yelled at so often. In such a case, the actions I undertake are all non-coercively performed by me, but I do not experience them as “mine.” Another form of alienation would be when I find that what I take myself to be doing (say, what I take to be showing hospitality to others, my description of the act I give myself), is shared by none of the others in my new circle, so much so that I begin to doubt I actually understand what I’m doing. Or, even worse, when I am asked why I am doing what I am doing, and I present my reasons, no one understands me, or, if they do, they refuse to believe anyone could have such reasons. This does not mean that a non-alienated situation is one of mass conformism, and therein arises the most controversial point in Hegel: that this relation between individual self-understanding and self-worth and some objective “reflection back” from the social world of such a content is a “dialectical” rather than a disjunctive or reductive one. Meaningful action requires a proper recognition by others, but that condition cannot be directly sought or demanded. An artist whose first goal is to produce what a commercial or critical audience wants would not be genuinely producing “her” work, any more than one with no concern for the intelligibility and impact of her work on others.

The larger point is that this requirement that one’s self-understanding be reflected in the social world—in the way one is seen and treated by others—is not primarily a psychological need (for reassurance, say) but is rather an acknowledgement that the social world is always already implicated in the formation and experience of my deeds as “mine”; deeds I can render intelligible and justifiable both to myself and to others; that is, as freely undertaken. This is the basis of Hegel’s larger worries about a capitalist economy, and of course it has a lot of resonances in what Marx inherited from Hegel, especially the early Marx, for whom the realization of the human species-being and solidarity with fellow workers were so important. (It also underlies a Hegelian principle that is often not well understood: that no one individual can be said to be free unless all are.)

— Robert Pippin, Capitalism at Dusk

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Capitalism at Dusk | The Point Magazine

Hegel and the irrationality of modern economy, by Robert Pippin

Although the nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel is known as a defender of bourgeois society and so of what came to be known after him as capitalism, I think the evidence suggests that his answer to these questions is far more negative than is widely recognized, and this in a distinctive sense that remains relevant today. I want to try to explain this counterintuitive claim. Hegel, of course, writing in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had no idea of the full scope of the industrial capitalism to come, but he certainly saw that a largely agricultural and artisanal/craft/predominantly homebound economy was changing into a wage-labor economy, and his worries about that alone are apposite. What makes him especially worth returning to in our present circumstances, however, is that while material inequalities and the resulting systematic unfairness were important to him, Hegel’s principal focus was on the experiences of ourselves and others inherent in the ordinary life required by such a productive system. These issues are often misleadingly marginalized as “psychological,” but as recent events have shown, they are crucial to the possibility of the social bonds without which no society can survive.

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Há alguns posts, falei sobre uma lista, disponibilizada, no The Current, da Criterion, com os melhores livros sobre cinema lançados, em dezembro, no além-mar. Um deles envolvia um estudo de Robert Pippin sobre a discussão filosófica presente nos filmes de Hitchcock. Agora, procurando mais sobre a obra de Pippin, vejo que há algo de realmente interessante em seus escritos fora de mera especulação sobre cinema e sua profundidade. O homem escreveu, enfim, sobre o futuro da subjetividade com o fim do modernismo. Em outras palavras, o Kantian aftermath.

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Paul Cézanne, Bathers, 1900 - 1906 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Robert Pippin writes:

Using Hegel’s characterization, I suggested in the first chapter that the striking gazes in Manet’s paintings in the 1860s and beyond were best understood as interrogative. They raise at once the question of the point of modern easel painting and at the same time the possibility of social relationships responsive to the challenge raised in the gazes, a challenge to the possible embodiment of mutually achieved meaning in sensible materiality… Cézanne’s late bather paintings could be understood as expressing the ever more limited possibilities of answering those questions, or perhaps intimations of the suspicion that they cannot be answered or that they can be answered only at the level of the shareability of a rather brutish material meaning. (Said in a more Hegelian way: we have not brought about, realized, a world in which Manet’s challenge can be met). They are nevertheless extraordinarily powerful, effective paintings despite those limitations because Cézanne has found a way of keeping those questions alive, and so continuing to draw the beholder into the paintings and so into those questions. Moreover, the paintings, all of them, the still lifes, the landscapes, and the figural paintings, exude such an immense self-confidence in the possibilities of even a much more reduced or narrower frame within which Manet’s questions can continue to be interrogated, and in the continuing distinctness and importance of such a unique form of visual or gestural intelligibility, that the mysteriousness of these paintings never evinces a hint of skepticism or despair.

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Paul Cézanne, Bathers, 1894 - 1905 (National Gallery, London).

Robert Pippin writes:

Once can only suggest here that the elemental or alien, brutish, either absolutely isolated or bizarrely merging, barely gendered figures, figures who look more like flesh sacks (they don’t appear to have bones or joints), who often appear indistinguishable from one another, and who do not occupy space as much as are laid flat onto a plane. The figures whom we see in these great paintings of bathers are not a manifestation of any ontological truth as much as they are simply “what remains” as a possible level of shareable intelligibility in a situation of ever greater “worldlessness,” or, as Heidegger himself says about animals, the world-poor contexts for such art. We seem pressed into intimations of a level of materiality and quite basic but primitive and merely gestural meaning (of a sort that would be ever more apparent in modernist sculpture and later experimentations in painting) that are at once striking, recognizable, and, in Cézanne’s context, frightening because so minimal, elemental, and just thereby resistant to any determinate interrogation.

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Vincent Van Gogh, Peasants Planting Potatoes, 1884 (Kröller-Müller museum, Otterlo).

Robert Pippin writes:

Of course, there will always be work and leisure activities and athletic contests and reading that all require intense attention, concentration. But when painting such activities begins to fail to compel conviction, both aesthetic and, let us say, existential credibility are at stake. Absorption, as successfully depicted, would be genuine indifference to the beholder, and working, modern work, wage labor especially, is by and large working for someone, and usually in repetitive and stultifying ways. (Stultifying mindlessness is not absorption).