On Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022)

     First in the 1950s, and then in many books and articles in the next three decades, the great Marxist literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams used the term ‘structures of feeling’ as part of an attempt to describe kinds of social phenomena that were distinctive of a social period but were not well captured in institutional analysis or ideology critique. As he put it towards the end of his life, the ascription of a structure of feeling is a ‘cultural hypothesis’ aiming to capture the sense of a ‘change in presence’ in a culture. They are ‘structures’ in that there are usually multiple, connected phenomena at play; and they are ‘feelings’ in that the phenomena lack the determinate character of articulate thoughts, but rather concern the sense of how lives are actually lived, and how it ‘feels’ to be alive and active at a certain period. Williams acknowledged the vagueness of the term, but nonetheless reasonably considered something like it essential to cultural analysis, though always in the context of a fuller account that included the means and relations of production in a society, along with its institutions and practices, both dominant and marginal. (Williams 1977 pp. 128-32, and 1981)  In his new book the art critic Ben Davis, with explicit reference to Williams, has set himself the task of describing and evaluating the structure of feeling characteristic of the last decade, particularly with regard to the visual arts. Like Williams, Davis identifies himself as a Marxist, and likewise includes in his analyses one of the most attractive aspects of Marxist thinking, what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “the whole Marxist attempt to envisage societies from the standpoint of their openness to the future, of the possibilities of development inherent in them.” (MacIntyre 1968, p. 142) Here this aspect of Marxism takes the form of suggesting ways of resolving or superseding fraught tensions within our most recent structure of feeling.

     In the book’s Introduction Davis considers three factors responsible for our most recent structure of feeling. (pp. 2-5) One is the intensification of economic inequality in the wake of the recovery from the downturn of 2008. In the social sphere including the visual arts this led to inflation of prices of artworks as signals of luxury consumption and museum’s increasing reliance upon the uncertain largesse of the super-wealthy. A second factor the omnipresence of digital culture and social media. In the arts this leads to the intensification of interest in works that are ‘relevant’ in the sense of inducing transient spikes in public interest. More fundamentally, it leads to what Davis calls ‘context collapse’, whereby works of art no longer gain any durable meaning as a result of being in a stable space, such as a museum or private residence, but instead undergo an uncontrollable process of gaining meaning and significance “as they circulate among dispersed and unpredictable audiences.” (p. 3) A third factor, partially overlapping with the second, is the rise of Black Lives Matter and other new social movements that gain physiognomies in part as elements of a “digital activist culture.” (p. 4) Because of the broad sense of immediacy and urgency attached to these movements, the new structure of feeling includes the sense that ‘aesthetic experience’ (and so presumably the visual arts) are “being both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection them.” (p. 5)

     The first chapter, ‘Connoisseurship and Critique’, treats Giovanni Morelli, the nineteenth-century founder of the practice of scientific connoisseurship, as an exemplary figure in the modern arts in allegedly elitist celebrating the artistic personality that produces and is expressed in a work of art. The modern counter-figure to the connoisseur is the consumer, a shadowy figure whose characteristic activities are of the type of someone “looking for something suitably distracting while grazing on Netflix.” (p. 25) The typical objects of the connoisseur are works of fine art, while those of the consumer are the industrialized products of commodity culture. But each figure might take up the characteristic objects of the other: the connoisseur might, in the manner pioneered by the film critic Andrew Sarris, treat a body of Hollywood B-movies as an oeuvre, as expressions of the distinctive style and concerns of the director; and works of fine art such as the Mona Lisa, might become icons of popular media. But while these opposed figures and objects maintained through the modern period some degree of conceptual, social, and institutional distinctiveness, Davis suggests that what “seems characteristic of the recent moment is the intensification of the confusion between the different positions.” (p. 26)

      Most of the pages of the book’s succeeding eight chapters are devoted to the broader cultural phenomena that crystallize the most recent structure of feeling, such as the uses of social media in the service of political activism, the uses of the technologies of artificial intelligence for making art and pornography, and the struggles of art museums to attract large audiences by staging media events. Each chapter has dozens of footnotes, most citing pieces of journalism, articles, or books on very recent social phenomena. In each chapter there is a wealth of detail that makes summarizing Davis’s accounts difficult, yet there is also a repetitive drum-beat of the larger claims that Davis make. Davis’s repeatedly makes, or at least alludes to, four claims: 1. The phenomena and the associated controversies Davis discusses are ultimately matters of taste: Should one admire or condemn Dana Schutz’s painting of the corpse of Emmet Till? Should one celebrate cultural appropriation as a key element of a democratic culture, or condemn it as a crypto-imperialist enterprise of profiting from the work of marginalized peoples? 2. Since the cultural phenomena discussed make up part of the most recent structure of feeling, they do not so to speak legislate their own uses. Artificial intelligence, social media, and so forth can be put to different ends, in the service of celebration or critique, of conservatism or reform or revolution. 3. Because the phenomena discussed are primarily matters of taste and so matters of aesthetics, they are simultaneously not primarily political matters; consequently concern with the features of the structure of feeling is at the very least “always in danger of redirecting political questions into questions of taste.” (p. 27) 4. So instead of concerning ourselves with the futile attempt to decide between one or the other of the warring sides surrounding these cultural phenomena, we should instead work politically to create a more just world wherein these cultural phenomena, discussed herein in great detail, lose their centrality and importance in our lives.

     An interesting part of the book, so far unmentioned, is that Davis frames the body of his book with two visions of the cultural future. The book opens with a dystopian account, purportedly from the year 2037, of the situation of contemporary art. The dystopia is our future, if our future is unmarked by a radical break with the present, and the phenomena of our current structure of feeling are sedimented in human life. This is the dystopia of conspicuous consumption for wealthy elites and mindless entertainment for the plebes, but still with a subterranean world of dissident artists inventing new secret art forms. The book concludes with the utopian vision of an account of culture ten years after the success of a revolution that overthrew capitalism, something that would happen if all the political work urged in point 4 above coalesced and succeeded. In the post-capitalist world there is much to grieve, and so a major part of the arts aims to memorialize and reconcile. Additionally there are a new localism and new forms of celebration.

     There is much to be learned from Davis’s book, particularly if one is interested in social media and transient controversies, and one’s computer has not been working for the last decade. Still, the book is disappointing for two major reasons. One basic problem is that so to speak theory and topic pass each other by. The theory is a fairly standard kind of smoothed-over Marxist account wherein cultural phenomena are treated as derivative of more basic economic phenomena, in particular of class. The book’s explicit topic, our most recent structure of feeling, lacks substance, as if it were a kind of froth on the surface of economic and political life. What’s missing, it seems to me, is the sort of account that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello gave in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), where they analyze contemporary social change under the twin perspectives of social critique and aesthetic critique, each rooted in durable attitudes, ideologies, and institutions, and each taking new forms in the most recent phase of capitalism that emerges in the 1970s. Similarly, as noted in the introduction above, Raymond Williams did not treat structures of feeling as a kind of free-standing social element, but rather as a historically varying aspect of social life to be grasped in the context of more durable social forms, institutions, ideologies, and practices.

     A second disappointment stems from Davis’s title, Art in the After-Culture. There is in fact very little on art in the book. Several chapters barely mention art, and the longest discussions are not of art or artists, but rather of media events like the controversy surrounding Schutz’s painting or the uses of the image of the Mona Lisa. The most extended discussion of a work of art in the entire 227 pages of text is a single paragraph on Christian Marclay’s celebrated piece The Clock. It is perhaps indicative of our contemporary structure of feeling, in a manner unrecognized by Davis, that one might write a book on art that contains no sustained discussion of art.

   

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References:

 

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005)

Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022)

Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (1968)

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)

-----Culture (1981)