T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life
Some dissertation defense prep…
T.J. Clark. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
I don’t have any academic interest in the Impressionists (I mean, I do, of course, they’re lovely and fascinating, but they aren’t a topic I write about). I’m looking at this to get a sense of Clark’s theoretical framework, so I’m mostly milling around the opening and closing ideas.
In The Painting of Modern Life Clark gazes at the Impressionists through the lens of Marxist and Situationist criticism, but attempts to maintain a coupling between the historical materialism of Marxist theory and semiotics. Clark warns against labeling material culture as “more real” than representation and instead proposes a “hierarchy of representations.”
One of the main points I make in the diss involves the inertia or stasis of a brand (an object-code that means in a system of material culture) in comparison to the dynamics of a fiction or utterance. It’s a point that extends Grant McCracken’s observations on material culture in his Culture and Consumption (9 Sep 2004: just found McCracken’s blog). I think I agree with Clark, but I also think he and McCracken are of closer minds than first glance might suggest.
Material culture is a representational system, but it’s not like every other representational system. Clark’s right in stating that material culture is not “the bedrock of matter and action” (6) that undergirds the more flimsy world of signs; however, material culture operates differently, and has different combinatory potentials, and shouldn’t be indiscriminately lumped in with utterance and language. Clark speaks of ideology as “a kind of inertness in discourse” (8) and describes ideology using ideas very similar to those I invoke to describe brands in the market.
Clark locates both material representation and artistic and literary representation within the bounds of social practice:
Society is a battlefield of representations, on which the limits and coherence of any given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt. Thus it makes sense to say that representations are continually subject to the test of a reality more basic than themselves — the test of social practice. Social practice is that complexity which always outruns the constraints of a given discourse; it is the overlap and interference of representations; it is their rearrangement in use; it is the test which consolidates or disintegrates our categories, which makes or unmakes a concept, which blurs the edge of a particular language game and makes it difficult (though possible) to distinguish between a mistake and a metaphor. (Clark 6)
The big draw of this book for the defense is Clark’s association with the Situationists and his discussion of spectacle. I discuss spectacle in the diss in terms of Christian Metz’s semiotics of film, but it has very different meanings in Situationist theory. The spectacle is, in Clark’s words, “the marketing, the making-into-commodities, of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday life” (9). Spectacle marks the commercialization of the life and leisure that was once outside capitalism.
MMOGs can be, of course, provocatively read against the theory of spectacle. Our human interactions are now mediated by commercial simulative constructs, our social practice circumscribed by terms of service contracts and our performances owned by a media company. I’m more interested in negotiation and resistance than oppression, though, and I don’t think it’s accurate to ascribe too much passivity to consumers/players in this framework. Consumers have and use authority within “spectacles,” and while the “society as battlefield” metaphor is a little agonistic for my comfort, it gets closer to the back-and-forth between producer/developer and consumer/player that I see in MMOGs.
Clark likes to link sentences together ad infinitum with colons and semicolons, just like I do. I’m in good company.