Leesfragment: The Art of Cruelty

W.W. Norton & Company is de oudste en grootste uitgeverij die door het eigen personeel in eigendom is. En nu zijn ze een eeuw oud, nog steeds onafhankelijk. Athenaeum Boekhandel viert het jubileum mee — we hadden een kortingsactie, en nu brengen we een fragment uit Maggie Nelsons The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning.

• ‘This is criticism at its best.’ — Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

N.B. Lees ook een fragment uit Bluets, Daan Stoffelsens bespreking, een fragment uit De Argonauten en Nicolette Hoekmeijers toelichting op die vertaling. Een lees aanbevelingen van Ayoub Tannaoui (The Argonauts) en Marius Desmet (Bluets).

Styles of imprisonment

“One should open one’s eyes and take a new look at cruelty,” Friedrich Nietzsche exhorted in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in which Nietzsche famously attempts to lay waste to traditional notions of morality, especially those associated with Christianity. Nietzsche hoped that, in catapulting beyond the poles of good and evil, kindness and cruelty, the true energy and strength of mankind would be liberated: in art as in life, this energy—which Nietzsche termed our “will to power”—would pour forth; it would dance; it would shine.
The next century—with its unthinkable wars, premeditated and spontaneous genocides, rapacious exploitation of resources, environmental catastrophes, and systemic injustices of all kinds— provided ample opportunity to take this new look. Many of the century’s art movements (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Viennese Actionism, the Black Arts Movement, and so on) made complicated contributions to this conversation, in that many artists associated with them hoped to mount a forceful protest against such cruelties, while they also derived much of their inspiration, rhetoric, and strategy from a bellicose avant-garde tradition with thinkers such as Nietzsche at its root. To complicate matters further, the twentieth century brought an explosion in the human capacity to create and circulate images, via technological inventions such as film, television, Internet, digital photography, and countless other means. Given brutality’s particularly fraught relationship with representation, twentieth-century art that concerned itself with its depiction or activation often found itself in turbulent ethical and aesthetic waters.
By now, it is something of a commonplace to say that twentiethcentury art movements were veritably obsessed with diagnosing injustice and alienation, and prescribing various “shock and awe” treatments to cure us of them—a method Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke usefully, if revoltingly, described in a 2007 interview as “raping the viewer into independence.” (Art critic Grant Kester has described this approach more gently, calling it the “orthopedic aesthetic.”) In short, the idea is that there’s something wrong with us, from the get-go—be it the mark of original sin (or, conversely, as Nietzsche would have it, adherence to the “slave morality” of Christianity), alienation from our labor, a fatal rift with Nature, being lost in a forest of simulations, being deformed by systems such as capitalism and patriarchy, Westernization, not enough Westernization, or simply “an epistemological lack,” as Kester has put it—that requires forceful (i.e., orthopedic) intervention to correct.
This premise is so ubiquitous that it allows phony wagers such as Haneke’s to go largely unchallenged, in both artistic and political arenas. It isn’t that many serious thinkers loudly profess to believe in them anymore, but rather that the habits of thought which have accrued around them remain largely intact, even when their core has been roundly disavowed. As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber puts it in an excellent short essay, “The Twilight of Vanguardism,” “Revolutionary thinkers have been declaring the age of vanguardism over for most of a century now. Outside a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it’s almost impossible to find radical intellectuals who seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction. But (rather like the idea of progress, to which it’s obviously connected), it seems much easier to renounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought.” This book attempts such a shaking.
There are, of course, major trends in contemporary art that have set themselves explicitly apart from the vanguardist, shock-and-awe strategies just described. Indeed, while writing, I have been often haunted by the fact that much, if not most of the art surrounding me at present follows a different trajectory altogether—one that goes by the name of relational aesthetics (or conversational art, or social practice, or community-based art, or littoral art, or as Kester—one of this work’s most articulate champions—prefers, “dialogical” art). For Kester and others, these out-of-the-gallery projects, typically based on community engagement and interactive dialogue, offer the freshest, most viable response to what Kester calls “the most pressing questions facing us in the twentieth century: How do we reduce the violence and hatred that have so often marked human social interactions? How do we, in short, lead a ‘non-fascist’ life?” There is much to admire here, as well as much to question. But in the end, such projects remain outside this book’s purview, if only for the simple reason that they are most always predicated on the desire to lessen the amount of cruelty and miscommunication in the world, rather than to explore or express it.
This book asks different questions. It asks whether there are certain aspects or instances of the so-called art of cruelty—as famously imagined by French dramatist and madman Antonin Artaud—that are still wild and worthwhile, now that we purportedly inhabit a political and entertainment landscape increasingly glutted with images—and actualities—of torture, sadism, and endless warfare. It asks when and whether Artaud’s distinction between a coarse sort of cruelty, based in sadism and bloodshed, and his notion of a “pure cruelty, without bodily laceration” can be productively made, and to what end. “From the point of view of the mind,” Artaud wrote, “cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.”

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Copyright © 2011 by Maggie Nelson
Excerpted with permission from W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.