Tag: class

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House Society

Notes from Living Rooms

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Read Living Rooms by Sam Johnson-Schlee (Goodreads)

'Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living…'

In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.

Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.

In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?

Possessions and labor

“As Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish reveals, the objects we covet are valuable because they are made by human labour. To make the labour of production visible in the object, as Ruskin and Morris hoped to do, is an act of subversion, it reminds us that the product should remain in the gift of its producer, and not the capitalist who exploits them.”

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Art and Design Garden

Notes from Green Light

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Read Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution by George Gessert (Goodreads)

How humans' aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants. Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are prized for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen's hybrid delphiniums.

Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution.

Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants—the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers.

“Aesthetic experience is an antidote to delusion.”

Aesthetic plants

“One of the great unacknowledged forces of domestication today may be a hunger for abundant uselessness.”

everything else in our lives must be optimized, but houseplants are almost solely aesthetic

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Featured House Reflection Shopping

To buy or not to buy: making our selves through our homes (Part 8)

screenshot from West Elm website showing a floor lamp with sinuous curves in red topped by a white classic cone, listed for $249
the lamp of my desires

I want this lamp.

I want it unreasonably.

I don’t need this lamp, but can one ever have enough lamps?

I have left it on my wishlist for six months, and I still want it just as much as I did when I added it.

They tell you to do that instead of impulse buying, so you can see if you still want it after the initial glow of desire wears off. I basically always still want whatever it is — even years later. My want for aesthetic consumer goods endures* to the point it’s almost funny, except it would be nice to stop wanting.

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Art and Design

Read The Dialectics of Art

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Read The Dialectics of Art (Goodreads)

To the question of "what is art", it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines — from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance.

In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.

Read introduction, chapters 1-2 and 10-11, and the conclusion. Learned a lot about Marxism — Marx himself goes over my head but examining ideas through examples like this book does with art is more understandable for me. I like the idea of art as unalienated labor.

His walk-through of relational aesthetics and the social turn was useful. I was hoping for a bit more from the section on art about climate change, which somewhat fizzled out after some discussion of land art.

Regardless of whether I agree, I like that the author is very opinionated (e.g. “Postmodernism was at most a fad, not an era”) and unafraid of proclaiming judgment (e.g. he describes Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition as “by turns fascinating, challenging, and irritating” 😂)

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Art and Design Culture

Notes from Ways of Seeing

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Read Ways of Seeing by John Berger (ways-of-seeing.com)

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

Chapter 1

Relations and power

“The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical: it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life – precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it.”

internet as modern sacred space?

“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.”

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Culture

Notes from The Class Matrix

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Read The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn by Vivek Chibber (goodreads.com)

An influential sociologist revives materialist explanations of class, while accommodating the best of rival cultural theory.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, analysis of class and other basic structures of capitalism was sidelined by theorists who argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture―that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, capitalism is back on the agenda, as gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival.

Chibber shows that it is possible to accommodate the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework: one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency, while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. Chibber vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it in fact accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain. But he also shows that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors.

The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”

But this process — of perceiving and understanding their material interests — was necessarily mediated by the symbolic universe the actors inhabited. Class interests would only become politically operative if they were translated into the appropriate cultural codes.

  • this explanation = an adaptation of Marxism to explain why people were more interested in ideological cohorts (rooted in xenophobia) than willing to gather across them for shared interests
  • led to further changes in understanding: that people’s perception of their position in the structure and thus interests is produced by culture; that structure itself is an outgrowth of culture; and that because culture is not universal neither are structures (locality, contingency, meaning)
  • except those ideas happened at the same time as neoliberalism … and capitalism essentially imposed a universal structure upon all cultures
  • point of this book is to square the cultural theories with materialism and determine where the line of influence lies between culture and material forces
  • he’s arguing that worker resistance manifests as individual action rather than collective in the absence of solidarity culture

“Resignation” as mechanism for worker compliance:

Workers submit to capitalism not because they view it as legitimate or just but because they see no real possibility for changing it.

Categories
Learning Society

Reemerging orality and serf brain

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We Used to Read Things in This Country by Noah McCormack (The Baffler)

““When people say things like ‘Twitter is filled with fake news’ or ‘TikTok is ruining the attention spans of today’s youth,’” [Joe] Weisenthal writes, “all of that may be correct. But the bigger story, that more and more people are grappling with, is that a return to orality will fundamentally rewire the logic engine of the human brain.””

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Culture Society

Read The Sum of Small Things

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Read The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (goodreads.com)

How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all

In today's world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption–like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children's growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide.

Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption," Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices.

With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.

The concept of “conspicuous production” (as compared with conspicuous consumption) was an aha moment for me. The landscape of consumption chapter felt a bit out of place — it was interesting but I wasn’t sure how well the information has held up since 2017. Overall this was oddly slow and academic, denser reading than it needed to be. The book would have benefitted from a wrap-up chapter. Intriguing as a member of the aspirational class…

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Political Commentary Society

Read Virtue Hoarders

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Read Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (goodreads.com)

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

I don’t disagree with most of her observations or many of her critiques, but question the attribution based on the fuzzy definition of PMC. Her conceit is that moral superiority and neoliberalism have taken over college educated liberal elites and culture, and that the professional managerial class always works to protect its own financial and cultural power and make itself out to be heroes saving the weaker classes. The introduction is the strongest; the chapter on sex I found weakest (and I skipped the kids chapter). It does feel like online progressivism has been captured by this cancel culture minded virtue signaling crowd, and its self-righteous assuredness makes it feel risky to criticize.

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Art and Design

Read Pretentiousness

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Read Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (Goodreads)

Pretentiousness is for anyone who has braved being different, whether that's making a stand against artistic consensus or running the gauntlet of the last bus home dressed differently from everyone else. It's an essential ingredient in pop music and high art. Why do we choose accusations of elitism over open-mindedness? What do our anxieties about "pretending" say about us?

Co-editor of frieze, Europe's foremost magazine of contemporary art and culture, Dan Fox has authored over two hundred essays, interviews, and reviews and contributed to numerous catalogues and publications produced by major international art galleries and institutions.

book spread with brief quotes from Susan Sontag and The Modern Lovers, alongside a comic of an oblivious academic lecturing two bound and gagged colleagues with the caption "There, as usual, was Edelson, delivering his post-structuralist analysis of the modern novel to the privileged few.
The book is comfortably divided into readable chapters prefaced by a piece of art and two quotes, seemingly from one highbrow and one lowbrow artist / artwork. (Comic by Glen Baxter.)

An interesting read that ranged across history and genre to dissect the meaning of pretention and unravel its cultural value.

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