Panajotis Kondylis (1943-1998)
By
Ch. Van Eecke
A light introduction to Kondylian mass democracy by an artistically minded author
Kondylian Combinations
[...] Bürger’s history of the avant-garde is corroborated in an
interesting way in Panajotis Kondylis’ history of the decay of the
bourgeois way of life and the emergence of mass democracy. Kondylis
argues that every culture looks at reality from a specific perspective
or worldview. Such a worldview is created to cope with the world: it is a
means of survival in a hostile environment. By imposing a certain view
upon the world, a culture establishes an identity that allows it to
control the world. Through this control a culture and its inhabitants
are able to keep themselves alive.
This means that every worldview is designed in relation to whatever
may threaten a culture’s survival. These threats are the culture’s
enemies. In primitive cultures the enemy may be wild animals or
poisonous plants, but in our more developed societies the worldview is
usually designed to identify and do battle with ideological enemies,
namely groups of people or cultures that live by another and usually
conflicting worldview. This means that for Kondylis ‘es gibt keinen
anderen methodischen Zugang zur Erfassung des Charakters einer Epoche
oder einer Gesellschaftsformation als ihre Abgrenzung gegen eine frühere
oder eine andere’. To understand a culture or epoch one must understand
against what or whom it was constructed. For instance, the worldview of
the Enlightenment was developed as a strategic answer to the Christian
worldview of the Middle ages. The Christian worldview saw everything
from the perspective of religion and salvation, with the main focus of
attention lying in the afterworld. It was a world of disembodiment and
spirituality. The Enlightenment was a strategic answer to the challenge
of gaining victory over this worldview by trying to rethink the
relationship between mind and body.
A specific way in which this strategic answer took form can be seen
in modern aesthetics, notably in the works of Schiller and Kant. As we
saw before, Kant’s aesthetic theory was an attempt to bridge the gap
between body and mind. This means that he was trying to undo the
bifurcation of body and mind that was at the heart of Christianity,
where the body had to be mortified and only the immortal soul would be
saved. A similar tactic is at work in Schiller’s work, where the arts,
and notably the theatre, are engaged in a didactic process: the theatre
can be used as a stage for attractively packaged moral messages.
However, Schiller argued for the autonomy of art: whatever moral message
a work of art may present, it could only be successfully conveyed if
the work of art was not subservient to morality. There had to be harmony
of form and content and neither of the two should dominate the other.
Kondylis has called the mechanism at work in modern aesthetics ‘the
rehabilitation of the sensual’ (‘die Rehabilitation der Sinnlichkeit’):
Both Kant’s and Schiller’s works (but the works of many others too, and
not merely in aesthetics) can be seen as attempts to re-enfranchise the
physical realm in view of the traditional hostility towards it. One way
of doing this was to stress the moral potential of art: aesthetic
enjoyment (which is sinful in a Christian perspective) could serve
higher moral ends. But both Kant and Schiller stress the autonomy of art
in this process, which chimes with Bürger’s claim that bourgeois
culture evolved towards an emancipation of the aesthetic into an
autonomous realm. In Kant this trend towards autonomy of the aesthetic
is most clear in the element of disinterestedness which we have already
discussed.
Kondylis has sketched bourgeois culture as ‘synthetic-harmonising’
(‘synthetisch-harmonisierend’): it is a worldview that is well-ordered
and scientific and aims at a harmonic synthesis of opposites. It tries
to bring everything together in what can be called le juste milieu. This
term is borrowed from the arts, but we find it equally at work in the
other aspects of culture. For example, deism seeks to harmonise the
existence of a superior being with the findings of modern science, thus
saving both traditional morality and modern science from mutual
embarrassment (and philosophical writers from possible prosecution by
church or state). In the case of Kant, the harmonising middle ground
lies in his attempt to bridge the gap between body and mind, whereas
Schiller epitomised the rehabilitation of the sensual in his moral
mission for the theatre. But apart from harmonising, the modern
bourgeois worldview is also organic in structure. This is expressed in
the idea of Bildung: man has an essential nature which must be nurtured
to bring it to fruition. The prime metaphor to understand modern
culture, according to Kondylis, is therefore time: there is a trend
towards harmony that develops through time. Modernity is the culture of
perfectibility. History is a process of progress. In the arts bourgeois
culture is expressed in Classicism, where there is a symmetrical
relation between the whole and its parts and a perfect union of form and
content, as in Schiller’s proposals for the theatre. In the modern
view, art is included in the history of organic progress for it is
usually seen as the highest triumph of nature: it is in art that mankind
achieves the highest expression of himself. It is no coincidence that
this idea was also at the heart of schiller’s aesthetics, where it is
art that allows man to bind together his sensual and his moral self
(Kant’s body and mind) in a greater harmony that is his highest human
calling.
Bourgeois culture in its pure form only existed for a very brief
period of time. It soon started to erode from within. This process
becomes especially visible in the second half of the nineteenth century,
when the emancipation of the several spheres of action becomes clearly
visible. The decline of bourgeois culture is in many ways a parallel
process to the division of labour, as Bürger also claimed. the
nineteenth century saw the gradual emancipation of the labourer in the
emergence of social movements. This started a process of atomisation of
society: as the twentieth century progresses, the individual comes more
and more to the fore and egalitarian ideals gain ground. This is an
effect of the process of emancipation of bourgeois culture.
Artistically, this process came to an end with aestheticism, art for
art’s sake. This means that the autonomy of art, which we saw emerge in
Kant’s idea of disinterestedness, had finally run its course. On this
point, Kondylis’ analysis merges with Bürger’s: the avant-garde (or what
Bürger calls the historical avant-garde) demands the end of art in the
sense that art and life must merge. On a more general level, the
synthetic-harmonising culture of bourgeois modernity makes way for a new
culture that will evolve into the postmodern. The postmodern is no
longer aimed at synthesis or harmony and is described by Kondylis as
‘analytical-combinatory’ (‘analytisch-kombinatorisch’). Society is no
longer harmonised but analysed into its constituent parts. This means
that the process of emancipation started in bourgeois culture is taken
to its logical extreme: every individual becomes important in its unique
individuality. This is the emergence of the atomised society that we
call mass democracy. In a 1961 lecture Langer has referred to this as a
process of individuation; a process that she felt had ‘all but reached
its limit. Society is breaking up into its ultimate units – single
individuals, persons’. Langer looked at this process with some concern
because ‘the fact is that in our Western culture [...] each individual
really stands alone’ and many people ‘feel, but cannot understand, their
loss of the sense of involvement, which makes the world seem like a
meaningless rat race in which they are reduced to nothingness, alone in
life and in death’. A parallel process can be seen in the arts of what
we now call Modernism: artists seek the primary elements of art, be it
pure colours or shapes, basic forms, or the basic elements of perception
(Kondylis points out that modernism in history and Modernism in the
arts do not coincide: artistic Modernism is in fact the kind of art
developed in the postmodern era). This is what Danto calls the age of
Manifestos. The guiding metaphor of postmodernity is not time but space.
Mass democracy can be represented as a huge plane or space in which all
individuals, lifestyles, values, or objects are simply at hand. There
is no hierarchy. There is no individual more valuable than any other, no
lifestyle more favourable than any other. Everything is equal. Which
means that things are simply at hand in space as in a huge window
display or on a counter. This is the analytical aspect: everything is
broken down into its most basic constituents. The combinatory aspect
next says that all these elements can be combined in whatever
combinations we please. This means that personality is no longer seen as
a temporal thing, as in the ideal of Bildung. People construct their
personality: they make choices, identify themselves as belonging to
specific subcultures, they choose their gender roles, their jobs, their
dress, everything. And no choice is ever final: there are no essences
and every choice can always be traded for another styling of the self
and its mercurial identities. We no longer accumulate our personality
through time but assemble it as a work of art. For the arts this means
that artists can use whatever they want in whatever combination they
want. The prime example of postmodern or analytical-combinatory art is
the collage, or the collection of perspectives in a Cubist painting. In
fact, Bürger maintains that montage should be considered ‘the basic
principle of avant-garde art’, partly because its explicitly constructed
nature is the exact opposite of the organic concept of art found in
bourgeois culture (Robert Rauschenberg tellingly referred to some of his
works as “combines”). This again means that what Danto has called the
Post-Historical condition in art, namely the fact that anything can
become art or be integrated in art, is in fact a feature of artistic
Modernism. Both Bürger and Kondylis show that Danto is at least fifty
years behind when he defines 1964 as the point in time where the
Post-Historical era emerges [...]
Source: Christophe Van Eecke, ONLY CONNECT –
five exercises in aesthetics (2011)
