Thursday, September 6, 2007

D-I-Y POP-UP GUIDE TO JOY IN WORK II

by the Sandwichman
with the Saint Simonians, industrial labor is seen in the light of sexual intercourse; the idea of the joy of working is patterned after an image of the pleasure of procreation -- Walter Benjamin

The British artist Eric Gill gave a series of lectures in the 1930s, which was subsequently published as a book, Work and Leisure. What he had to say was largely in the tradition of 19th century English moralists on work, such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris. He summarized his argument in a letter to the editor of The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs responding to a critical review of his book.

I reproduce Gill's summary of his book below, but first a word about Gill's curious sexual (mis)conduct. In addition to countless encounters with models, prostitutes, patronesses and anyone else in a skirt who came within hailing distance, Gill had incestuous relations with his sisters, his daughters and "experimented" with his dog (and he wasn't even a Republican!).

An indignant sketch of Gill's proclivity was given by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in a 1989 review -- "Perversity raised to a principle" -- of Fiona MacCarthy's ERIC GILL A Lover's Quest for Art and God. My own view is that Harrison's indignation was misplaced. Not to condone or celebrate Gill's behaviour, I would place the blame for it instead on modern industry's failure to realize the utopian dream image mentioned in the above quote by Benjamin. And now, without further ado, here's Gill's summary of Work and Leisure:
In Chapter 1 of the book, I dealt with the nature of art as embracing the whole of human making. In the course of this, I endeavored to show that by the use of modern machines responsibility is denied to the individual workman -- he has been reduced to a subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility -- and that machines in their perfection do not help the labourer but are a substitute for him. It is argued therefore that machine-made things, however good in their kind, are not, properly speaking, human products and are therefore ultimately unsuitable for human use.

In Chapter 2, I argued that in human society, commerce springs naturally as the business of exchange and that there is not normally any "art" which is not an object of commerce--for no painter can eat paintings but must exchange them for bread. The trouble arises, according to my argument, when the trader or middleman becomes insubordinate and obtains control of production and consumption, thus perverting production to "the vicious aim of profit." In this commercialism, machine-production is the natural instrument. It enables those who control it to make more things more cheaply and, therefore -- the machine-minders being dispossessed -- more profitably, and they are not worried by any questions of inhumanity.

In Chapter 3, I argued that though art is all human making and commerce is the right and natural business of the exchange of goods and services, there is a quality in human beings and therefore in human works which is not patient of valuation in terms of prices and that it is this quality which, in ultimate analysis, is man’s reason of being or final cause, and without which there could be no need to bother about art or commerce, right or wrong, justice or injustice, piety or politics. This is the quality of holiness and in humane societies, societies not ruled by finance, societies in which things are made by men for men and not by machines, the quality of holiness is a common quality, a common-place quality, nothing to write home about or put in glass cases in museums.

26 comments:

  1. "not normally any "art" which is not an object of commerce--for no painter can eat paintings but must exchange them for bread."


    no.

    the artist "paints" for himself. or for art. or even for his friends. or for his communtiy.

    he gets bread either by his other work. or by the kindness of his friends. or, sometimes, by selling his paintings.

    but that last is by no means the sine qua non of art. it sure as hell is not the "motivation."

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  2. Sandwich

    i suspect that in the end we agree about the quality of holiness, but...

    "It is argued therefore that machine-made things, however good in their kind, are not, properly speaking, human products and are therefore ultimately unsuitable for human use."

    misses a point. the man who designs the machine, the man who makes the machine, the man who fixes the machine, and the man who operates the machine...

    are all, potentially, in an important sense, "artists."

    don't imagine that those of us who do not paint or compose are incapable of the joys of creation or fine execution....even in a machine tool environment.

    no doubt the first flaked stone tool was looked at with contempt by the artist who had perfected the subtle uses of roundstone tools and body painting.

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  3. coberly,

    I take Gill to be talking here about division of labour and specialization. He is using painting as an extreme example partly because of its self-evident "uselessness" for subsistence and partly precisely because of the presumed intrinsic motivation that you highlight.

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  4. misses a point. the man who designs the machine, the man who makes the machine, the man who fixes the machine, and the man who operates the machine...

    I happen to agree. But I think there's a real value to Gill's overstating of the case (just as he 'overstated' his revolt against puritanical sexual constraints). The craftsman was never free to make whatever object he saw fit and make it however he saw fit. The Industrial worker is never entirely unfree to affect the process and sometimes even the object of his work. Gill is using the stark black and white contrast of a woodcut to highlight the contours of his argument. He is leaving it to the imagination of the reader to supply the shading that gives the illusion of three dimensional depth to the picture.

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  5. "and he wasn't even a Republican!"

    Huh?

    Gill actually sounds quite liberal/left.

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  6. anonymous asked Huh?

    Think Santorum.

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  7. sanwich

    i suppose you are right.

    i worked at a trade which for a few years allowed me quite a bit of creativity, made easier by the most advanced technology in the world.

    then another technology came along that should have just made things easier, and allow more time for the creative part

    instead the bosses seized the new technology as a means to centralize control, remove all creativity and substitute their own "solutions."

    and i was not the only one this happened to.

    as it turns out, the bosses ended up with something less efficient... except that it did help to make up in part for their own inefficiencies in the prior regime

    i didn't fit this into my story very well, but i should have noted that my own creativity intitially was made possible by a sub-boss who was actually pretty creative at his own job...managing people. extremely rare in any business, or universtity, i was ever in.

    so if this is what Gill is talking about, I agree entirely. does he have a cure?

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  8. does he have a cure?

    Not exactly. In fact, he was hostile toward the idea of a ready-made "solution".

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  9. Impressive woodcut
    Yes. Now there's no 2 ways about it, I'm with those prim ladies that think he was affected to the point of being able to only write a 3 chapter book owing to outside interests.
    Not that I am ready to commit everything he wrote to the flames as they were not reasoned, but caused by an affliction.
    No. I'll examine any position...such is my affliction.
    Ch #1:
    It is argued therefore that machine-made things, however good in their kind, are not, properly speaking, human products and are therefore ultimately unsuitable for human use. Even crows have been observed using sticks as levers. Would Gill deny them crowhood or back off a little on what counts as a machine? If not we've come a long way from the Homo Erectus he was living with, no?
    The evolution of work (which is the interest that beats Sandwichman's heart and I am so glad) seems to have hit Gil right between the eyes and he needs to deny those changes, the alienation, the anonymity --in stark contrast to his sexual encounters.
    calmo is distracted by the psychological case, you?

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  10. I'll only point out that some, maybe a great deal, of what we look upon today as the greatest of artistic accomplishments were, at there first creation, little more than paid work for the artists. Think of Florence under the rule of the de Medicis. Whole companies functioned under the managerial supervision of an artist who was in the business of producing paintings, sculptures, even buildings on a commission basis. Sounds like work in a work place to me. And great works of art were the product.

    By the way sand-man, that's one heck of a wood cut. She looks familiar, but I can't quite place the face. Is this site going to become as randy as Max's former location was occasionally wont to do?

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  11. calmo is distracted by the psychological case, you?

    Sandwichman is intrigued by the psychological case.

    In a less tittlating vein, Benjamin writes about the decay of communicable experience in modern life and its replacement by sensation -- much of this decay having to do with the tempo of ordinary activities.

    From a distance, there seems to me to be something pathetically inarticulate about Gill's priapism. It is as if he was trying to short circuit, through fornication, the "common-place quality of holiness" that he yearned for and saw a lacking in modern society. But the scandal cannot not have bothered him.

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  12. been having one hell of a time trying to convey a communicable experience regarding numerical analysis and careful conceptualization. i blame the internet.

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  13. gosh, i read too much into it,

    thought gill was saying something about the expansion of constant capital, mass production, decline in value/unit, increased div of labor, distancing of creators from their creations, from themselves and a personal 'make love not cheap stuff' means of overcoming while not.

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  14. I think Gill was a paid hack of the business community to promote wasteful consumption and wasteful use of the population's time through unnecessary work.

    After all he was writing at the very time the consumer culture was being sytematically engineered.

    "Sharon Beder’s excellent article, Consumerism: An historical perspective available at Pacific Ecologist, it is a very informative piece about the origins of the consumer culture in modern Western countries.
    ‘By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation, “over-production” and lack of consumer demand were blamed for recession. More goods were being produced than a population with “set habits and means” could consume. There were two schools of thought about how this problem should be solved. One was that work hours should be decreased and the economy stabilised so production met current needs and work was shared around. This view was held by intellectuals, labour leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America and in Europe, it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could be reached and production beyond those limits would result in increased leisure time for all. The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was over-production could and should be solved by increasing consumption so economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually expand production so as to increase their profits. Employers were also afraid of such a future because of its potential to undermine the work ethic and encourage degeneracy amongst workers who were unable to make proper use of their time.."

    Consumerism – an Historical Perspective
    http://homepage.mac.com/herinst/sbeder/consumerism.html

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  15. Sorry, I misconstrued Gill's sentiment. (Too late at night for me).

    "the vicious aim of profit". Yes, indeed.

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  16. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  17. brenda

    "it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could be reached..."

    that's amazing. i quit my first first year economics class because i expressed that common belief, against the scientific opinion of the professor. and in the 40 or so years since then i have never seen the possibility that consumer desires had limits even alluded to in a textbook or popular account.


    re comment deleted: i assume it was not one of my comments.

    the issue of censorship is a bit delicate. there are certainly comments that i don't care to see. but in my close encounters with "the button," it has felt like another case of that professor 40 years ago who didn't want to entertain the ignorance of a student who thought his consumer desires might be limited.

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  18. Brenda,

    '...increasing consumption,,' was also facilitated through development of formal consumer credit and birth/use of modern public relations/marketing techniques as outlined in edward bernays' 1928 book, "propaganda" which can be found here:
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html

    from your quote, it sounds that business believed that crises could be overcome if only people consumed more, which is an underconsumption notion of crisis which ignores imbalances within the production side.

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  19. Consumer DESIRES have NO limits and are usually fueled by salesmen, politicians , con men, etc. Comsumer NEEDS are definately finite. Consumer ability to pay is definately finite. But Consumer Desire, infinite. (I have that fever myself)
    Mike Meyer

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  20. Thanks for the info on Bernay, Juan. Helpful. And, I found this today.

    From Wikipedia on Edward Bernay. An excerpt from his book ‘Propaganda’:
    The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind…

    And from Bernay’s autobiography:
    “In his autobiography, Bernays recalls a dinner at his home in 1933 where
    Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. ... Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.

    The smaller and smaller interlocking directorate of Government and big business "cause conflicts of interest, poor governance and poor compensation decisions, a lack of fresh perspective" [Wikipedia]. Hardly capable of the 'intelligent' manipulation of billions of citizens.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate

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  21. well,
    we think we always knew about propaganda and salesmanship. but found it wrongish that that would become an "assumption" of the science of economics, one which could not tolerate questioning.

    it's funny that those who are not, currently at least, priapicly preoccupied feel a mild contempt for those who are. but that's always been true too.

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  22. re: "comment deleted"

    That was my own comment telling Brenda she must have misread Gill that I deleted after Brenda, in the meantime, had posted a comment saying she had misread Gill. If I delete anyone else's comments, it will be in a spirit of moderation, not censorship. Disagreement is welcome. Nastiness is discouraged and -- if it becomes chronic and repetitive -- deleted.

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  23. it's funny that those who are not, currently at least, priapicly preoccupied feel a mild contempt for those who are. but that's always been true too.

    It may also be that those who are lust-obsessed express contempt for O.P.'s lust to cover their own tracks. It's a truism that homophobia is a personality disorder of the pathologically closeted.

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  24. sandwich

    hard to tell where you draw the line.

    i suspect you are quite right about the lust obsessed and the pathologically closeted.

    although i am surprised his dog did not bite him.

    i can tell you that in my own case when i was "in love" my friends were mildly contemptuous. that's the way i read Romeo's friends in Shakespears semi eponyomous play. And a book I happened to just be looking at pretty much describes the same response to a "love" sick lad in pre-historic Britain. so I guess as a phenomenon it's pretty wide spread... er, common.

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  25. It's a truism that homophobia is a personality disorder of the pathologically closeted.


    so, are we supposed to hate them because they are gay bashers or love them because they are fellow gay victims of a repressive society?

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  26. coberly,

    That last question is indeed a sad comment on this whole issue.

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