Issue #84 We Have Never Been Post-Industrial

We Have Never Been Post-Industrial

Jacob Stewart-Halevy

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Asha Schechter, Coffee Scene, 2015, digital video. 13'57'' minutes.

Issue #84
September 2017










Notes
1

Essays in Post-Industrialism: A Symposium of Prophecy concerning the Future of Society, eds. Ananda Coomaraswamy and Arthur Penty (London: T. N. Foulis, 1914).

2

Allan Antliff highlights the place individual that artisans held for Coomaraswamy and his cowriter—the guild socialist Arthur Penty—as they fleshed out the concept of Post-Industrialism: “Neither Penty nor Coomaraswamy sought a wholesale resuscitation of medieval institutions in Europe or India; their program idealized medieval societies in those countries as alternative ‘models’ for the social organization of the future in which spiritual values would shape every aspect of daily life … The most important feature of medieval society was the integration of spiritual idealism with the day-to-day activities of the population, primarily through art.” Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art Politics and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

3

Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Purposes of Art,” Modern Review 13 (June 1913): 606.

4

Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon (London: T. N. Foulis, 1913), 34.

5

Ananda Coomaraswamy, Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908), viii.

6

Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva (New York: Sunwise Turn, 1924), 138–39.

7

Bell notes his surprise in discovering the prior usage: “Ironically I have recently discovered that the phrase occurs in a book by Arthur J. Penty, a well-known Guild Socialist of the time … and called for a return to decentralized, small workshop artisan society, ennobling work, which he called ‘the post-industrial state’!” Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 37.

8

William Davies, “Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 7 (August 2014): 316.

9

Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, in The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), 382.

10

Julia Elyachar, “Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo,” American Ethnologist 37 (2010): 452–64.

11

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

12

Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (New York: SAGE, 1966).

13

Joanna Cook, “Mindful in Westminster: The Politics of Meditation and the Limits of Neoliberal Critique,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 141–61.

14

Michael Storper and Susan Christopherson, “Flexible Specialization and Regional Industrial Agglomerations: The Case of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (1987): 104–17.

15

Michael Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture,“ Signs and Society 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 327–366, 349. For a broader discussion of “Oinoglossia,” see Michael Silverstein, “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life,” Language & Communication 23 (2003): 193–229.

16

Silverstein, No-Thingness of Culture, 329

17

In his history of early cinema, Georges Sadoul writes that Auguste Lumière’s need for film to run through a mechanism at a normal rate of speed made him think that a foot pedal from a sewing machine might function equally well in a film projector. Georges Sadoul, Histoire Général du Cinéma, vol.1 (Paris: Denoël, 1946), 184–96.

18

Jonathan Beller, “Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money,” Boundary 2 26, no. 9 (1999): 162. Italics in original.

19

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Jephcott and Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 101–33.

20

Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); John MacKay, “Vertov and the Line: Art, Socialization, Collaboration,” in Museum Without Walls: Film, Art, New Media, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

21

John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jerome Christensen, America's Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

22

Caldwell, Production Culture, 232

23

Ibid., 3.

24

Although often regarded as merely a “receptor surface,” this question of “orientation” is key to the art historian Leo Steinberg’s discussion of the “flatbed picture plane”: “The characteristic ‘flatbed’ picture plane of the 1960s” insists on a “radically new orientation” towards it. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 84–85.

25

The denouement of “Speculative Materialist” art, in the wake of the most recent Berlin Biennial, seems to have resulted from the movement’s inability to renovate a codified set of materials and talking points that had become vulnerable to ready-typification and parodic trolling from competing registers.