Interview With Nicholas Garnham, Part II

[This is the second of a three-part interview with Professor Nicholas Garnham, a founder of the media studies program at the University of Westminster, UK, and of the journal Media Culture & Society. Part one of the interview is here. The third and final part will be posted shortly.]

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Q4. In the 1970s you wrote a book about the film director Samuel Fuller, and your analysis of his films deployed ideas from existentialism. It is one of my favorite film studies books. But I notice that with your turn to Marxism and political economy, both text analysis and existentialism moved to the margins. Would you ever consider writing another book like that? And if not, why not?

Nicholas Garnham: There are too many books -- most of which are over expanded articles. And few people read them. But if I were to write another book it would in fact probably be in the same area as the Fuller book i.e. closer to specific artistic productions. Whether it would use ideas from existentialism I don’t know although the core of existentialism in phenomenology seems unavoidable in writing about texts/artifacts.

My problem with textual analysis however is that all the attempts to take textual analysis beyond impressionistic personal responses have more or less failed. On the one hand (I will return to this in relation to Bourdieu) theoretical/sociology of art, materialist analyses, however skillful and well informed seem always to leave something out -- namely people’s responses to art -- why do people respond to it or indeed create it at all. For this reason my current concerns are very much with aesthetics and the very traditional arts and crafts. I think I can say accurately that I hardly ever watch TV, rarely the cinema, but I spend a great deal of time looking at pictures and sculpture and ceramics. And to a lesser extent listening to music -- music seems to me (as someone who had no musical education or training) the most difficult case. Above all I am interested in and moved by architecture -- clearly the most social and material of the arts/crafts. Here the question of what makes a ‘great’ building apart from the fulfillment of its manifest social function and the question of the quality of vernacular traditions are paramount. Here architecture and music are important and difficult precisely because in the end they resist textual analysis.

The problem with the kind of textual analysis I undertook in the Fuller book is that it always in the end uses the work as a rosarch blot upon which the analyst inevitably imposes his or her own preoccupations, beliefs etc. It tells us in the end more about the analyst that it does the work. This has been clarified for me recently by reading T.J. Clark’s books on Modernism and Poussin. Clark’s readings of the paintings at issue are as material, as close as materialist and as sensitive and insightful as you can get. In short he is the best in the business. But particularly in the book on Modernism all the readings are based upon a philosophical position -- broadly that of alienation, that capitalism has created so alienated a world that human beings can not only no longer live happily at home in the world but cannot even imagine a better world. Now since I think this position is more or less nonsense from beginning to end -- the old romantic, vitalist and conservative revolt against modernity that got taken up by one current in Marxism -- with very baleful consequences, the whole analysis of the paintings, especially the abstract paintings falls apart. One realises one can construct an almost infinite range of coherent analyses based on the close, materialist reading of any specific text.

Q5. In your book Emancipation the Media & Modernity, you argue that media studies is a field whose roots are to be found in both the European scientific Enlightenment, and in debates about epistemology, ethics and aesthetics first raised by the Greeks. It seems to me that the attempt to graft this agenda onto a fully materialist approach to culture (exemplified for instance in the work of Adorno, Sartre and Williams) keeps coming up against the repression of the body and the (related) effects of a lingering mind-body dualism. What I mean to say is that the rationalist approach is always vulnerable to assertions of a more corporeal, hedonistic and/or non-rationalist aesthetics/way-of-being, whatever one might say about the essentially self-contradictory nature of post-structural and post-modern theories of society/representation. So that, to give an example from your book (in chapter 7), the defence of aesthetic value along cognitivist lines is welcome, but also surely fragile, if we leave no room at all for, say, Bakhtin.

Nicholas Garnham: I think here you are confusing ontology and epistemology. As the current state of both brain science and philosophy of mind demonstrate we are a long way from being able to make the move from the material determinants of brain function to an explanation of consciousness and in particular self-consciousness. So for the present some degree of mind/body dualism seems to me both right and unavoidable. The whole point of the Kantian revolution and of Cassirer’s development of the philosophy of symbolic forms was to bracket out ontology and focus not on the ultimate truth of reality or essence but on the different ways in which we can construct different realities and truths. It is not therefore a question of rationalist versus non-rationalist, but of differing modes of rational apprehension of the world. For better or worse human beings are the way they are and have created the cultural forms of being they have because they are not just bodies responding to external stimuli or following evolutionary hard-wired routines. Their relation to their environment and their responses to the stimuli received from it are processed by what for short hand we can call mind. While some bodily responses are indeed instinctive/hard-wired most of the range is at some level intentional and in various ways learnt.

The problem with the critique of mind/body dualism is that it too often takes the form of a romantic rejection of the Kantian revolution where the body represents some lost essence embodied in a Herderian move by the volk and its culture as against the artificial creation of civilisation, the work of intellectuals and the posh in general. This as you will recognise continues to be a powerful, and politically powerful trope. It is already being used by Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama under the name elitism. The irony here is that this trope has often been used to racist ends. Blacks are body therefore either bad/dangerous to know or noble savages. Jews are intellectuals and therefore suspect. The problem is to think of the corporeal/hedonistic as somehow pre or sub mental and therefore superior -- a Rousseauean move -- from which comes the whole admiration for children, mad people and indeed noble savages. But enough. As you can see I reject the whole romantic bag and baggage. I am not sure how Bakhtin fits in here, but I have never read much of him and what I have read not, as with Adorno, for many years.

Q6. On balance, has the reception of Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic judgment done more harm than good? I mean of course that to the extent that it has become the occasion for a festival of cultural relativism and class-reductive analyses of texts, has Bourdieu, in your view, been misread? Or is the problem there at the heart of his work?

Nicholas Garnham: Yes I think on balance that Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic judgement has done more harm than good. His early work on the socially stratified basis of taste was on the whole positive except for a reverse snobbism (linking to my comments above) whereby popular taste was more valid/valuable because closer to bodily necessity. It is not so much that Bourdieu’s work has been misread but that owing to his particular style of argument where he continually covers his tracks it is open to a range of readings which are often mutually contradictory. But the problem of class reductive and of relativism does lie at the heart of his work. Indeed the class reductive became stronger at the end of his life at the cost of the much of the subtlety of his theory. This was a problem he shared with both Foucault and Derrida. Their theories in each case came to clash with their progressive political instincts. In my view the central problem with Bourdieu is the attempt on the one hand to defend in a Kantian fashion the development of increasingly autonomous fields with their own rules of validity and the possibility of critique, while at the same time developing a deeply embedded theory of the operation of stratified power. If his theory of power is correct how can autonomous fields and critiques ever develop? On the other hand if autonomous fields, and especially the autonomy of the scientific fields, is a positive, defensible benefit than why is the exercise of aesthetic judgement a la Kant and Cassirer repressive?

Q7. Your critique of cultural studies involves a rejection of psychoanalytic approaches on the grounds – if I have understood this correctly – not that this is the wrong approach but that it should not be a priority. But how are we to understand culture if we do not attempt to take some account of the unconscious mind?

Nicholas Garnham: Of course in understanding culture we have to take account of the unconscious mind. Or perhaps it would be better to say not fully conscious. But my main argument with psychoanalytical approaches was that they largely mobilised a Freudian framework as though it was an unquestionable truth when in fact its evidential base was slim (and its therapeutic record poor if not positively harmful). Cultural artifacts were then read off from this theory. At its worse the unconscious was just substituted for the class struggle as the explanation for the deep meaning of the text. It has lead in short to a form of mysticism and mystification.

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Please note that this interview is posted under a Creative Commons 3.0
Attribution-Share-Alike Licence.

To be continued.