This discussion was merged into The burning fawn.

Can't wait till the destruction of Americanism. America - and the rest of the world - will be better off without it.

If you are incapable of providing grouds for your assertions - of answering the most basic of questions, 'why?' - then I'll leave you to it then.

Are you really saying that without an argument you do not know if you agree to any of the numerous claims I've made? — creativesoul

Of course I am. It's literally the basis of all rational assessment. It's worrying that this seems so puzzling to you.

It's not clear what one would be agreeing or disagreeing with. Without an argument the position is impossible to assess, and everything that follows from it is arbitrary and equally unassailable.

Look towards the top of the OP. Second paragraph. — creativesoul

The second para is just more bare assertion. Still waiting for an argument.

If morality is codified rules of acceptable and/or unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour, then it only follows - it must be the case - that morality is relative to familial, societal, and/or cultural particular circumstances, with language playing an irrevocable role. — creativesoul

How does it follow? As it stands this is an enthymeme - it's missing a premise that would make it a complete argument, or indeed, an argument at all.

It's only because he knows what Baden did last summer.

how do artists understand the artist's statement? How do they approach it? What use do artists put it to? How do dealers understand the artist's statement. What use do they put it to. How do curators? Critics? and so forth. — csalisbury

I think these are fair questions. I do think they are overdetermined though, by a focus on mandatory artist statements, which is not something I'm at all in favour of. I agree that's shit, and it's awful that they've become, as you've said de rigueur. But I also want to hold out for their value, and especially against the idea - most prominently argued in the OP - that the statement in someway compromises some imagined purity of the artwork in it's experiential capital-P Presence. My problem being more directly about the principle than than the conclusion, as it were.

I'm also not arguing that artists statements' are 'effective' in the 'accelerationist' sense of breaking the mold of the art industry or whatever. I don't think they even try to! They are quite clearly tailored, sociologically speaking, for that industry. But they don't have to be that. That's why I like the kids' statements and why I reckon they're a model for what an artists' statement should be like. If you want a 'revolution' in the experience of art you're certainly going to have to look beyond the form and content of artists statements - a relatively meagre and trivial thing, all things considered.

I also like their pedagogic element. I'm no art expert. I like having certain things drawn to my attention that I might not have otherwise thought of. Sometimes, a great deal of the time, the statements are silly and can detract rather than add to the artwork. But again they don't have to be! I've definitely learnt to see or feel or listen or think differently as the result of some, and maybe that makes me some kind of phillistine, but then, fuck any elitism that expects everyone to 'get it' on the strength of their own art-analytic powers. That's what informed by charge of elitism too. There's a great deal of political nievity (at best) or simple class contempt (at worst) in the argument that art simply ought to stand on its own.

(Which is not an argument that all art should aspire to pedagogic transparency, or to pedagogy at all. Just as it should not be required that all art should have artists' statements, there should equally be a space for art to be challengingly opaque and 'difficult'. It's just that the one should not rule the other out. But I think there's something to be said about aspiring, however minimally, to a democratic culture of art appreciation, of which artist statements, when done well, can contribute to).

Without responding point by point, I do agree that much of what happens to the rich family is undeserved (yet the real question is about the structure and distribution of deserts to begin with). I also agree that the Kims were conniving, pernicious, and, at least in the fathers case, murderous even (but yet again, the real question is structural: how and why is morality engendered in the way it is, in the film?).

But to say this and leave it at that is to (1) ignore entirely the cinematic elements of the movie and remain inadequately at the level of sheer narrative; and (2) ignore, as I said, the utterly obvious societal positions that inform the actions of the characters (which in turn is why the film - to anyone with a half-developed cinematic eye - acts as a commentary and critique of the existence of those positions, and their pernicious effects).

--

To begin with the second point (2): there's no doubt that the Kims are hustlers and will do almost anything do improve their lot. But this takes place against the backdrop of their terrible living conditions: they have shitty/no wifi, drunks pee outside their window, their house gets fumigated, etc. Their desire to improve their lot and their conditions of living cannot be treated in isolation, the one informs the other, and if you try and treat their individual actions without taking this into account, your reading of the film will be absolutely stunted. This doesn't excuse their behaviour, but it certainly informs and motivates it. It is, as people everywhere have been quick to recognise, core to the film's critique.

This, in turn is contrasted with the exorbitant privilege of the Parks, whose needs are expressly not that of just survival, but of sheer excess. Without pointing out the obvious, it's clear their approach to the world is similarly informed by their position in life. The mum says it outright!: "She's nice because they're rich... If I were rich I'd be nice too - even nicer!". The ultimate confirmation of this 'structural' reading is of course the discovery of the man in the basement: not only was he (and his wife, the ex-helper) in a very similar position to the Kims, they too, are driven to do what they do by their terrible position in life. It's no mere coincidence that their lives are so parallel: this kind of thing is pervasive - it's happened before! That's part of the mixture of tragedy and comedy of the movie (Marx: "first time as tragedy, second time as farce"), where the whole situation is both incredibly sad - considering the lengths people are driven to to survive - and hilarious.

A quick note, too on substitutability: not only does Mr. Kim 'substitute' the basement dweller by the end of the film, but so too is the entire film based on the substitutability and replaceability of the working class. Each member of the Kim family literally substitutes for a former worker, in a way that couldn't make the class dimension of this film any more obvious: we're not talking about good and evil, but structures which homogenize people along class lines. If not the Kims, then someone else - in this case quite literally another family (or couple, rather), in their place, sharing the same class predicament. Given the substitution of Mr. Kim in the basement and the arrival of a new German couple in the house at the end of the film, one can even imagine the cycle of substitution perpetuating indefinitely...

-

So the attempt to treat the characters' actions apart from their social conditions - and in turn, to not see the film as a critique of those conditions - is belied at every point in the film. This brings me to the first point (1), regarding the film's cinematic quality. Bong is on record expressly characterising the film as a "stairway movie", in the vein of a series like Downton Abby and it's precursor Upstairs/Downstairs, all situated in a genre well known to be social commentary. This is cinematically marked by the literal living orientation of the two families: The Parks live "down", their house is in an alley at the bottom of a giant stairway, while the Kims' house is up a hill, up a set of stairs. These spatial orientations are themselves markers of societal difference, brought out expressly in the storm, where the Parks' house floods, and the Kims watch the storm from the serenity of their living room, while their child - in yet another mark of utter privilege - 'goes native' in his little tent in the garden. Significantly, the Kims are not alone in their predicament, their entire neighbourhood ends up in emergency accommodation in a stadium(?). This is a story that goes well beyond mere individuals acting in 'good' and 'evil' ways - a reading reductionist beyond all filmic evidence.

The second cinematic element to take into account is simply the fact that the story is told from the Kims' perspective! It's their successes and their failures which the movie tracks, and it's filmed quite obviously in such a way that we (are meant to) root for their successes and feel badly about their failures. Their eventual success at 'replacing' all members of the previous help is quite clearly filmed as triumphant (the sequence where they frame the previously maid is positively celebratory at the end), and the tension as they hide under the table is nail-biting because we are quite obviously hoping that they are not discovered. Then there's the fact that Bong goes to great lengths to humanize the Kims: we spend time with them, see them joke and laugh with one another (most obviously at the beginning of the film, and then again when they are luxuriating in the living room while the Parks are away). The contrasts in disposition between the Kims and the Parks are obvious too: the relationships among the Park family are cold and formal - even the sex is awkward and anything but passionate - while the Kims' relations' to each other bustle with warmth and joy. That anyone could think the Kims are meant to be villains is plainly ridiculous.

--

So some lessons to draw here: First, this is not a morality tale. The accent is heavily on social position, foregrounded everywhere throughout the film as informing action, which makes the film a political and not moral play. The Parks and Kims are, to a great degree, representative of class, and the tragedy that unfolds as much a commentary on the tragedy of class relations as it is the actions of individual people. Second, those who are looking to see the film portray the rich as 'evil' or 'immoral' and then faulting the film for not showing this ought to themselves be faulted for setting up false and unwarrented expectations that have nothing to do with the film and then complaining when those expectations are not met. The fault here is bad film comphrehension, and not bad cinema. The Parks' being overtly 'immoral' and 'deserving' (of what happens to them) would make the film worse, not better. It would make the story revolve around individual action, personalizing the story and undermine the fact that what matters is not 'who' the Parks are but, as it were, 'what' they are. It would undermine the story that Parasite is trying to tell.

The same applies mutatis mutandis, to the Kims. Their desperation and the lengths they are willing go to is essential to the story: their being more morally pure would not make us 'side' with them, but also undermine the critique of class relations that the film is attempting. Those who think that Bong is not successful because the Kims are 'villians' (thus, presumably, not making us identify with them) miss the point entirely. It's almost as far from the point as one could possibly be. What they 'want' the film to show is exactly what it aims to resist: the personalization of class conflict. That 'the rich are part of the problem' is not the point. That a class structure exists in which there are distributions of polarized rich and poor to begin with at all, however, is (incidentally, this seems to be a point that many critics of the left seem incapable of understanding). The rich could be angels, the best people in the world. And still the critique of class would hold.

Anyway, this was fun, I don't usually spend so much time on posts, but you asked for analysis rather than generality so there you go :)

Biden is being absolutely murdered in NH. I knew he was an unlikable fuddy duddy but this is next level. Maybe Americans are not entirely shit.

I don't even know what we're arguing here. — BitconnectCarlos

Um, you asked how the title could refer to the rich family, and I quoted the director explaining just that. Not sure what you seem to be confused about.

I mean he's only the director of the film but yeah sure totally a strech.

To quote Bong himself: "Because the story is about the poor family infiltrating and creeping into the rich house, it seems very obvious that Parasite refers to the poor family, and I think that's why the marketing team was a little hesitant. But if you look at it the other way, you can say that rich family, they're also parasites in terms of labor. They can't even wash dishes, they can't drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family's labor. So both are parasites." (via the Wiki page).

The movie shows that under Capitalism, both the rich and the poor are parasites to one another, and that class distinctions are arbitrary. — Maw

:up:

It's an incredibly naive reading to think that 'parasite' refers only to the poor family, and not - perhaps especially so - the rich one too (to say nothing of the cellar dwellers). One of the great joys of the movie is coming to realize this, the way it kind of slowly subverts your expectations. Also, one of the film's strengths is precisely in not simply casting the rich and poor family along straightforward good/evil lines. The poor family are clearly the protagonists (how the OP can think otherwise is beyond me), but the rich family are not simply 'bad', and the poor family quite obviously have their problems. But the film does a great job in showing how their actions are deeply motivated - and in some manner necessitated - by their class position, and not simply their individual 'moral dispositions' or whathaveyou. In other words, societal structure is foregrounded in a way that undoes any simplistic individualist reading. That's the clear thrust of the critique that the film makes. If there's any notion that 'greed for money leads to tregedy', its very specifically clear that it does so under our specific societal arrangements and that everyone is implicated in this tragedy, rich and poor alike.

Also, the only people who think this film is anti-American and people who are upset that an English speaking movie didn't win Best Picture.

Please be more specific. — Wallows

I don't want to be rude, so I'd prefer not to.

Does that help? — Wallows

No.

Most people are not at all vague when they claim to know something.

This thread is what happens when language goes on holiday.

See the point? — Wallows

No.

When a person says, "I know", what do they really mean? — Wallows

Have you considered asking said person?

Might seem rude if you didn't, is all.

If we ingenuously follow this thread, we're lead to the fact that the artist statement is not simply an additional multimedia aspect, but something, essentially gallery and market-facing. Again, we need to be empirical here. Are we talking about artist statements as they actually function, or are we talking about an abstract idea of 'the artist statement' as it can be slotted into a pre-existing complex of thought involving identity, purity etc. — csalisbury

I think I mostly agree with this, but here's the case I want to make: in gallery conditions, where the artwork is already so alienated and displaced from the lifeworld - where its aura is already diminished - the statement can function in a compensatory register; it is a reactive effort to give something of what has already been lost.

The other option - call it the revolutionary option to my reformist one - is to refuse to play the game and say: here's the artwork, in this cold space, take or it leave it: if its aura is missing, thats your(?) problem, these are the conditions under which art is exhibited now, so this is what you get. A kind of identification with alienation ('accelerationist'?). And yeah sure, you can do this, but how effective is this going to be, really?

So I am trying to be historical-empirical here: this isn't just some abstract-theoretical argument in favour of multimedia experience, but really looking at how the artist statement functions in the conditions of alienated art. I see it as potentially offering a small window into an outside that no longer exists, a tiny effort at reclamation. The artist statement as the union and the dole, if I can make that comparison.

A work of art 'speaks for itself'...

Because art communicates via it's own inherent medium. — Noble Dust

I do not understand what this is supposed to mean, nor how it provides a reason for the former. At best, it seems tautologous - does it say anything other than 'art speaks for itself because it speaks for itself?' - but I can't be sure of even that.

But generally, good art should evoke interpretation, not require explanation. Does that make sense? No? — Noble Dust

But why a disjunction between interpretation and explanation in the first place? Why one or the other? Why even these terms and not others? I'm not taking sides here: I just don't see that there's a genuine debate to be had in these terms to begin here. And even if I were to take sides - why shouldn't some 'good art' require explanation, especially when that explanation is willingly provided? Why not draw connections, why not expand the imagination even more, why not multiply the points of reference? Why this pious insistence on closing art down because - what? It's a very strange gatekeeping, a kind of priestly instance.

This metaphor simply indicates that art is not primarily apprehended theoretically. — Noble Dust

Who are you to say how art is 'primarily apprehended'? Is this your artists' statement? And why should anyone give a fig about that?

I'm still waiting for your argument in favor of artist statements. — Noble Dust

I'm don't have an 'argument in favour of artist statements' in general. I'm not particularly 'for' them. I'm simply not against being against them on, as far as I can see, utter spurious grounds. Some artists statements are good, some are terrible. But I'm not here to play art police and specify what ought to be the case in advance.

Or the artwork, due to neoliberal precarity, is forced to market itself through the artist statement, like a worker made to forge their way in a gig economy, seeking the right conceptual hashtags to render itself employable. — csalisbury

But in many ways I think this is right too. Art in a gallery is already compromised in some way; an artist statement does function - or is made to function - much like you describe. But I can fully accede to this while still thinking that some principled prohibition on artists statements the name of some faux-purity is also dumb. There's a whole bunch of stuff about Benjamins' 'aura' going though my head right now if you're familiar with that stuff, but if not nevermind. Anyway, so yeah, you can totally have that conversation - conditions of art in the modern world, etc etc, - but that's just a different conversation.

Anyway, if the artwork doesn't speak for itself, but requires a statement, then we can as easily say the statement doesn't speak for itself (what, is this a statement in a warehouse?) and so needs an additional statement and so forth. — csalisbury

Yeah, we can say this, but should we? Perhaps part of the problem is that the very idea of art 'speaking for itself' or not is silly to begin with. The way I see it, a statement for the most part is just another way to engage with an artwork; another way 'in': it's embellishment upon an embellishment, excess upon excess. Like, I'm not saying that art 'requires' a statement. That'd be silly. I'm just against it's 'prohibition': that it must be without one, otherwise - what? It interrupts some purity? No. It's all excess all the way down.

If a work of art I make requires an explanation, then it's not worthy of anyone's time. The work should speak for itself; essentially, what the philosophical issue is here is that art should express itself on it's own terms. — Noble Dust

This isn't a proper argument either. Why should an artwork 'speak for itself'? Why it is 'not worthy of anyone's time' if it requires an explanation? What is the artwork's 'own terms'? What does it even mean to say that an artwork has 'its own terms'? This a-contextual notion of art is so incredibly, well, artificial that it's simply incomprehensible to me. It's simply a hermetic sealing of art off from anything in the world. It's elitist and bourgeois: "I will not have the petty concerns of the world or of people intrude on my charmed experience of the artwork!". The OP asks for a 'counter-argument' - but there is no argument to counter. Simply a bald series of statements without any provided rationale.

Everything you think are detrimental about artists statements, I think are positives, basically. I think the so-called 'purity' you're after is a myth, and I think you're unnecessarily closing down avenues of interest so that you can better secure that myth.

mandatory artist statements are stupid. — csalisbury

Sure, I can agree with this. But that's the thing, not supplying a statement is fine too. That too, 'says' something. The isolated warehouse artwork also carries 'meaning'. But it all does. Inveighing against the artist statement is simply arbitrary. It closes off possibilities elsewhere admitted. It's policing. It's equally stupid.

---

Would it be over-interpretation to say that this is neoliberalism at the level of art? 'An artwork should pull itself up by its own bootstraps!'. Eugh. Reagan as art curator.

At the contemporary art museum in town, they sometimes have two statements. Your standard one, along with one for kids. I adore the ones for kids. It's usually something like: "The blue in this makes us feel sad, and the patterns show how we all have different kinds of sadness. Have you noticed how you can feel different kinds of sadness sometimes? Which patterns do you think you have felt before?". It's simple, it picks out an obvious theme, and it usually tries to relate the artwork to the child in some manner. It's not altogether different from - as the OP put it - a kindergarten show and tell. And it is the very paradigm of how I think all artist statements should be written.

The kids' statements really bring out that childish wonder which I think is sometimes the best way to experience art. Obviously not all statements do this - a great deal are nonsense - but I like the principle of elaboration on an artwork. Give me context, give me themes, append some intellectual spark along with the sensory, let them mesh, clash, extend, contradict one another. "An artwork should stand on it's own" - but nothing stands on its own, even without the statement. I simply have no time for 'purity' of art. Art isolated, put on a pedestal in the middle of a warehouse with a single lonely light on it. That's art for the collector, who wants to admire pretty things without being disturbed by anything else. Can I say that's bougie bullshit? I'm not sure if we're allowed to use bougie as an insult anymore.

Ah. Policing art in the name of not letting art be policed. Very good.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=34191831628526077764

Searchable and copyable PDF, as promised.

I'd love to read Anscombe's 'Under a Description' after this if we're not all to exhausted by her when we're done with this. Or 'The First Person'.

Ian Buchanan - Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Readers Guide
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: An Introduction to Schizoanalysis
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

And once more into the Deleuzian breach.

:grin:

She was also, I believe, a student of his, as in, she was thought by him, face to face. As well as one of his literary executors after his death.

Does anyone have a better PDF? — Banno

I'll link to one when I get home tonight.

You're... dead?

I hope all those who got their panties in a twist over the show trial that was 'impeachment' can now move on and actually give a shit about things that matter.

I don't think that for Anscombe "...owes..." comes for any induction or consensus. It's more that if one admits to receiving the spuds after having asked for them, one has misunderstood the nature of the transaction if one then insists that one is not in dept to the grocer.

...SO the difference would be that between understanding and agreeing to join in the group enterprise of creating the institution of paying for one's spuds, and just understanding a simple transaction from the point of view of the grocer - he thought you would pay for the spuds. — Banno

This seems right to me.

Just that second sentence, where she wants an "adequate philosophy of psychology"... a philosophy of psychology is not a psychology; and adequate for... doing morality? — Banno

Yeah, like, why do we need a philosophy of psychology to do moral philosophy? She just kind lays that out there, and I don't understand why.

She says at the beginning that we need a more adequate philosophy of psychology, but it's not really that, it's her treatment of how we get 'owes' to be a fact. Her explanation here is confusing to me so I could easily have this wrong, but all I get out of it (both here and in 'Brute Facts') is that 'owes' refers just to a circumstance which most people would use 'owes' to identify. What criteria they are using is not yet fixed, but simply held by tradition. I owe the grocer for the potatoes (after he has delivered them) simply because that it the state of affairs most people would consider had arisen as a result of that prior fact. Even though some instances where we would use some label 'owes' can have their history/tradition elucidated by reference to other more brute facts/institutions (justifying that A is done by reference to xyz) but such a relationship between A and xyz is held in normal circumstances by tradition.

Also, we only have a speculative, pragmatic description of 'owes', fringe cases are up for debate and (local) consensus wins.

Investigating what this tradition/consensus is is a matter of induction, either from experience or scientific investigation (samples, statistical analysis etc). Investigating what traditions hold and in what circumstances is a matter of psychology. — Isaac

I agree with - or think I do - everything you said right up until the bit I bolded. The unbolded seems authorized by the text; the bolded seems far more extrapolative and ambigious in its textual warrant. The very question of induction is nowhere raised for instance, and I suspect for good reason.

The paper does speak of 'institutions' but gives no direction on how - except for conceptual analysis - to individuate traditions.

I have to say though, I don't quite understand the role that 'psychology' has to play in the paper. The places where Anscombe invokes it seem arbitrary to me - I can't gork why she does it when she does. The closest I can get is when she talks of the 'mesmeric' effect of moral oughts, and perhaps a psychology needed to understand that effect. Anyone have any further ideas?

Babies are very much the perfect atheists. For them, the question of God(s) - like every other question of course - is simply unintelligible. As it should be. The tragedy of it is that most are brought up to believe that the very question makes sense at all. Shame.

Ellen Meiksins Wood on why capitalist democracy is a bit shit:

"In capitalist democracy, the separation between civic status and class position operates in both directions: socio-economic position does not determine the right to citizenship - and that is what is democractic in capitalist democracy - but, since the power of the capitalist to appropriate the surplus labour of workers is not dependant on a privileged juridical or civic status, civic equality does not directly affect or significantly modify class inequality - and that is what limits democracy in capitalism. Class relations between capital and labour can survive even with juridical equality and universal suffrage. In that sense, political equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with socio-economic inequality but leaves it fundamentally intact".

--

On why the American idea of democracy is particularly shit:

"We have become so accustomed to the formula, 'representative democracy', that we have tended to forget the novelty of the American idea. In its Federalist form, at any rate, it meant that something hirthrto perceived as the antithesis of democratic self-government was now nbot only compatible with but constitutive of democracy: not the excercise political power but its relinquishment, its transfer to others, its alienation.

The alienation of political power was so foreign to the Greek conception of democracy that even election could be regarded a an oligarchic practice, which democracies might adopt for certain specific purposes but which did not belong to the essence of the democratic constitution. Thus Aristotle, outlining how a 'mixes' constitution might be constructed out of the elements from the main constitutional types, such as oligarchy and democracy, suggests the inclusion of election as an oligarchic feature. It was oligarchic because it tended to favour the gnorimoi, the notables, the rich and well born who were less likely to be sympathetic to democracy. ... Not only did the 'Founding Fathers' conceive representation as a means of distancing the people from politics, but they advocated it for the same reason that Athenian democracts were suspicious of election: that it favoured the propertied classes".

via Democracy Against Capitalism

It seems to me from the opening that Anscombe is looking to a more psychological understanding of morality. — Isaac

Hm, which passages do you have in mind that give warrant to this reading?

Again, I think this fits the space-clearing view. — csalisbury

Yeah that's fair. I won't puruse this too far but I agree that providing more of the bits she says that should be provided doesn't necessarily block a fly-out-of-the bottle approach.