The memory of a founding event is said to be called up periodically in the interest of preserving historical continuity. A skeptic would add it’s in order to re-instantiate previous authority. Both are wrong, or at least don’t give the full story, for two reasons. First, continuity doesn’t work that way. There is not an authority fixed in place whose power gets renewed periodically for this purpose. Rather the memory of the event is part of “a complex pattern of recurrence” that gets interpreted anew according to a changing political and intellectual scene (M. Cox 1998, 5).
Second, there is no such thing as a founding event. It’s a myth which not even historians themselves are entirely free of. Yet to believe in it amounts to a delusion, according to post-Marxist historian Francois Furet, whose work on the French Revolution has been described as advancing a “postdelusional perspective”:
“Furet says that for nearly two hundred years Frenchmen suffering from this delusion have refought the revolution’s battles…Virtually all historians of the revolution have subscribed to some version of the myth” (Cox 3).
The contemporary account takes from previous upendings of the ‘orthodox’ (hegemonic) views that held for much of the 20th century to say the French Revolution was not in fact a class overthrow, that the aristocracy as a class was not unseated, and that the bourgeoisie thereby could not have become the new ruling class.
Rather it was political consciousness that changed, such that “the revolution in political culture consisted primarily of the substitution of a new form of absolutism, popular sovereignty, for the old absolutist doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings” (Cox 2).
Is all this wishful thinking?
Marvin R. Cox, author and editor of the volume The Place of the French Revolution in History, says it is a rethinking characteristic of paradigm shifts in general, of which the contested meaning of the French Revolution is an example.
The spectacle that the public has more power than it does takes a lot of coordination. Cox presents another historian, Robert Darnton, whose contemporary view is that “changes in language, symbol, and ceremonial eventuate in a reconstruction of what the revolutionaries took to be reality” (Cox 2).
Yet if discernment is lacking here, it is in part because historians and political theorists themselves do little to correct for it.
Michael Hardt is one political theorist whose notion of political love conflates a change of heart with actual governance. Political love, conceived as possible insofar as love resides in the people, can replace Machiavellian rule by fear (e.g., that to which we submit whenever we take our shoes off at the airport). Hardt’s vision is restricted to a revolutionary change in consciousness as to where and in whom power resides, despite his best efforts to counter the corruption of the words “love” and “democracy.” Political love is platonic, ontological, and not “a horrible kind of love” in which you only love the one who looks like you.
The difference between real and imagined rule carries over to the art scene particular to the period 1848-1875, where the beginnings of a divergence is noted between revolution in art and the art of revolution (Hobsbawm 1975, 295). True innovation belongs to the former, the author says, in part through an abandoning of orthodoxy, hegemony, or otherwise conventional codes of past painting. Whereas the retention of convention, however outmoded, is essential to the art of revolution. The account differs from Darnton’s in that it implies ‘revolution management’ through mass media includes its spectacle, whose very bread and butter is in the continued use of outmoded symbols and their assigned meanings.
According to Hobsbawm, the scientific question of what the eye ‘really’ sees as light falls on objects has no definite answer in art, but “the search for science in art” does achieve something: “the destruction of a conventional and generally accepted code of visual communication, which was not replaced by ‘reality’ or any other single such code, but by a multiplicity of equally possible conventions” (The Age of Capital 295).
This in turn points up the problem with mainstream cultural critiques of industrial-agrarian-capitalist realism in that they tend to get couched in terms of there being a deceptive presentation of this present economic system as being all there is, with no alternative to it as a system. The critique in itself and its subject are of a piece in that both take attention from the problematic aspects within capitalist culture, as though there is no problem.
It’s a concealment that finds precedent in what looks to be a tradition that cultivates a singular sense of shared destiny buoyed by an “immense and unquestioned faith” that does not permit the hand of man to be brought into view. The same assumptions underwrite the inferiority of technological supports (the deux ex machina as one example) and the subordination of entertainment to serious art.
Hobsbawm words the rationale in terms of a philosophy of architecture:
“…architecture expressed no kind of ‘truth’, but only the confidence and self-confidence of the society that built it, and this sense of the immense and unquestioned faith in bourgeois destiny is what makes its best examples impressive, if only by sheer bulk. It was a language of social symbols. Hence the deliberate concealment of what was really novel and interesting in it, the magnificent technology and engineering which showed their face in public only on the rare occasions when what was to be symbolized was to be technical progress itself…even the glorious functionalism of utilitarian buildings was increasingly disguised…” (289).
The account points up an age-old notion about the advancement of man, which says something to the effect that, by the time technical supports become available, the hope is one no longer is in need of them. Such supports must be hidden because their existence and their extensive use shows a departure never took place.
The functional utility of the technical arts as answering to necessity wasn’t the only thing considered antithetical to the myth of a favored class as the embodiment of truth in itself, whose arrival was achieved without the aid of supports interpreted not as merits but as faults. Hard labor was also hidden, or at least made palatable in ‘realism’ turned to ‘naturalism’ in the arts, “where poverty and hard labour seemed to be made acceptable by the obedient piety of the poor; at worst it turned into the sentimental flattery of the family portrait” (291).
But sentimental flattery isn’t what an aspirational mass public was after, according to Hobsbawm. What it desired was respectability and culture. Artists and advertisers were influenced by this consolidation of ‘power’ from the bottom. It seems the only regret was in overpaying for this accommodation, which is correct from an understanding of progress as not a guarantee of superiority. At the same time that this clamoring for respectability was being reported from the lower quarters, Hobsbawm did not spare from ridicule the bourgeoisie who, in seeing themselves as the successors to “the renaissance, the age of merchant princes,” naturally were inclined to favor renaissance art (288).
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