Raphael's Tapestries

There are many reasons to begrudge the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain this month. The fact that he looks like a conspiring alien hiding inside a badly fitting man-suit immediately disinclines me towards him, although there is a strange mixture of melancholy and mania in his heavy-lidded eyes which I find disturbingly hypnotic. More disturbing, of course, is his implication in the world-wide Catholic conspiracy to cover up endemic child abuse within the church. But it’s not all doom and gloom you know! For the pope comes bearing gifts: the Raphael tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Peter and Paul, which usually hang from the walls of the Sistine Chapel, have been loaned to the V&A museum to be displayed, for the first time, alongside the artist’s original cartoons, and their delivery to Britain has been timed to coincide with the pope’s visit. But it gets better: the exhibition is free.

And yet the news left me underwhelmed. After all, the cartoons are always on display; as for the tapestries – well, I just can’t get excited about tapestries. Whereas paintings (with a little help from restoration work) seem to age gracefully, their faded hues conferring distinction, like flecks of grey hair on handsome man, tapestries don’t seems to age so much as wither away. There is something wan and tubercular about their paling threads, their once-bright colours succumbing to consumption, too bright still to be considered – as the faded monochrome of an ageing sketch might be – as spectral, they linger in their not-quite-brightness like an etiolated star, the white dwarf of many a country house. Or perhaps I read too much into chromatic decline...

But free is free, and Raphael is Raphael, and certainly if these tapestries are ever going to be actually enjoyed by the public then it will be here in this exhibition at the V&A rather than in the Sistine Chapel, in the hallowed ground of which the phenomenology of viewership is one of fatigued touristic ennui. For before seeing Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel you inevitably wander through the Vatican’s superabundance of treasures, carried along with the tide of tourists until you’re numbed into a plodding passive state by aesthetic overload and the incessant dazzling flash of cameras. Eventually you’re spat out into the chapel itself to stand shoulder-to shoulder, cheek-by-jowl with the gawping hordes, everyone craning their necks upwards in agonised admiration of Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling – which, for all its familiarity, for all the expectation and the mad rush and crush of visitors (up to 20,000 in a day!), still fails to disappoint. But as for the tapestries? Only the determined push and shove their way around the outskirts of the chapel to take a peek at where they hang from the walls; only the superhuman are then able to actually take their time appreciating them!

Yet when these tapestries were first made they were considered more precious than Michelangelo’s ceiling. To look at them now, I personally find it difficult to discern this past lustre of theirs. And this is why old tapestries in general fail to excite me: they constitute an unsatisfying lack – an imagine-what-once-was that is somehow devoid of the sublimity which that imagining achieves in the case of architectural ruins. However, for this reason seeing these tapestries next to the cartoons is gratifying, since the paintings (faded though they are) allow one to reconstruct what it was that Raphael was aiming for. But still I found myself more drawn towards the small preliminary sketches of the apostolic scenes than I did the woven wall hangings... The appeal of tapestries apparently eludes me still.

The Capitalist (use of) Sentiment

What role does sentimentality play in capitalist culture today? We need look no further than the X-Factor – a new series of which has just started, with its standard combination of hyper-sentimentality and cruel spectacles of ostracism, all underpinned by the ruthless pursuit of profit (which finds its pantomimic personification in the figure of Simon Cowell). The programme can be seen as epitomising the role which sentiment plays in the West with regard to the accumulation of capital. Take, for instance, the stage in the show when each judge retires to one of their many mansions with a group of contestants. After having sang, the hopefuls are then given a one-on-one session with the judge in which they are told whether or not they pass to the next round. Those who are rejected are understandably upset, but interesting here is the role which the judge Cheryl Cole/Tweedy normally plays in these scenarios. She – who is effectively inflicting this misery – commiserates dramatically with them, even sharing in their tears! In doing so, Cheryl attempts to highlight that she is a mere instrument enforcing the immutable laws of the programme, and as such not only is she exempt from blame for inducing this misery, but she should in fact be celebrated as a good person for attempting to partially ameliorate the upset which she herself has caused (and which is a fundamental aspect of the programme from which she profits hugely). This, then, is the role of sentiment in capitalist society: it is a conscience-pleasing mask underneath which the pitiless extraction of profit can be performed. For who is it really that is comforted during the maudlin embrace of Cheryl and her cast-off? It is Cheryl.

But sentimentality in the X-Factor is also a mask for the contestants, who upon entering the programme’s symbolic universe are expected to effuse saccharin gratefulness while articulating a sufficiently piquant life story to stimulate the sentimentality of the public. It seems that the contestants have to compensate for the banal selfishness of their idiotic dreams with these ritualised spectacles of mawkishness, in which is supposedly displayed an ‘identity’ through which a connection with the viewing public can be formed. The typical identity usually amounts to each singer’s idealised expression of their own myopic preoccupation with fame – but within this world the pathological pursuit of stardom is treated with respect. Although to ‘really, really want this’ is not in itself enough to get ahead in the competition, it is certainly enough to constitute an identity for the contestant, with this wanting-but-not-having of fame being considered fairly poignant by contestant, crowd and judges alike. Interesting here, though, is that for the contestant sentimentality functions in much the same way as it does for Cheryl – as an empty gesture of connectedness which conceals the ugliness of an ego gorging itself on wealth and fame.

In the X-Factor format the wider dynamics of the capitalist (use of) sentiment are thus apparent. Sentimentality transposes an ideal of beneficent selfhood onto the essential selfishness of the capitalist personality, imbuing the rampant individualism of society with a feel good sense of emotional – but not material – communism. For while in reality capitalism is an amoral, inhuman system that proceeds according to its own internal logic of growth and profit, terrifyingly indifference to the real-life concerns of people, the communal sentimentality which simultaneously cloaks and combats that system creates a sense of shared humanity within the fractiously iniquitous area of the social. Think, for instance, of the charity advert and its reliance on sentimentality to make the rich western public give money to the poverty-stricken Other – just as the X-Factor contestant must be made accessible by sentiment, so too it seems must the African be sentimentally subjectivised in order to receive charity. Sentimentality, with its privileging of virtues such as sympathy and its prioritising of the emotional over the political, therefore offers a way to rhetorically suture capitalism’s fragmentation of real-life relations – both global and local – between people living in radically different levels of material comfort.

But this suture of relations is only rhetorical – as Zizek has written, ‘Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation...the developed countries “help” the undeveloped with aid, credits and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped’. Furthermore, Zizek argues that capitalism is in fact fortified by the partially palliative nature of charity, since capitalism ‘needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction’. Sentimentality thus not only makes life tolerable by acting as a sympathetic counterweight to the pitiless machinations of capital, but in fact also aids the very perpetuation of capitalism: without the counterweight, capitalism would crash into the ground.

Cameron the Conservative Condom

In Praise of Steve Bell's caricatures of David Cameron as a condom...

So why is it that Steve Bell’s caricature of David Cameron as a condom is so superbly apt? On a formal level the condom’s slimy, insubstantial transparency is a brilliant visualisation of the long term misgivings which were voiced by the British public over Cameron and his apparent modernisation of the Tories – that is, that there was no substance to the party's new claims to be progressive, and that Cameron's nice-guy rhetoric was merely a cynical veneer for something altogether more obscene. However, if it was only the combination of translucency and slipperiness which the cartoonist Bell wanted to evoke, then he could have stuck with his initial caricature of Cameron as a see-through jellyfish (see Bell speaking about his inspiration for that here). So why didn’t he? Well, let’s think about condoms...

Condoms have an image problem. They have never obtained any air of glamour, since as much as they are seen as a reliable means of having safe sex, so too does there seem to be something inherently seedy about things that can be bought for a pound from a dirty machine inside the pub toilets. Condoms do not conjure up lovemaking but one night stands, the predicament of what to do with the used bit of sagging plastic after use, the heavily anti-erotic awkwardness of putting it on in the first place, that malodorous scent of latex and cheap lubricant. They are essentially unwanted by most people since they detract from enjoyment, but are nevertheless considered necessary because of existing dangers.

What better image is there, then, for epitomising the public response to the Tory party and their cuts programme, than a condom, with its redolent mixture of pleasure and disgust? For as much as there is a sordidness to condoms they are also undeniably a product of hedonism, of jouissance. So too with David Cameron’s deficit-slashing – which has been greeted by the public with a kind of sado-masochistic pleasure (the self-righteous thrill of scapegoating ‘benefit scroungers’ for example). Indeed, what else are the Tories now if not a political condom that the public has reluctantly adorned in order to fuck the deficit? Steve Bell’s condom motif renders a Conservative Party who will be disposed of once the deficit droops, cast off like an embarrassing husk as Britain awakens from its right-wing inebriation with vague feelings of self-loathing.

Sherlock: The Dispassion of the Saviour

The BBC’s recent showing of three hour-and-a-half-long episodes of Sherlock has been like a brief breathe of fresh air in the fetid atmosphere of summertime television – in which the terminally wounded televisual beast Big Brother howls out its last gasps, seemingly able to bore even those who aren’t watching it, and the Masterchef judges continue to harangue contestants and audience alike with their remorseless lack of charm or self-awareness. Sherlock – a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes character for the Google Generation – is an engaging portrait of the ‘consultant detective’, which is in fact – despite the iphones – a fairly faithful realisation of the eccentric spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original creation.

The plots of all three episodes have been ludicrous but enjoyable. However, the third and final (for now) episode was an interesting interrogation of the benefits of sentimentality in the face of violence. The episode sees Sherlock contacted by a master-villain who expects him to solve various mysteries in a certain amount of time. If Sherlock fails, then an innocent and random civilian (who for the duration of the task is being held hostage) will be killed. The result of this is a sense of potentially paralysing urgency which Sherlock must overcome. As ever, the trusty Dr Watson is on hand for support, but is increasingly made aware not only of Sherlock’s enjoyment of the macabre tests, but of his ability to undertake them without becoming overwhelmed with worry about the fate of the hostages whose lives hang in the balance.

Eventually, Watson finds himself objecting to Sherlock’s seeming indifference. The doctor increasingly sees Sherlock as something of an abomination because, while undoubtedly helping ameliorate crime, he displays no gushing sentiment towards its victims. ‘Will it help them?’ Sherlock asks caustically, to which Watson replies with a surly ‘No’, but as if actually helping them is not in itself the point. The point for Watson, the ‘everyman’ of the programme, is the gesture of sentiment itself – whether it is helpful or not. (There is also perhaps an element of the Big Other at work here – that even though the victims themselves are ignorant as to whether or not Sherlock betrays feeling for them, he is nevertheless expected to do so as a way of satisfying the Big Other’s expectations.) At one point, Sherlock, agitated by Watson’s sulky accusations of heartlessness, snaps: ‘There are plenty of people dying in this hospital. Go cry by their bedsides, see if it makes any difference’. Watson’s sentimental reaction is thus shown to be a facile, merely rhetorical palliative which Sherlock himself eschews in favour of cold – but ultimately more helpful – thought.

Redolent in the reaction of Watson to Sherlock here is Zizek’s observation that for most people ‘there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror’. Opposed to this form of cold analysis is today’s predominant mode of addressing violence: in which the ‘fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence’ is underpinned by a ‘sense of moral outrage’ – both of which in reality operate as obfuscatory mechanisms that preclude any meaningful interrogation of the root causes of violent events. During the time that Watson is succumbing to sentimentality and moral indignation, he is in fact distracting Sherlock from what should be the more pressing task of actually solving the mystery and therefore saving the lives of the people held hostage. The bluff, caring, mawkishness of Watson therefore actually endangers the lives of the hostages, and yet it is Sherlock who during the exchange is tarnished with an air of impropriety.

Especially relevant here is Zizek’s take on a scenario which Sartre used to demonstrate existential freedom, in which a Frenchman is presented with a choice of either going to war to fight the Nazi invasion, or staying at home to nurse his sick mother. Only by exercising pure abyssal freedom (as opposed to adhering to preexisting moral codes of conduct) can this difficult decision be made. But Zizek offers a third option: ‘to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying’. What Zizek means here I think is that the hysteria of a morality grounded in sentiment – be it jingoistic, filial, or humanitarian – should be avoided when thinking about ways in which to actually improve upon the world. The dispassion of Sherlock’s approach means he avoids the mystification which Zizek claims is inherent in a direct confrontation with violence, ‘in which the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with its victims inexorably functions as a lure which prevents us from thinking’. Sherlock’s refusal to succumb to the effusive displays of sentiment expected by society is thus essential to his ability to actually help those affected by violence.

Unfortunately, the writers of the show were not brave enough to see the helpfully dispassionate intellect of Sherlock through until the end. Ultimately, Watson himself is held hostage. Following some twists and turns he is freed, upon which Sherlock seems to betray some brief gushing relief, therefore apparently absolving himself of his previous crime of callousness. It is a regrettable retreat into moral black and whiteness – Sherlock is revealed as merely Good, both in his nod to a sentimental normativity, and in his intellectual efforts to think himself and others out of a crisis. The more interesting point – that sentimental performances are potentially harmful in their ability to mask inaction with vacuous gestures – is abandoned.

The Paranoid Cogito

I suspect there are few people by now who are unfamiliar with that mixture of creeping dread and adrenaline that accompanies the first checking of one’s email account following a holiday. But for many I think the same now holds for Facebook – supposedly the medium of affable sociability and friendly connectivity, this casual means of communication also contains within it an injunction to ENJOY and an invitation to ENVY. There is a common (mostly American) televisual narrative trope which has been rendered moribund by Facebook, whereby a person receives an invitation to a High School Reunion. Upon receiving this invitation the protagonist is plunged into a world of introspective panic: Where is he in his life? Where is he going? But more importantly: Where are They in Their lives – his old classmates whose spectres seem to have been sent along with the invitation to haunt his suddenly paranoid present. How does his (un)success compare to Theirs?

Does this formula not seem quaint from our modern standpoint? Who now would need to await a letter (an actual physical letter!) to remind them of their classmates? What troglodytes are there left who aren’t receiving, via Facebook, constant status updates from their status-update-obsessed classmates? And university friends? And myriad aqaintances from times and places now forgotten? What was in the past a traumatic but transient period of panic-inducing comparisons to erstwhile friends is now a fundamental aspect of the way we interact. The spectres are part of the structure of the new mode of sociability. The social networking site, with its artificial maintenance of ties between people who have long ceased to maintain ties in reality, is a graveyard wherein the presence of people mostly serves to highlight their actual absence from our lives. You no longer have the comfort of real companionship with these people, but their exploits are nevertheless carved onto their digital tombstones for your inspection, along with the always-implicit interrogation: How does your life compare to this?

Rarely well. But then this is probably less to do with the quality of either your life or Theirs, and more do with the miserable gulf which separates the actual jouissance experienced in the having/using/doing of a thing, and the jouissance that we felt was promised by the linguistic-imagistic symbolisation of the having/using/doing of that thing (for example, the chasm that separates the actual pleasure had from drinking a can of Coke, and the obscene excess of ecstasy which was promised to you by the advertisement’s symbolisation of drinking that can of Coke). Most Facebook profile pages are to their authors what C.V.s are to job-seeking candidates or advertisements to products: a shameless effort at self-promotion conducted in ceaselessly positive prose. But in the case of the profile page what is being advertised is the author’s extent of access to jouissance. Photographs of drunken revelry, romantic canoodling, and touristic sightseeing function as evidence of jouissance which can be presented to the (Big) Other. There is thus a sense here that our social lives, as they are played out in the social networking matrix, are mirroring the target-oriented nature of work today, wherein the obsession with ‘box-ticking’ has meant, as Mark Fisher has written in Capitalist Realism, ‘a short circuit occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of work itself... In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR’.

Is this melting not now equally relevant to our lives outside of work? What else can explain the ubiquitous tendency of tourists to walk around with their camera glued to their face like some obscene all-seeing proboscis? The compulsion to capture all on camera at the expense of a proper, meaningful engagement with the world, the replacement of actually seeing with being seen to have seen – this is what cultural tourism now amounts to (although it is maybe naive to believe that sightseeing was ever really anything other than this), and our social lives in general are similarly treated. Today, the cogito must be lengthened in order to accommodate the interpellating factors of reality TV, CCTV and the Facebook Me: I think I am being watched, therefore I am.

Increasingly it seems that reality is constituted for us by surveillance. The most immersive cinematic experience I have had in a long time hasn’t been anything in 3D but Cloverfield, a film involving a Godzilla-like creature destroying New York, shot as if from a trembling handheld camera. Indeed, now, if a television programme wants to imbue itself with realism, it will adopt the documentary style of camerawork, since this style of amateurish angles and camera movement seems more realistic to us by its very invocation of the presence of a cameraman working his equipment. Videogame graphics today, as part of their very ‘realism’, have blood or rain splatter onto the front of the player’s television screen – as if the droplets were on the lens of a camera recording the action. The knowledge of the presence of a camera no longer speaks of artificiality but of authenticity. Reality is forged through its own recording, like some quantum state decided by its very measurement. As so often it is Charlie Brooker who acerbically hits the nail on the head. On the ubiquity of screens today and its effect on how we process reality, he writes:

"When I venture into the moist green countryside, the lack of screens is stunning... When a cow saunters by without so much as a single plasma display embedded in its hide, I instinctively film it on my phone, so I can see it on a screen where it won't freak me out. Then I email a recording to the folks back home, so they can look it up online and tell me what it is. Ooh: apparently it's a type of animal. I get it now, now it's on my screen."