Eruditorum Press

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renaissance

Sarcasm and Chips

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Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is a work of sarcasm.  Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm nonetheless. 

It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion.  This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings.  He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici… and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable. 

It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves.  In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince.  The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia’s most implacable enemies. 

Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying.  They just didn’t talk about it.  In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets.  If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible.  Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets. 

The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book’s implicit recognition of this.  Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips.  Money.  To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested.  The market is the basis of Medici power.  They make society a market in which people are the tokens.

Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don’t think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of ‘realpolitik’ people often take from the book.  On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel – a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.…

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The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni’s house in Paris.

“It’s the Mona Lisa!” says the Doctor.

“Must be a fake,” replies Duggan.

The Doctor says he doesn’t know what’s currently hanging in the Louvre, “but this is the genuine article”.

Duggan’s astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa.  And another.  And another.  Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.

“They must be fakes,” says Duggan again.

“The brushwork’s Leonardo’s,” the Doctor asserts, “It’s as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too.”

“What,” blithers Duggan, “on all of them?”

“What I don’t understand is why a man who’s got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh.”  (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)

This is Duggan’s area.  “Come on, Doctor, I’ve just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody’s going to buy the Mona Lisa when it’s hanging in the Louvre!”

“Of course,” says Romana, “They’d each have to think they were buying the stolen one.”

Because only ‘the original’ is valuable.  These collectors wouldn’t even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display… they’d want it for – to use Duggan’s phrase – the “expensive gloat”.

But where does the value of the work of art lie?  In its ‘authenticity’?  Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the ‘authenticity’ of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins.   Experts compete over the ‘authenticity’ of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the ‘real’ one.  Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their ‘authenticity’, and hence their ‘value’. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)

In the modern age, the ‘age of mechanical reproduction‘ as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way.  The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator.  The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter’s role as portrayer of the patron’s property and ideology.  Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the “aura” of a work of art (Benjamin’s word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context.  The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world.  It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre.  It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists’ photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels.  All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness. …

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We are the Borgias. You will be Excommunicated. Renaissance is Futile.

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It’s good that TV dramas have become more complex and ambiguous, particularly with regards to morality.  But there is a tendency for them to lose any moral compass in their eagerness to show us the dark sides of the characters with whom they want us to empathize and to care about.

The Borgias wants us to follow Cesare’s career with sympathy, but also shows him having people tortured into madness.  What is the show’s position on this?  Oddly, it tries to whitewash him even as it revels in his dark side.  It makes his victims into rapists and murderers.  It depicts him as personally involved in tormenting Savonarola, but makes Savonarola a fanatic (of course) and a vicious homophobe.  Now, it’s true that Savonarola instituted strictly puritanical laws in Florence, including against sodomy… but that was applicable to hetero sex as well as homo.  Of course, I wouldn’t want to defend Savonarola’s views in their entirety.  He was not a modern democrat.  But he and people akin to him – Munzer, Cromwell, the Levellers, the Diggers… the p/Protestant revolutionaries of the era of transition from feudalism to capitalism – were more than just foaming fanatics.  They meant more than that.  Of course, revolutionary ideals are always depicted as fanatical and dangerous in mainstream culture, more horrible by definition than any status quo they may challenge.  c.f. anybody in Gotham City who doesn’t like draconian laws and huge imbalances of wealth.

On the subject of Savonarola, we of course get a depiction of the revolution he led in Florence against the Medicis as an irrational explosion of fanaticism and lunacy.  We get no hint of the scale of corruption and oppression committed by the Medicis, no real hint of the horror of poverty in Florence alongside the amazing cultural flowering and explosion of wealth.  We get nothing about the popular support for Savonarola, the support of artists like Michaelangelo and Botticelli (we even get Machiavelli and Cesare tutting over the burning of a Botticelli on one of the Bonfires of the Vanities).  The Florentine republic created after the people kicked out the Medici was astonishing for its time.  The franchise was extended, public office was opened to lower ranks, the use of capital punishment was limited, etc.  None of that.  Natch.

And, to loop back to what I was saying earlier, we get no sense of the scale of corruption in the Catholic Church that Savonarola and people like him were rebelling against.  Pope Alexander VI, played (ludicrously, with stuck out chin and silly gruff voice) by Jeremy Irons, is shown to be a libertine, a spendthrift, a buyer and seller of offices, etc… but we’re evidently meant to relish him as a morally ambiguous figure whose passions are enjoyable to witness.  He is also shown giving a shit about the poor of Rome, going out at night in secret to investigate why the orphans don’t got no clean water.  He even gets to deliver John Ball’s line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”…

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Gonzo Marx

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Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc.  Don’t mind me.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff.  Broadly, that’s what humans are: the apes that make stuff.  Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man “the tool-making animal”, a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the ‘big brain’ driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers.  The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires.  The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system.  The division of labour.  Specialisation without expertise.  Organisation of time.  The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers.  Mass production.  Heavy industry.  Conveyor belts.  Fordism.  Mechanisation.  Computer-run facilities. 

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating.  When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it’s hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology.  This was also part of the rise of capitalism.  Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the ‘Early Modern Period’, the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him.  His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant’s ships were returning safely, laden with goods.  Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets.  When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous.  The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful.  They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave).  They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe.  They ferried people to industrial murder factories.  They allowed man to fly.  To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds.  They put apes on the moon. 

And they transformed inner space too.  “You’ve discovered television, haven’t you?”  And here we are, on the glorious interweb.…

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