Sep 10, 2021
Article about Jay Bernstein, Linda’s agent, in the September 1, 1981, issue of Us magazine.Â
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Article about Jay Bernstein, Linda’s agent, in the September 1, 1981, issue of Us magazine.Â
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Philosophy has lost its place in modern culture-it has failed to respond to the disenchantment inflicted by science and the death of God. Jay Bernstein blames both Anglo-American and continental philosophers for this predicament. He says that Gillian Rose, the British thinker, was among the few who
[Thanks to Jay Bernstein for alerting me to this connection.]
Picture of Linda and her agent Jay Bernstein in the September 1, 1981, issue of Us magazine. Photo by George Brich.Â
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There’s been something that has bothered me my entire philosophical life: It is the moment (in the Meditations) when Descartes takes a piece of wax and brings it next to the fireplace; he watches as it changes, and he sees every one of its sensible features—color, taste, sound, feel, smell, size, shape—change. Then he issues a challenge: if every single one of its sensible features changes, then how is it the same piece of wax? And he says, roughly, “Ah well, we have to realize that those sensible features do not truly belong to the wax, and that really the wax is nothing but extension and shape, hence nothing but geometry and number.” It is a shocking moment. The entire sensory, visible world disappears in two pages. I’m always upset when I read this passage, and I’m always amazed when other people aren’t upset too. What Descartes thinks he is doing here is preparing the way for mathematical physics to be the true language for describing the physical world. And indeed, that is, in a way, what has happened. The disappearing piece of wax is an allegory of modernity, of how modern rationality dissolves the world. So, the same way in which Descartes makes the sensible piece of wax disappear into number, exchange value makes everyday objects disappear in their concreteness. Money, exchange value, can become everything while the concrete things in their reality disappear. That’s terrifying. And I think you cannot understand painting or modern art at all unless you take seriously that the modern rationality that creates modern science, that creates the capitalist economy, that creates bureaucratic rationality, needs to get rid of sensuous materiality, concreteness, and the experience of those things.
Jay Bernstein, The Brooklyn Rail interview (with Joan Waltemath)Â
Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
Jay Bernstein writes:
Adorno imagines that once upon a time, in the age of myth, sign and image were one. With the "clean separation of science and poetry" there developed a division of intellectual labor that extended into the heart of language: "For science the word is a sign, as sound, image, and word proper is distributed among the different arts, and is not permitted to reconstitute itself by their addition." The arts, in the plural (music, painting, and sculpture, literature), are for Adorno a repository of the elements of particular, sensuous, embodied experience that were found expendable for cognition once the abstract sign - first the Platonic universal, later the mathematical sign and the logical connective - became legislative for empirical knowledge and practical reasoning. Thus when the arts finally become autonomous (from magic, religion, metaphysics, politics), when they began self-consciously articulating their conventions and limiting conditions, the logicality unique to them, as their mode of progressive self-formation, they are to be understood, in their blasted fragmentariness, as articulating the binding rationality of what belongs uniquely to what was found expendable in the advance of reason: particular, sensuous, embodied experience. Almost. Very nearly. Not quite. If one understands the arts as having developed under the pressure of a rationality that wished to dispose of what was intrinsically particular, sensuous, and embodied, then the arts owe their very existence to a historical calamity, the disremption of the symbol into sign and image or concept and intuition or, returning to our starting point, the rupture of material inference into logic and cause, or: "the untruth attacked by art is not rationality but rationality's rigid opposition to the particular."
Cindy Sherman, Untitled 316, 1995 (Metro Pictures Gallery)
Jay Bernstein writes:
In Untitled 316, which is a doll face in close-up, turning the whole doll thereby into a mask, Sherman potently captures this duality within the mask by providing a layering of masks, revealing below a smooth outer surface (mask) another mask, scarred, pitted, ravaged -- the inner mask the truth of the outer mask, the layers of masking replicating the history of the mask. The ravaged mask animates the smooth surface mask, making the latter the repudiation of the former. And, of course, the eyes of this doll are human eyes, no longer frightened or stiffened -- it is too late for that -- but unutterably sad. Kafka eyes.