Theoretical Disengagement Part VI

Auteur Theory is defined as “…reading and appraising films through the imprint of an auteur (author), usually meant to be the director.” The implication is that there are many forces that go into making a motion picture, and they are driven by the vision of the director. This idea of the auteur was developed to discuss the ghost in the "Hollywood" machine - it was a way to find style in the corporate mix. Auteurism, once used to describe only film directors, has been expanded by Postmodernist theorists to describe the personalities behind recognizable production styles. The idea of the auteur has been stretched to include actors who pursue a type of character or acting style, producers a type of film, writers a type of story and it’s been used ad nauseum to describe creative individuals in a slew of other professions. In addition to defining the functions of style a main contingent of auteur theory is the acknowledgment that the product is influenced and built in collaboration with a team of other auteurs. For instance, Stephen Spielberg’s visual style and look of his movies has developed over the years as he has changed his cinematographers - since the early 1990s he has collaborated with the DOP Janusz Kaminski. Though Spielberg continues to employ the same directorial tropes that defined his early career, the visual presentation has become markedly different because of the photographic sensibilities of Kaminski - who has changed the lighting, camera movement, angles, and textures of the images.

This idea of auteur collaboration can also be seen in architecture. The public ascendancy of the engineer Cecil Balmond has been instructive and difficult for the architectural attribution system. Balmond, a structural genius, is responsible for many of the technical innovations in architecture that we’ve seen over the last 20 years. His ideas of engineering have pushed the material planning and production of contemporary architects into new visual territories - creating many of the amazing architectural forms of the early 21st century.

His solutions inevitably have an enormous impact on buildings, but it’s not as if
he wants them to look like “feats of engineering.” Instead they appear so integral to each project that you can’t tell the engineering from the architecture. This brings up all sorts of authorship questions. “The whole question of influence in my view is barely relevant,” Koolhaas says. “And I would even say so is the issue of authorship.” The issue nearly got Balmond sued by a young firm he worked with in the late 1990s when it accused him of
taking too much credit for the work.

As with Balmond, true innovators cause concern when they clash with the Postmodernist corporate auteur model and its subservience to the corporate hierarchy. Auteurship when it is seen as innovation erases the conceptual limits of the production system - which can cause problems for management - especially if a personality becomes larger than the controlling system. Where does the idea of authorship begin and end within this corporate structure? Who is driving the aesthetic engine?

Let’s face it - auteurship is designed to meld nicely within the political structures of a CEO driven economic model. This prototype is based on the top down heroic creative “decider” and is essential to the institutionalization of corporate hierarchy. It can be compared to a modern-day version of an Alexandrian mythology or Arthurian Right to Rule - the leader is uplifted and supported by an army of dedicated heroes realizing the ambitions of a god-like MBA/MFA. The corporate system is designed to compartmentalize and decentralize production - research, marketing, and manufacturing - each isolated and dependent on the directed flow of the system - all of which are in place to foster a personality culture rather than a revolutionary one. The CEO becomes the synthesizing force - a boardroom Caesar, a Napoleon of desire - ensuring a top down institution with a creative force that is expendable and replaceable. What is interesting in this structure is the hierarchy of command to control, and how the corporation can then implement the creative act without any observance of distinctive personalities or their contributions of individual style.

Fukuyama’s essay in “The End of History and the Last Man” makes quite a display of Hegel in regards to the triumph of post-historical consciousness. His contention is that with the collapse of communism and the rise and dominance of corporate (my word) economics history has ceased to exist. Western economic structures now proliferate throughout the world and they tend to establish systems of control that best support these types of economic structures - in his estimation - liberal democracies and free markets. Little is actually said about human beings and their adjustment to this post-historical society except at the end of the essay…

In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the
perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.

I like the phrase “caretaking of the museum of human history.” This describes the postmodern relationship to theoretics in a nutshell. Even though the POMOs make the claim that they are outside of history they are bound by it, even subservient to it - caretakers one and all. The subtext of history has become the context of art. POMOs can not move forward, can not create new forms - they can only recombine or reproduce. We see this in the art, the galleries and the museums; art that mashes past styles together or customizes previous styles, galleries that recontextualize much like the recent show of Old master’s work and contemporary painters at Zwirner and Wirth, and museums that mix and match their collections to create new “resonance” with the works. The term “parasitic” is used by Postmodernists to describe their practice - they need a host in order to feed - ultimately depleting the source and creating only waste and disease (OK that’s harsh, but I reserve the right to hit hard and mean against a bigger, uglier opponent.)

For now let’s examine the auteur’s relationship to this control model using the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic - so often cited by POMOs -

…if one of the two should die (in the confrontation) the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this failure as “abstract negation” not the negation or sublation required (for freedom). This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or subordination to, slavery. In this struggle the Master emerges as Master because he doesn’t fear death as much as the slave, and the slave out of this fear consents to the slavery. This experience of fear on the part of the slave is crucial, however, in a later moment of the dialectic, where it becomes the prerequisite experience for the slave’s further development…Truth of oneself as self-conscious is achieved only if both live, the recognition of the other gives each one the objective truth and self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Thus, the two enter into the relation of master/slave and preserve the recognition of each other….The master self-consciousness is dependent on the slave for recognition and also has a mediated relation with
nature; the slave works with nature and begins to shape it into products for the master. The master only has an evanescent desire/pleasure relation to things whereas the slave sees his work objectified in products. Only when slavery is abolished and there is mutual recognition will both fully achieve self-consciousness.

Using these concepts we might be right to think that the final capitulation by the auteur/slave to the CEO/master reinforces the idea of the Postmodernist as a consciousness outside of history. But unlike Hegel's hoped for move beyond subservience to a free consciousness, Postmodernism must preserve the mechanics of the dialectic. This could be the beginning of a post-creative society based on the concept of the Last Man - acceptance of corporate structure as life. The CEO/master remains in an endless state of desire micromanaging the fluctuations of his disposition - the auteur/slave works to manufacture recombinations of familiar product in order to perpetuate that desire - perfect symbiosis. It ensures that the auteur/slave never moves beyond the confines of acceptance - never breaking the dialectic. And it leaves the CEO/master to experience constant fluctuations of unfulfilled desire - never experiencing consummation - perpetuating the system. We’ve seen this dialectical endgame in the art world for the past 30 years as the Postmodern economic and theoretic structures continue to perpetuate themselves - we are deep into our third reworking of this system.

This political/economic structure finally hailed as Post-History is the basis of POMO sensibility. Postmodernism’s theoretical debasement of singular innovative consciousness, and its disbanding of an independent avant garde have resulted in a corporate art product culture driven by the recombination and marketability of a recontextualized "art historical resource." The theoretics underlying POMO is based on the mining of history instead of the production of possibility - exemplified by the emergence of the auteur class - a creative that works within the confines of a corporate structured milieu. If the auteur moves beyond the confines of recombination, institutionalism and marketability to innovation an old and dangerous idea tends to emerge - that of the artist.

We will conclude this series in Part VII…