Brad Bannon
English 350
November 1, 2007
The Aesthetic of Marxist Vengeance
In a peculiar apposition of Bosnian war criminals with the paintings of Johannes
Vermeer, Lawrence Weschler explicitly argues for the affirmation of the individual
subject amid historical iconography. The general outlines of this argument are prompted
by his conversation with one of the sitting judges on the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal,
who claims that he keeps from going mad by spending as much time as he can with the
Vermeers that are on display at the nearby Mauritshuis museum. After an initial
consideration of Vermeer’s particular aesthetic appeal, Weschler has a breakthrough in
which he makes the pivotal connection between Vermeer and modern-day Bosnia:
For, of course, when Vermeer was painting those images, which for us have
become the very emblem of peacefulness and serenity, all Europe was Bosnia (or
had only just been): awash in incredibly vicious wars of religious persecution and
proto-nationalist formation. (57)
But to arrive at this connection, Weschler first acknowledges Vermeer’s position in
established critical-historical terms with his mention of Edward Snow’s deployment “as
an epigraph a line from Andrew Forge’s essay ‘Painting and the Struggle for the Whole
Self,’ which reads, ‘In ways that I do not pretend to understand fully, painting deals with
the only issues that seem to me to count in our benighted time – freedom, autonomy,
fairness, love.” And apropos of this, Weschler both identifies and emphasizes the
implication that “somehow these issues may be more richly and fully addressed in
Vermeer than anywhere else” (57).
Yet the full thrust of Weschler’s argument is perhaps contained in the remarkable
measure of humanity that he grants to the Bosnian War Criminals when, by way of
comparison, he calls upon Vermeer’s artistic talent for presenting the viewer with images
of subjects who command a kind of personal acknowledgment. That is, the aesthetic that
Weschler identifies in Vermeer’s painting is an affirmation of the individual specifically
against a notion of the subject “as merely a type, a trope, an allegory” (62). But in the
case of the Bosnian War Criminals, a recognition of autonomous individuality may in
fact be a way of assuring that such men are punished in proportion to the reprehensible
nature of their crimes, as Weschler finally suggests:
There he was, not some symbol or trope or stand-in for anybody other than
himself: a quite specific individual, in all his sublime self-sufficiency; a man of
whom, as it happened, terrible, terrible allegation had been made, and who was
now going to have to face those allegations, stripped of any rationales except his
own autonomous free agency” (64).
Here, Weschler’s claim about the subjects of Vermeer’s paintings is as intentionally
upended as the presentations of a conventional iconography are in the paintings
themselves. Just as Weschler understands Vermeer’s purpose in employing a
conventional iconography as a means of defying it, Weschler himself affirms an
ostensibly harmless claim concerning the aesthetic force of Vermeer only to then impose
it upon the Bosnian War Criminals in the interest of social justice. The upending, in this
case, is contained in the ethical content of the transfer: granting individuality to subjects
who would otherwise be subsumed by their iconography is an act of humanitarianism;
imposing individuality upon subjects for an expressly punitive purpose is an act of
retribution. What is a source of aesthetic pleasure in Vermeer will strip the Bosnian war
criminals of their defenses; and while the subjects of the paintings cry out for individual
recognition from behind the veil of a conventional iconography the war criminals perhaps
cry out for anonymity from (somewhere) behind the putative reality of their “own
autonomous free agency.”
That all of this engages with Marxist notions of the individual is clear enough
even without Weschler’s mention of Vermeer’s camera obscura, which he describes as
“an empty box fronted by a lens through which the chaos of the world might be drawn in
and tamed back to a kind of sublime order” (64). For Marx, of course, the function of the
camera obscura is not as an ameliorative device, but rather as an inversion by which the
real consciousness of man is usurped by an ideological consciousness, through which
circumstances are viewed at the behest of a “historical life-process” (409). Yet
Weschler’s seeming heavy-handedness may also suggest that it is through an inversion of
Marx, and specifically the Marxist notion of how we ought to view the individual in
society, that we may be able to tame chaos and give order to the antagonistic world in
which we now live, and in which we have perhaps hitherto always lived.
For Marx, the liberation of society can only follow from the emancipation of the
laborer precisely because the estrangement of the laborer from the product of his labor,
and consequently from his own existence, is the corrupt base upon which a capitalist
society is founded. The product of labor, however, is not produced without benefit; there
are, in fact, other humans to whom the product and benefit of labor belongs and from
whom the social structure and State evolve. But as far as what individuals are, Marx
claims,
Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they
are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the
intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can
never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process.” (409)
Weschler, then, would like to view the Bosnian War Criminals as “real active men,” each
with an individual conscious existence that is their actual life-process. But it is difficult
to know when to distinguish between the actual life-process that engenders conscious
existence and the historical life-process that only informs ideology. And who should
make this distinction?
In any case, it is certain that Weschler would like to see each of the war criminals
tried on the very basis of his own autonomy, his own conscious existence. Yet this
putatively ethical, albeit vengeful, desire is complicated by Althusser’s assertion that the
individual is
interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the
commandments of the Subject, i.e., in order that he shall (freely) accept his
subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his
subjection ‘all by himself.’ There are no subjects except by and for their
subjection. That is why they ‘work all by themselves’ (1271-2).
Thus one could argue that the Bosnian War Criminals are as subjected to their own
subjection as the rabble that went along with them. Certainly they must be punished to
keep order in place, but why grant them autonomous free agency? Why not simply
consider them unlucky subjects who happen to be on the losing end of things? According
to lead prosecutor Richard Goldstone, they should be granted such agency in order to
break the cycle of interethnic violence. If culpability resides with individuals and not
with particular ethnic groups, he argues, then barbaric and murderous interethnic
motivations will be prevented from finding future roots. But in this instance, the
ideology of the state summons the notion of “real active men” only for the war criminals
while reserving the more innocuous Althusserian “subject” for the complicit masses.
Ultimately, this perhaps necessary distinction suggests an underlying uncertainty with
respect to the always-circumstantial subject.
In “The Romantic Artist” Raymond Williams takes up this concern with respect
to the romantic notion of the poet. And though he detects a kind of helplessness in
Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” it is of particular note that he closes the discussion by
recognizing the individual subject’s effacement in his or her own action (“For it is less
their spirit, than the spirit of their age”). And likewise, earlier in the essay Williams
attributes a suspicious solidity to Keats’s conception of the poet that raises a similar
question of where the subject, or poet, can be located. From a letter from Keats to
Benjamin Bailey, Williams excerpts the following: “Men of Genius are great as certain
ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – but they have not any
individuality, any determined Character – I would call the top and head of those who
have a proper self, Men of Power” (366). So, to pose the question in a different way:
who has a “proper self” and who doesn’t? If “Men of Genius” occupy a higher position
than “Men of Power,” then why not blame them when things go wrong?
Finally, it is apparent from the excerpt that Keats’s “Man of Genius” has “not any
individuality, any determined Character,” though this suggestion is different than
Althusser’s “subject” and certainly has something to do with Keats’s notion of the
“chameleon poet.” But again, the question of how to locate a subject at all, let alone
distinguish from one that affirms its own nonexistence and another that affirms its own
existence while actually having none, remains.