Greetings Economists, So far I've said little in a serious way about Warhol. Certainly the sense of depth of inquiry that Engels and Marx always sought is missing from the content of Warhols' work. So this second part argues what Engel's meant by the difference between Zola and Balzac as applied to Warhol.
The focus here is one of Warhol's more important concept pieces' the eight hour movie of the Empire State building. On one level it seems like unarguable realism. Empire State building is black and white sixteen millimeter footage shot from a fixed tripod position over eight hours of an unmoving shot of landmark building and spliced back together in time order sequence. I have seen claims that some people have seen the whole movie. It's not available in the public market for a review at this time. The movie is an easy metaphor for some of Warhol's basic methods, repetition, the value in banal subjects, boring, tweaking serious metaphysics, vast over production of images with no particular purpose in mind. In effect it trots out what Warhol's realism stood for that clashes with what Engel's meant by the whole. Is the movie realistic? In other words does it contribute to human understanding so that the whole of reality vast and complex as it is can be absorbed by some of us in a social communication sense? Engels didn't say a lot about aesthetics. Roughly speaking he seems to have meant that we could better grasp the whole of a given society in Balzac than we can in Zola. Engels said of Zola he was photographic in the sense photographs are fragments that look real but disconnected from the human sense of visual wholeness. The economic sense of class structure in society, of classes contending was obscured by Zola's taste for sensational subject matter. So we might ask of Warhol's Empire State building is it a wholeness? Not many are ever likely to sit through the eight hours of Empire State building. The content is impractical in saying the reality of the building to most people. The image is so static it would in any given couple of minutes not change more than a still picture of the building. In other words the 'motion' of the motion picture is hardly seen. This implies that the language content, the grammatical structure of the motion is not realistically seen. Hence the social reality of human language is not accurately or realistically shown. The PBS documentary says of Warhol he didn't know how to tell a story. He was focused on the visual stillness of images. Not attached to people, not attached to the realistic or social use of images but to the highly focused contemplation of bits and pieces of popular culture. This appears related to his disablements. Characteristic of Autism is a relative inability in terms of language acquisition to discern social network structure. Hence while able to focus on the network properties of a surface that still picture present, the lack of ability to respond to other peoples' needs is a language related disability. Hence, the social whole of Engels is the language like structure that Engels' discerned in Balzac. This wholeness is a whole of language but it reflects a sense that society as a whole is knitted together in specific ways that reflects attention to the public or social whole in a world reality or contra in capitalism attention to owners of for example intellectual property pieces. This attention to property is what Warhol exemplifies. The tools of his trade are the tools of one to many media fragments of knowledge production sold to the many by repeating printing of content. In essence Warhol is the precursor of those companies who travel to out of the way spots to steal medical knowledge from the locals whose whole knowledge of the landscape produces a value missing from vast complexity of material reality. Stealing knowledge for profit is what a business plan of one to many media implies. What is the opposite conceptual framework to Warhols' realism? In other words what does media do that represents people knowing a language like whole in media? We can say that just a focus on the stillness of images as if one were painting does not communicate the whole of a 'social' concept. There is a quote in "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" that summarizes one version of this missing aspect of Warhol's media work. Passage quote from "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" by Michael Tomasello, Harvard University Press, 1999, pages 142 to 143; Narratives Children also routinely experience complex linguistic constructions in discourse in which multiple simple events or states of affairs are chained together into some kind of complex narrative-typically with one or more participants constant across events and causal or intentional links giving the entire sequence the kind of rational coherence that distinguishes a "story" from a random chain of events."... Doyle The knowledge production to share between people needs to be framed in these terms in order to communicate social wholes or interconnection between people. This exchange process in which we come to understand each other is fundamental to the language process. Knowledge does not always follow in this path. For example, mathematical reasoning is not language framed, nor is painting a picture language framed, nor is a movie language framed in so far as it is one to many product. But the social whole is build by framing exchanges so that human being well being is attained in the exchange. This framework of well being shared by human beings is most certainly a fundamental of what Engels meant by the 'whole' of Balzacs' narrative written work. In that Engels knew perfectly well that class conflict shows how well being is not promoted in Capitalism for the masses of working class people. So that the forces of marginalization that casts for example an Autistic person to the bottom of the working class, or the sexual intimacy that casts same sex activity to the bottom of the working class also provides a cheap source of knowledge work. This knowledge then is usable in so far as the framework of knowledge exchange can suitably show that knowledge. An eight hour movie of a static shot of a building is outside language like exchange of knowledge. This is why Engels' broad generalization gives us lasting insight into the failure of capitalist culture to liberate people from want and oppression even when it exposes for public consumption the sensational life and death struggle in marginalized sub cultures in Capitalist society. thanks, Doyle Saylor
