Adrian Piper

Utility, publicity, and manipulation

In our dealings with young children, we often get them to do or think things by arranging their environments in certain ways; by dissembling, simplifying, or ambiguating the facts in answer to their queries; by carefully selecting the states of affairs, behavior, and utterances to which they shall be privy. We rightly justify these practices by pointing out a childs malleability and the necessity of paying close attention to formative influences during the years of growth. This filtering of influences is necessary, we point out, if children are ever to reach a sufficient degree of maturity and inner stability to understand and cope with the complexities and perils of the world from which we now seek to shield them. Thus a childs eventual competence, maturity, and autonomy adequately justify our covert practice of manipulating his environment: such a practice is rightly held to be ultimately in the childs best interests. Let these truisms set the stage for the following discussion.

The Logic of Modernism

There are four interrelated properties of Euroethnic art that are central to understanding the development of modernism, and in particular the development of contemporary art in the United States within the last few decades: 1) its appropriative character; 2) its formalism; 3) its self-awareness; and 4) its commitment to social content. These four properties furnish strong conceptual and strategic continuities between the history of European art-modernism in particular-and recent developments in American art with explicitly political subject matter. Relative to these lines of continuity, the peculiarly American variety of modernism known as Greenbergian formalism is an aberration. Characterized by its repudiation of content in general and explicitly political subject matter in particular, Greenbergian formalism gained currency as an opportunistic ideological evasion of the threat of cold war McCarthyite censorship and red-baiting in the fifties. To the extent that this ideological repudiation of political subject matter has prevailed in the international art context, American imperialism has succeeded in supplanting the longstanding European tradition of art as a medium of social engagement with a peculiarly pharmaceutical conception of art as soporific and analgesic. By the appropriative character of Euroethnic art, I mean its tendency to draw on the art of non-Euroethnic cultures for inspiration. This may originate in the early Italian Renaissance experience of drawing on the art of an alien, temporarily remote culture-that of Hellenic Greece-for revitalization. The real lesson of the Renaissance, on this account, is not the rediscovery of perspective but rather the discovery of difference as a source of inspiration. Other early examples of the Euroethnic appetite for appropriation include the influence of Byzantine religious art in the paintings of Duccio or Cimabue; the Islamic and Hindu influences on the art of Giotto or Fra Angelico; more recently, the influences of Japanese art on Van Gogh, of Tahitian art on Gauguin, and of African art on Picasso; and more recently still, the influences of African-American jazz on Mondrian and Stuart Davis, and of African-American graffiti art on Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz. It is natural that a society dependent on colonized non-Euroethnic cultures for its land, labor, and natural resources should be so for its aesthetic and cultural resources as well. But the impetus in the latter case is not necessarily imperialistic or exploitive. It may instead be a drive to self-transcendence of the limits of the socially prescribed Euroethnic self, by striving to incorporate the idiolects of the enigmatic Other within them. Here the aim of appropriation would not be to exploit deliberately the Others aesthetic language, but to confound oneself by incorporating into works of art an aesthetic language one recognizes as largely opaque; as having a significance one recognizes as beyond ones comprehen-

Property and the limits of the self

U H E MAIN OBJECTIVES of the following discussion are, first, to show the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property and, second, to show its exegetical inconsistency with the most plausible and consistent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the self and its relation to the state in Ethical Life. 1 begin with the latter objective, by distinguishing three basic conceptions of the self that can be gleaned from various passages in the Pliilosopliy of Rigfir. I suggest viable connections between each of these three conceptions and three respective interpretations of what I call the Hegeliun reqtrire/izetzl, i.e., that the individual be able to identify his personal interests and values with those of the state [141, 147, 147r. 151, 1551.1 This can be understood as the requirement that the individual be capable of transcending certain limits of his individuality in the service of broader and more inclusive political goals. 1 argue that Hegel’s theory of Personality and the requirements of Ethical Life in the state commit him to a conception of the self as capable of achieving such self-transcendence through action, despite appearances to the contrary that suggest that self-transcendence is to be primarily achieved through acquisition of various kinds. 1 then try to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property. I argue that the fallacies inherent in his exposition of this theory can be explained by his presupposing a conception of the self which both is inadequate to meet the criteria of Hegel’s theories of Personality and Ethical Life and also, therefore, fails the Hegelian requirement.