A Philosophical Memoir: Notes on Bhaskar, Realism and Cultural Theory

Abstract

In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic (1993) played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion of absence (in this instance of cultural skill and sensitivity) as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory.

KEYWORDS:

• avant-garde
• concept use
• philistine
• non-reductive realism
• real absence

Notes

1 Bhaskar 1980.

2 In fact, in Art & Language's 1982 painting, Index: 3 Wesley Place, which depicts the interior of their studio with the group at work, and their various working artistic and intellectual resources hung on walls or laid out on tables (in the spirit of Courbet's The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory [1855]), they include, on the far right table, a copy of A Realist Theory of Science.

3 Of particular importance were Goodman 1968 and Quine 1951.

4 Roemer 1986 (although this does contain Gerry Cohen's brilliant essay ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’).

5 See in particular Sayer 1979.

6 See Roberts 1992 and 1993.

7 See Jakobson 1921.

8 Adorno et al. 1978.

9 The classic formulation is MacCabe 1974.

10 Williams 1979, 218–19.

11 Lovell 1980, 87.

12 See Leyda 1960, also Kepley Jr. 2003.

13 Eagleton 1978, 24.

14 Adorno 1984.

15 Adorno 1984, 461.

16 Adorno 1984, 342.

17 Rousseau 1992.

18 Beech and Roberts 1998, 50.

19 Bhaskar 1993, 238–41.

20 MacLennan 1998.

21 Beech 1998, 18.

22 Bhaskar [2002] 2012, 145. I'm sure Bhaskar had no cultural memory of this, but the quote sounds like a conservative homily from a 1960s modernist painting tutor, intent on releasing the ‘inner creativity’ of his students.

23 Bhaskar [2002] 2012, 134.

24 For a defence of the Hegelian legacy of human sapience, see Brandom 2000.

25 See e.g. Verstegen 2013.

26 See Roberts 2015, 86–91.

27 See Roberts 2015, 86-91

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Roberts

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of a number of books, including The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech) (Verso, 2002), The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2007), The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011), Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015). He has also contributed to various journals, including Historical Materialism, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Third Text and New Literary History. His Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given is to be published by Zero Books in 2016.