First and as always, Orbie, your feedback is appreciated –even if I can’t always understand it or respond. That said, I hope my translations are not going totally off point.
“Marcel Duchamp filled an aesthetic role and the new age of philosophers filled the role of philosophy. Aesthetics usually works at a more fundamental level than philosophy, so the question cannot be asked, whether one can fill the shoes of another. That is my only comment on the above, before wandering into the implications you have noted.” –Orbie [or my translation of his response to my post:
“Duchamp had two strategic objectives. First, to destroy the hegemony exerted by an establishment which claimed the right to decide what was, and what was not, to be deemed a work of art. Second, to puncture the pretentious claims of those who called themselves artists and in doing so assumed that they possessed extraordinary skills and unique gifts of discrimination and taste.” –from Alistair McFarlane’s article, Brief Lives: Marcel Duchamp in Philosophy Now (issue 108)
“One has to wonder if philosophy isn’t in need of a Marcel Duchamp. Or did thinkers like Deleuze and Derrida fulfill that role?”
Granted Orbie, aesthetics and the arts are about what happens at a more instinctual level. This is why, for instance, that Deleuze can reasonably make the argument that aesthetics are not just about the appreciation of beauty, but also the way in which consciousness engages and comes to know the reality it is confronted with –hence the doctrine of the faculties he goes into in Difference and Repetition. Therefore, I would argue that the interests of the arts and philosophy are a little more intimately entwined than you seem to be arguing. But then I am mainly working from the post-Nietzscheian perspective that pushed philosophy closer to the literary side of the no-man’s land between science and literature in which it resides. This also why Deleuze, in his A to Z interview, spoke of the import of “engagement” (going to a movie, reading a poem, even watching a TV series (to the philosophical process. It is this kind of loose attitude towards what constitutes proper philosophical inquiry that defines modernism to postmodernism’s (which includes structuralism and post-structuralism (break from the Platonic hierarchy that wanted to ban poets from the Republic. And it is also this appeal (at least I believe (to the aesthetic/instinctive that lies behind the postmodern propensity towards etherspeak: the oblique poetics of free indirect discourse.
“In Nude Descending the Staircase, we get a sense of disintegration. He is not, it seems, describing a changing situation, is not dogmatically disintegrating the meaning of form, as American superficiality seems to. I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. That sense of it feels certain, but as in all relationships, the weighing of alternatives is balanced in Europe, between those of the East, in political as well as economic terms, and the West.”
I would first ask you to consider the influence of futurism on Nude Descending Staircase: the enthusiasm we experienced in the face of advancing technology. And given the effects we experience today of that accelerating technological advance, we might consider the disintegration of Duchamp‘s painting as prophetic: the experience of speed smear. And this returns me to the point made by Peter Baehr in the intro to The Portable Hannah Arendt:
"Under non-despotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence….
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by “loneliness.” To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’“
As I have been working towards understanding, the whole Republican platform is just another example of Capitalism creating a demand for its products, of creating a problem (the disintegration described in Nude Descending Staircase (then selling a solution to it: the ideology of Capitalism. It is an ideology that seems to be rolling us over, darkening the American spirit and stealing its soul, and rolling your way, brother…. as you seem to be describing.
And despite the fact that every other advanced nation is more evolved than America in that they can actually talk about Marx without hearing psycho shrieks, that ideology is going to keep rolling us over until it gets everything it wants: a beast with an ever expanding appetite. You say:
“I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. “
I live among its disciples: its true believers: those that don’t have the advantage of seeing Marx as just another philosopher with an alternative to Capitalism. They are a wall at which reason fails and all that is left is force. But there is no force left against Capitalism. It owns everything. The best we can do is blend in and hope that the true believers either change their minds or die off.
And in terms of the question you are asking yourself, I would point out that America has a military might that is equivalent to the rest of the world, one financed and supported by Capitalism. So yeah: you are fucked. We all are. All we can do is articulate on our downfall.