For the love of God
Spinoza and Politics, by Etienne Balibar (Radical Thinkers III)
Sarah Boyes
Spinoza and Politics (Radical Thinkers Series 3)
The Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), like Einstein, is known as one of those wily pantheists. Einstein coined the phrase,‘God doesn’t play dice’, playfully summing up his belief that God is immanent in the law-governed natural world. For Spinoza, He can also live in rationally-organised society. Both views are borne out of thinking in terms of interconnected totalities. Because of his identification of reason and freedom and his ethics, Spinoza is a contested philosophical precursor to many of the ideas that took root during the French Revolution (1). He’s often seen as proto-Marxist, and the interplay between the two thinkers was the subject of lively discussions during the 1970s, the decade before Balibar’s book was first published.
Today, pantheistic ideas have few high-profile spokespeople, or political associations. Apart from the World Pantheist Movement and television programmes that romance the mystical views of colourful nomads, it’s rare to hear talk about God being immanent anywhere (let alone as a living force in society), though thoughts about the interconnectedness of life live on. Popular books and films about quantum mechanics highlight the randomness and indeterminate character of underlying reality; we’re frequently reminded that our consumption has dastardly unintended effects on the complex natural processes of the planet; whilst ‘networking’ means rubbing shoulders with people you don’t like really because you have to. If there are rules that structure the places and ways we live, it seems they’re chaotic and constraining, and we’re not the ones making them up. If God really is immanent in today’s mad world, then it’s all the worse for Him.
In his slim volume, now republished as part of Verso’s Radical Thinkers III, Etienne Balibar doesn’t make a case for the reconstitution of Spinoza’s thought, so much as use it to illuminate the relationship between philosophy and politics. The clue to his answer lies in the title: Spinoza (the man) and Politics: philosophy and politics ‘imply’ each other, both are integrated not so much on an abstract level, but best as activities done by one and the same person throughout his or her life. In contrast to today’s dislocation of philosophical ideas from public discourse, Warren Montag’s Preface explains that just as Spinoza’s involvement with his society came from the perspective of a ‘freedom party still to be created’, so his philosophy made an ‘attempt to move beyond the conception of democracy as a formal system and to grasp it as an actuality’. Balibar’s point, though, firmly endorses the role of critique: he says a more dynamic relationship between politics and intellectual work is possible, but just as Spinoza was constrained by both spheres’ mutual underdevelopment, so today are we. Spinoza and Balibar chose to make an impact primarily by publishing books. In a discussion on universalism with Badiou in 2007, Balibar cut out the work of today’s philosopher not as throwing himself in the deep end, following Spinoza’s line and founding his own party, but in the more analytic task of finding the contradictions in contemporary society and bringing them to light (2).
Why chose Spinoza? His particular dialectical method (later criticised by Marx) cut through popular debates of his time: between nature and culture, passion and reason, spiritual and material. Warren Montag explains that whilst Balibar and others were suspected of ‘advancing Spinozism in the guise of Marxism’ when the book was first published in Paris in 1985, today they ‘will undoubtedly be viewed by critics and admirers alike as “advancing Marxism by other means”’. But writing about Marxist ideas is no guarantee of getting people to engage with – or critique - them. Here we have the dead Spinoza in a second translation from Balibar’s French by Peter Snowden, set off by a preface by Warren Montag, published by the left-wing Verso. It’s at least a well-travelled conspiracy, but not a particularly cunning way of springing Marxism on an unsuspecting public.
Verso’s initial aim in translating and publishing the works of French cultural theorists during the 1970s was to loosen the stranglehold of analytic philosophy on the British academy and free up the general mood. Ideas were purposefully shipped across the channel in print. Logical positivism had for years failed to ignite political fervour amongst the intellectual elite or the masses. Neither, noticeably, did the Verso catalogue.
Nevertheless, at a discussion about the legacy of 1968 organised by Verso at the Southbank Centre earlier this year, some suggested ‘radical’ was simply a code word for ‘Marxist’. But in the absence of any role for Marxism as a social force, and with ‘radical’ more readily used as a term of abuse towards the (noticeably un-Marxist) political Islamists than with any political seriousness, the comment – though it had a resonance – seems off-beam. In part, this seems an expression of today’s schizophrenic attitude towards radicalism: whilst intellectuals and activists across the board are comfortable falling into nostalgia about its past and its survival in print, increasingly there’s a knee-jerk response to any growing contemporary currents. Aside from the moral posturing led by government, the general attitude towards ‘radical views’ today looks like the self-indulgent smile given to a small puppy naughtily walking all over the new family sofa. Either you don’t realise just how good things are, or you’ve still got some growing up to do. What a more mature political position might mean today in terms of the ideas dealt with in these Verso series, is far from clear.
What Balibar diagnoses as being Spinoza’s radical point of departure is explained in the final two chapters of the book. The first concerns Spinoza’s Ethics, which discusses the relationship between sociability, obedience and communication:
‘how are we ultimately to situate the meaning of a philosophy that declares both that society is the State, therefore that society is obedience, and that freedom can only be achieved within the limits of society?’ (p89)
Whilst Reason alone doesn’t define what it is to be a human being, it nevertheless forces people to work together, and the resulting social harmony includes within it an idea of God. In his discussion of Spinoza’s conception of democracy, Balibar points out that even once people begin consciously to exercise their collective sovereignty, and take this to be a properly social covenant rather than an outsourcing of authority to an imaginary God, there will still be the question of how to go about imposing the will of the majority on every person in society. To do this will take a further consensus between individuals, which must be understood in terms of a mutual love or ‘true religion’, where God is ‘represented nowhere but he will be everywhere...practically indistinguishable from the effort to live a virtuous life’ (p49).
What’s most important to Spinoza is ethics, and as Balibar explains, this comes as an integral part of his political system that points towards freedom. The idea of God being immanent in social reality as a lived phenomenon is another way of talking about what it is to be a developed human being, which is explained more fully as being a part of reason itself:
‘the definition of reason itself is to conceive of God as necessary, that is, as Nature itself in its impersonal totality...the love we then feel for God is what the fifth part of the Ethics calls an “intellectual love of God”, that is, both knowledge and the desire for knowledge’ (p92)
The notion of knowledge becomes key to what Balibar finds radical about Spinoza, when he goes on to discuss politics and communication in the final chapter. Individuals, in his view, are constructions that result from a ‘striving’ that takes place with ‘given regimes of communication’, and these regimes of communication – one of which is the state – are where ‘collective effort is being worked out’. Central to this is full freedom of expression, since it’s only through sharing opinions that power is made subject to public authority rather than being in the hands of unaccountable individuals, and that people begin a process of self-liberation, and new ‘regimes of communication’ (ie different social forms or historical states) can be developed. The radical way forward is therefore the democratisation of knowledge.
But what seems radical about Balibar’s understanding of Spinoza today, outside a Marxist framework of debate, is the general thrust and optimism of the whole analysis. In a modest sense, the rise of the internet and before that the growth of the printing press facilitated more people sharing opinions than ever before, creating a space for the public contestation of knowledge and development of new authorities. But the dominant response to this trend is to damn it for its destructive tendencies, and proceed with Upmost Caution lest we all be Persuaded; rather than point out it’s not changed things nearly enough. Today, the democratisation of knowledge is resisted both by the would-be guardians of knowledge in the academy and by many working in the media and other institutions, who prefer to hold onto their own authority; any thought of the public creating and defending an alternative interest of its own seems to fill the elite – and to some extent the public itself – with dread. And all before even mentioning politics. In the face of all this, the notion of God and Love playing any role in society might seem bizarre, but it makes sense precisely because for Spinoza both ideas are used to show that a basic trust between people and willingness to work together is paramount; not least when a decision is to be made after hard-nosed reflection about collective concerns.
Discussions about the role of reason in organising society – both academically and in the mainstream – have not become discredited simply through distrust of Modernism and questioning of the ‘grand narratives’ of the Enlightenment, but also because of the politically uninspiring character of ‘reason’ as discussed today, and its dislocation from modern life. If being rational now means deferring to the Evidence, narrowing the scope of social imagination and curbing freedoms; rather than creating the grounds for freedom to be fully realised, then no wonder it seems an outmoded concept with little contemporary resonance.
(1) See in particular Jonathan Israel’s influential Radical Enlightenment
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/spin-a07.shtml
(2) On Universalism (transcript from University of California Irvine, February 2, 2007): ‘what I believe is a task for a philosopher (or a philosopher today, at the present moment) with respect to universality is precisely to understand the logic of these contradictions and, in a dialectical way, to investigate their dominant and subordinated aspects, to reveal how they work and how they can be shifted or twisted through the interaction of theory and practice or, if you prefer, discourse and politics’.
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0607/balibar/en
• Books and Essays • Radicalism, past, present and future
Copyright: Culture Wars
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
New UN-backed reports warns of costs of inaction on climate change
New UN-backed reports warns of costs of inaction on climate change
Source: United Nations
Published Aug. 25, 2008
Government leaders must take urgent action to ensure that weather-related hazards, which are becoming more intense and frequent due to climate change, do not lead to a corresponding rise in disasters, a new United Nations-backed report released on Friday said.
The new study identified India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia as being among global warming’s “hotspots,” or countries particularly vulnerable to increases in extreme drought, flooding and cyclones anticipated in coming decades.
Commissioned by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the non-governmental organization (NGO) CARE International, it examined the possible consequences of global warming in the next 20 to 30 years.
The so-called hotspot nations are already facing considerable political, social, demographic, economic and security obstacles, the report said.
“Climate change will greatly complicate and could undermine efforts to manage these challenges,” said Charles Ehrhart, one of its authors, who serves as Climate Change Coordinator for CARE International.
The impact of a natural disaster is determined by several factors, such as access to proper equipment and information, as well as the ability to exert political influence, he noted. “The striking lack of these explains why poor people – especially those in marginalized social groups like pastoralists in Africa, women and children – constitute the vast majority of disaster victims.”
The report cited the most effective means to curb human vulnerability to disasters are: boosting the ability of local and government institutions to respond to crises; empowering local people to have a stronger say in disaster preparedness, response, recovery and rehabilitation; and providing services and social protection for the most vulnerable populations.
The authors expressed hope that point out hotspots around the world will spur leaders to take action and encourage aid workers to modify their strategies to take into account the realities of new risks posed by climate change.
The new study’s launch coincided with the gathering of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that kicked off yesterday in Accra, Ghana.
The seven-day event is the latest round of UN-sponsored global climate change negotiations, bringing together more than 1,600 participants to discuss future greenhouse gas emission reduction targets ahead of a major summit set for 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Source: United Nations
Published Aug. 25, 2008
Government leaders must take urgent action to ensure that weather-related hazards, which are becoming more intense and frequent due to climate change, do not lead to a corresponding rise in disasters, a new United Nations-backed report released on Friday said.
The new study identified India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia as being among global warming’s “hotspots,” or countries particularly vulnerable to increases in extreme drought, flooding and cyclones anticipated in coming decades.
Commissioned by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the non-governmental organization (NGO) CARE International, it examined the possible consequences of global warming in the next 20 to 30 years.
The so-called hotspot nations are already facing considerable political, social, demographic, economic and security obstacles, the report said.
“Climate change will greatly complicate and could undermine efforts to manage these challenges,” said Charles Ehrhart, one of its authors, who serves as Climate Change Coordinator for CARE International.
The impact of a natural disaster is determined by several factors, such as access to proper equipment and information, as well as the ability to exert political influence, he noted. “The striking lack of these explains why poor people – especially those in marginalized social groups like pastoralists in Africa, women and children – constitute the vast majority of disaster victims.”
The report cited the most effective means to curb human vulnerability to disasters are: boosting the ability of local and government institutions to respond to crises; empowering local people to have a stronger say in disaster preparedness, response, recovery and rehabilitation; and providing services and social protection for the most vulnerable populations.
The authors expressed hope that point out hotspots around the world will spur leaders to take action and encourage aid workers to modify their strategies to take into account the realities of new risks posed by climate change.
The new study’s launch coincided with the gathering of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that kicked off yesterday in Accra, Ghana.
The seven-day event is the latest round of UN-sponsored global climate change negotiations, bringing together more than 1,600 participants to discuss future greenhouse gas emission reduction targets ahead of a major summit set for 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Historic Obama Speech Sets Internet On Fire
Historic Obama Speech Sets Internet On Fire
By Sarah Lai Stirland August 28, 2008 | 12:47:11 AMCategories: DNC 2008
"Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves -- protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology," said Barack Obama during his speech accepting his nomination at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Image: Wordle Voters and pundits hungry for the details of Barack Obama's vision for America's future got them on Thursday when Obama formally accepted his party's presidential nomination, in an nearly 50-minute address to a packed Denver stadium.
Obama hammered Republican rival John McCain and at the same time offered his policy prescriptions in matters of national security, taxation and energy, among other things. With some notable exceptions, the early reaction from bloggers Thursday night was overwhelmingly positive.
"It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," notes the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a disillusioned Republican and outspoken Obama admirer.
"What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric," Sullivan writes on his blog The Daily Dish. "If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."
Traffic on the micro-blogging service Twitter immediately surged in the wake of Obama's speech, in which he officially became the first African American to win the nomination of the Democratic party.
More than 6,500 tweets poured through the service in just 20 minutes Thursday night -- most of them brief, two-line assessments of Obama's performance on a historic night, the 45th anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. (Obama is the most popular person on Twitter, according to the tracking service Twitterholics.)
"Obama nailed it tonight for me," writes "swhitley," "I may not agree with all of his policies, but I think his message of hope for our country means more."
"I want to have Barack Obama's babies, writes fluxrad.
And Brian Lerner tweeted, "It's hard to imagine there are people in this country that can not at least feel inspired by Obama even if they do not plan to vote for him."
Obama covered many of his key themes Thursday night, but there was an unusual fierceness to his oratory; which aimed McCain's record on specific issues like a guided cruise missile.
For example, among many other points, he asserted that McCain has sided with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time.
In addition, he addressed many of the criticisms of the Republicans, saying that he would cut taxes for middle class families instead of raising them. He also pledged to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years in renewable sources of energy, including wind and solar power as well as biofuels. He predicted that that investment will lead to five million jobs that "pay well and can't ever be outsourced."
Obama hit back at the Republicans on all of the major fronts on which they've been attacking him, the Atlantic's Sullivan notes: national security, his personal patriotism, and his ability to relate to the average middle-class family.
"I've said it before -- months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away," Sullivan concludes.
An Atlantic colleague of Sullivan's wasn't so generous. Megan McArdle, who blogs on economics, blasted Obama's promise to end America's dependence on Middle East oil, dismissing as empty political rhetoric.
"It doesn't matter what we do: drill, research alternative energy, raise CAFE standards . . . in 2018, we'll still be using oil," writes McArdle on her blog Asymmetrical Information. "Even if we discovered a magic source of clean renewable energy tomorrow, we'd still be using a lot of oil, because transitions of that magnitude take time."
Others, though, appreciated Obama's unapologetic case for an active federal government -- an unusual tact, they note, after decades of Democrats trying to campaign and win over what was an increasingly Republican-leaning electorate.
"From a Democratic perspective, he made the argument for government, something we haven't heard in a while," writes Robert Arena, a web marketing strategist who writes for the left leaning AMERICAblog.
Obama "moved into ample detail on what he wants to do with the economy and made the case for a failed Bush/McCain foreign policy," Arena wrote, voicing a common sentiment among Democratic bloggers. "I've been looking for the details for a while, and while not a wonky speech, there was enough there there to hang your hat on."
"And, perhaps most importantly, he defended himself and put the screws to the Republican Party for the failure of the last eight years . On the question of being ready to be commander in chief, Obama answered the question with a clarity and passion I haven't seen from him yet.
"All in all, a very Presidential speech."
By Sarah Lai Stirland August 28, 2008 | 12:47:11 AMCategories: DNC 2008
"Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves -- protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology," said Barack Obama during his speech accepting his nomination at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Image: Wordle Voters and pundits hungry for the details of Barack Obama's vision for America's future got them on Thursday when Obama formally accepted his party's presidential nomination, in an nearly 50-minute address to a packed Denver stadium.
Obama hammered Republican rival John McCain and at the same time offered his policy prescriptions in matters of national security, taxation and energy, among other things. With some notable exceptions, the early reaction from bloggers Thursday night was overwhelmingly positive.
"It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," notes the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a disillusioned Republican and outspoken Obama admirer.
"What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric," Sullivan writes on his blog The Daily Dish. "If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."
Traffic on the micro-blogging service Twitter immediately surged in the wake of Obama's speech, in which he officially became the first African American to win the nomination of the Democratic party.
More than 6,500 tweets poured through the service in just 20 minutes Thursday night -- most of them brief, two-line assessments of Obama's performance on a historic night, the 45th anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. (Obama is the most popular person on Twitter, according to the tracking service Twitterholics.)
"Obama nailed it tonight for me," writes "swhitley," "I may not agree with all of his policies, but I think his message of hope for our country means more."
"I want to have Barack Obama's babies, writes fluxrad.
And Brian Lerner tweeted, "It's hard to imagine there are people in this country that can not at least feel inspired by Obama even if they do not plan to vote for him."
Obama covered many of his key themes Thursday night, but there was an unusual fierceness to his oratory; which aimed McCain's record on specific issues like a guided cruise missile.
For example, among many other points, he asserted that McCain has sided with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time.
In addition, he addressed many of the criticisms of the Republicans, saying that he would cut taxes for middle class families instead of raising them. He also pledged to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years in renewable sources of energy, including wind and solar power as well as biofuels. He predicted that that investment will lead to five million jobs that "pay well and can't ever be outsourced."
Obama hit back at the Republicans on all of the major fronts on which they've been attacking him, the Atlantic's Sullivan notes: national security, his personal patriotism, and his ability to relate to the average middle-class family.
"I've said it before -- months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away," Sullivan concludes.
An Atlantic colleague of Sullivan's wasn't so generous. Megan McArdle, who blogs on economics, blasted Obama's promise to end America's dependence on Middle East oil, dismissing as empty political rhetoric.
"It doesn't matter what we do: drill, research alternative energy, raise CAFE standards . . . in 2018, we'll still be using oil," writes McArdle on her blog Asymmetrical Information. "Even if we discovered a magic source of clean renewable energy tomorrow, we'd still be using a lot of oil, because transitions of that magnitude take time."
Others, though, appreciated Obama's unapologetic case for an active federal government -- an unusual tact, they note, after decades of Democrats trying to campaign and win over what was an increasingly Republican-leaning electorate.
"From a Democratic perspective, he made the argument for government, something we haven't heard in a while," writes Robert Arena, a web marketing strategist who writes for the left leaning AMERICAblog.
Obama "moved into ample detail on what he wants to do with the economy and made the case for a failed Bush/McCain foreign policy," Arena wrote, voicing a common sentiment among Democratic bloggers. "I've been looking for the details for a while, and while not a wonky speech, there was enough there there to hang your hat on."
"And, perhaps most importantly, he defended himself and put the screws to the Republican Party for the failure of the last eight years . On the question of being ready to be commander in chief, Obama answered the question with a clarity and passion I haven't seen from him yet.
"All in all, a very Presidential speech."
Obama's Speech 'Very Tough'
Klein: Obama's Speech 'Very Tough'
Friday, Aug. 29, 2008 By JOE KLEIN/DENVER Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama during his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention on Aug. 28
It was the perfect speech for a skeptical nation. In some ways, the heart of it was near the end, when Obama directly confronted a country that has lost faith in government — and an opposing party that preys on that cynicism:
"I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
You make a big election about small things.
And you know what — it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.
I get it."
He delivered that, "I get it," perfectly, conversationally: It said, "I know what you guys are thinking." And the rest of the speech — every sentence, every paragraph — reflected that knowledge. His mission was to win over a doubtful nation, to convince us that he was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. Indeed, he used the word "dream" only once or twice. He didn't even talk about the "American Dream." He called it the "American Promise." He didn't tell us that he was different from Martin Luther King and the civil rights generation of black leadership; he showed us.
He began by setting the predicate, with a sleek précis of the Bush failures and John McCain's complicity. "Eight [years] is enough," he said. It was time for a change. His stories of the problems of the people he met along the way, the collateral damage of the Bush presidency, came closest to cliché — they weren't nearly as convincing as the stunning parade of Average Americans that preceded his speech, including a laid-off factory worker named Barney Smith who delivered the immortal line, "We need a government that cares more about Barney Smith than Smith Barney."
But Obama went through his domestic policy solutions to their problems without making it seem like a laundry list — and then he simply hammered John McCain on McCain's perceived strength, foreign policy. This is something that Republicans do and Democrats shy away from — challenging their opponents on perceived strength. At a moment when Americans are sick of the foreign entanglements that John McCain seems to seek at every turn, it seems a potentially profitable maneuver for Obama.
Obama went bluntly up into McCain's grill, time and time again — challenging him on the sort of campaign he was running, and especially on the sleazy tactic of questioning Obama's patriotism:
"The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.
So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first."
He delivered that line well, too.
In a normal year, a year when the public would have a week or two to digest this night, my guess is that this speech would have a dramatic impact on the race — and it still might. But by tomorrow night, it won't even be the lead story on the evening news. McCain's vice presidential selection will be. And then McCain will have the luxury of going second — batting last — next week, staging a convention that will, no doubt, lacerate Obama and the Democrats and then climax with McCain telling his incredible life story. By this time next week, Obama's speech will be a distant memory to those of us in the media. By this time two weeks from now, I wouldn't be surprised if John McCain were ahead in the polls.
But Barack Obama laid down an important marker at Invesco Field — and he may have convinced more than a few white working-class skeptics to give him a closer look when the debates roll around. He stood there not as an orator, but as a plausible chief executive. His message was as tight as a power-point presentation, but far more elegant. And tough — above all, tough: not an egghead, not Adlai Stevenson. No, tonight Barack Obama was a politician from the south side of Chicago, ready for the brawl of his life.
copyright: TIME
Friday, Aug. 29, 2008 By JOE KLEIN/DENVER Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama during his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention on Aug. 28
It was the perfect speech for a skeptical nation. In some ways, the heart of it was near the end, when Obama directly confronted a country that has lost faith in government — and an opposing party that preys on that cynicism:
"I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
You make a big election about small things.
And you know what — it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.
I get it."
He delivered that, "I get it," perfectly, conversationally: It said, "I know what you guys are thinking." And the rest of the speech — every sentence, every paragraph — reflected that knowledge. His mission was to win over a doubtful nation, to convince us that he was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. Indeed, he used the word "dream" only once or twice. He didn't even talk about the "American Dream." He called it the "American Promise." He didn't tell us that he was different from Martin Luther King and the civil rights generation of black leadership; he showed us.
He began by setting the predicate, with a sleek précis of the Bush failures and John McCain's complicity. "Eight [years] is enough," he said. It was time for a change. His stories of the problems of the people he met along the way, the collateral damage of the Bush presidency, came closest to cliché — they weren't nearly as convincing as the stunning parade of Average Americans that preceded his speech, including a laid-off factory worker named Barney Smith who delivered the immortal line, "We need a government that cares more about Barney Smith than Smith Barney."
But Obama went through his domestic policy solutions to their problems without making it seem like a laundry list — and then he simply hammered John McCain on McCain's perceived strength, foreign policy. This is something that Republicans do and Democrats shy away from — challenging their opponents on perceived strength. At a moment when Americans are sick of the foreign entanglements that John McCain seems to seek at every turn, it seems a potentially profitable maneuver for Obama.
Obama went bluntly up into McCain's grill, time and time again — challenging him on the sort of campaign he was running, and especially on the sleazy tactic of questioning Obama's patriotism:
"The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.
So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first."
He delivered that line well, too.
In a normal year, a year when the public would have a week or two to digest this night, my guess is that this speech would have a dramatic impact on the race — and it still might. But by tomorrow night, it won't even be the lead story on the evening news. McCain's vice presidential selection will be. And then McCain will have the luxury of going second — batting last — next week, staging a convention that will, no doubt, lacerate Obama and the Democrats and then climax with McCain telling his incredible life story. By this time next week, Obama's speech will be a distant memory to those of us in the media. By this time two weeks from now, I wouldn't be surprised if John McCain were ahead in the polls.
But Barack Obama laid down an important marker at Invesco Field — and he may have convinced more than a few white working-class skeptics to give him a closer look when the debates roll around. He stood there not as an orator, but as a plausible chief executive. His message was as tight as a power-point presentation, but far more elegant. And tough — above all, tough: not an egghead, not Adlai Stevenson. No, tonight Barack Obama was a politician from the south side of Chicago, ready for the brawl of his life.
copyright: TIME
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Ted Kennedy defies cancer diagnosis to inspire Democrats in Denver
Democratic National Convention
Ted Kennedy defies cancer diagnosis to inspire Democrats in Denver
* Suzanne Goldenberg in Denver
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday August 26 2008 04:36 BST
Edward Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, democratic convention
Senator Edward Kennedy waves at the Democratic convention in Denver. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Ted Kennedy, who for decades has inspired his fellow Democrats with his heart and passion, tonight defied a diagnosis of cancer to make an emotional and unexpected appearance at his party convention.
Kennedy's speech tonight was only his second public appearance since he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour last May.
But the legendary senator has attended all but two Democratic conventions in the last half-century. He made it clear tonight that, while frail, he was not going to be satisfied with a mere video tribute to a political career now in its 48th year.
The crush of the convention floor, the giddiness of activists waving placards, the speeches - Kennedy has loved it all.
"My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here tonight," Kennedy said. "Nothing, nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight."
The crowd believed it, but there was awareness too that this may well be Kennedy's last Democratic convention.
Kennedy however betrayed no such doubts, and he did not falter when urging the crowd to support Obama's candidacy. "I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America. To restore its future, to rise to its best ideals, and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States," Kennedy said.
"For me this is a season of hope," he said. "This is the cause of my life - new hope."
Kennedy's decision in January to support Obama's run for the White House was a turning point in his campaign. With the Kennedy seal of approval, Obama was adopted as the heir to America's reigning political dynasty.
In his remarks tonight, Kennedy made a reference to that family legacy.
"This November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans," he said. Then he went on pledge to be in the Senate next January when Obama is sworn in as president.
He was beaming when he entered the stage, steadied by his wife Victoria Reggie Kennedy. And though there was a shaved portion on the left side of his head, a relic of treatment, and Kennedy's jacket hung a little loosely on his large frame, for members of the Massachusetts delegation, just the sight of their senior senator appeared to offer a measure of reassurance.
As Kennedy made his speech for Obama, the crowd erupted several times: Ted-dy, Ted-dy.
"We are all so emotional," said Ana Maria Camarago, who appeared at times on the verge of tears. "There isn't going to be a dry eye here. We are all so used to him being strong."
Like others in the hall, she wore a button with Kennedy's likeness emblazoned with the legendary slogan from his 1980 run for the White House. Kennedy's challenge to Jimmy Carter, who was then president, left the Democratic party ruinously divided. But the slogan has become a mantra for many Democrats of that generation: "The cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."
Though evidently affected by his illness, Kennedy's voice was relatively strong and his voice clear. As he spoke, the atmosphere among the Massachusetts delegates lifted.
"He inspired so many of us to go into public service," said Lida Harkins. Now the majority whip in the Massachusetts house of representatives, she was a volunteer on Kennedy's first campaign for the Senate. "All of us look up to him."
In the tribute, Caroline Kennedy credited her uncle for progressive legislation on civil rights, healthcare and the minimum wage - all the fruits of a career in the Senate that has spanned five decades.
The sheer sweep of that history, made human flesh in Kennedy's appearance, reduced the crowd that only moments before had been dancing in their seats to silence.
There were sighs at the heartbreaking photo of Kennedy with his two older brothers, John and Robert, who would later be assassinated.
When the video turned to footage of an impassioned young Ted Kennedy banging his desk in the Senate, the crowd cheered.
And when the video showed footage, decades later, an impassioned snowy-haired Ted Kennedy asserting access to healthcare as a fundamental right, the crowd roared again.
There were echoes of those famous lines as Kennedy left the stage in Denver: "The work begins anew. The hope rises again, and the dream lives on."
About this article
Close
Senator Ted Kennedy defies cancer diagnosis to inspire Democrats in Denver
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Tuesday August 26 2008. It was last updated at 09:57 on August 26 2008.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Ted Kennedy defies cancer diagnosis to inspire Democrats in Denver
* Suzanne Goldenberg in Denver
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday August 26 2008 04:36 BST
Edward Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, democratic convention
Senator Edward Kennedy waves at the Democratic convention in Denver. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Ted Kennedy, who for decades has inspired his fellow Democrats with his heart and passion, tonight defied a diagnosis of cancer to make an emotional and unexpected appearance at his party convention.
Kennedy's speech tonight was only his second public appearance since he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour last May.
But the legendary senator has attended all but two Democratic conventions in the last half-century. He made it clear tonight that, while frail, he was not going to be satisfied with a mere video tribute to a political career now in its 48th year.
The crush of the convention floor, the giddiness of activists waving placards, the speeches - Kennedy has loved it all.
"My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here tonight," Kennedy said. "Nothing, nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight."
The crowd believed it, but there was awareness too that this may well be Kennedy's last Democratic convention.
Kennedy however betrayed no such doubts, and he did not falter when urging the crowd to support Obama's candidacy. "I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America. To restore its future, to rise to its best ideals, and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States," Kennedy said.
"For me this is a season of hope," he said. "This is the cause of my life - new hope."
Kennedy's decision in January to support Obama's run for the White House was a turning point in his campaign. With the Kennedy seal of approval, Obama was adopted as the heir to America's reigning political dynasty.
In his remarks tonight, Kennedy made a reference to that family legacy.
"This November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans," he said. Then he went on pledge to be in the Senate next January when Obama is sworn in as president.
He was beaming when he entered the stage, steadied by his wife Victoria Reggie Kennedy. And though there was a shaved portion on the left side of his head, a relic of treatment, and Kennedy's jacket hung a little loosely on his large frame, for members of the Massachusetts delegation, just the sight of their senior senator appeared to offer a measure of reassurance.
As Kennedy made his speech for Obama, the crowd erupted several times: Ted-dy, Ted-dy.
"We are all so emotional," said Ana Maria Camarago, who appeared at times on the verge of tears. "There isn't going to be a dry eye here. We are all so used to him being strong."
Like others in the hall, she wore a button with Kennedy's likeness emblazoned with the legendary slogan from his 1980 run for the White House. Kennedy's challenge to Jimmy Carter, who was then president, left the Democratic party ruinously divided. But the slogan has become a mantra for many Democrats of that generation: "The cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."
Though evidently affected by his illness, Kennedy's voice was relatively strong and his voice clear. As he spoke, the atmosphere among the Massachusetts delegates lifted.
"He inspired so many of us to go into public service," said Lida Harkins. Now the majority whip in the Massachusetts house of representatives, she was a volunteer on Kennedy's first campaign for the Senate. "All of us look up to him."
In the tribute, Caroline Kennedy credited her uncle for progressive legislation on civil rights, healthcare and the minimum wage - all the fruits of a career in the Senate that has spanned five decades.
The sheer sweep of that history, made human flesh in Kennedy's appearance, reduced the crowd that only moments before had been dancing in their seats to silence.
There were sighs at the heartbreaking photo of Kennedy with his two older brothers, John and Robert, who would later be assassinated.
When the video turned to footage of an impassioned young Ted Kennedy banging his desk in the Senate, the crowd cheered.
And when the video showed footage, decades later, an impassioned snowy-haired Ted Kennedy asserting access to healthcare as a fundamental right, the crowd roared again.
There were echoes of those famous lines as Kennedy left the stage in Denver: "The work begins anew. The hope rises again, and the dream lives on."
About this article
Close
Senator Ted Kennedy defies cancer diagnosis to inspire Democrats in Denver
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Tuesday August 26 2008. It was last updated at 09:57 on August 26 2008.
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Solar power
Solar power
Glowing after dark
Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Looking to leaves for a way to store solar power after sunset
PLANTS absorb sunlight, produce energy, consume carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. It is a perfect model for power generation, but copying Mother Nature is difficult. Although research into solar power has come a long way, sunset still poses a problem. Storing solar-made electricity in batteries can be expensive and inefficient. So to be really successful, the solar industry needs another way to keep power for use at night. Now researchers have found a chemical cocktail that might do the trick.
By adding cobalt and phosphates to water and passing a mild current through the solution with a glass electrode, Matthew Kanan and Daniel Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to break water apart and force oxygen to bubble to the surface. Protons left behind by the oxygen migrated to a second electrode made of platinum and formed into hydrogen.
<A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/3728/3/0/%2a/m%3B36321810%3B0-0%3B0%3B7058143%3B799-350/300%3B17002217/17020112/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/1/a1/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://www.economistsubscriptions.com/ecom517/global"><IMG SRC="http://m1.2mdn.net/711766/250x250_1.gif" BORDER=0></A>
Although the process appears simple, it is difficult in practice. Given enough electricity, there are already ways to break water apart. The problem is that the amount of energy required may significantly exceed that which the hydrogen can subsequently be used to generate. Scientists have tried adding chemicals to reduce the amount of electricity needed, but most of the ingredients have been rare and expensive. By using easily obtainable cobalt and phosphates, the MIT work could make it a lot more viable to obtain hydrogen directly from solar cells.
The researchers suggest splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen during the day whenever electricity from solar cells is not needed for anything else. At night the hydrogen could be burned or run through a fuel cell to create power.
The process, reported in Science, is similar to how plants work. When they do not need energy immediately, plants transform it into sugar which is stored. When energy is required, the sugar is used—regardless of whether the sun is up or down. Although their experimental work is yet to be commercialised, the MIT researchers suggest that within ten years solar cells using cobalt-based reactions to store energy could help to power some buildings.
Glowing after dark
Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Looking to leaves for a way to store solar power after sunset
PLANTS absorb sunlight, produce energy, consume carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. It is a perfect model for power generation, but copying Mother Nature is difficult. Although research into solar power has come a long way, sunset still poses a problem. Storing solar-made electricity in batteries can be expensive and inefficient. So to be really successful, the solar industry needs another way to keep power for use at night. Now researchers have found a chemical cocktail that might do the trick.
By adding cobalt and phosphates to water and passing a mild current through the solution with a glass electrode, Matthew Kanan and Daniel Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to break water apart and force oxygen to bubble to the surface. Protons left behind by the oxygen migrated to a second electrode made of platinum and formed into hydrogen.
<A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/3728/3/0/%2a/m%3B36321810%3B0-0%3B0%3B7058143%3B799-350/300%3B17002217/17020112/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/1/a1/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://www.economistsubscriptions.com/ecom517/global"><IMG SRC="http://m1.2mdn.net/711766/250x250_1.gif" BORDER=0></A>
Although the process appears simple, it is difficult in practice. Given enough electricity, there are already ways to break water apart. The problem is that the amount of energy required may significantly exceed that which the hydrogen can subsequently be used to generate. Scientists have tried adding chemicals to reduce the amount of electricity needed, but most of the ingredients have been rare and expensive. By using easily obtainable cobalt and phosphates, the MIT work could make it a lot more viable to obtain hydrogen directly from solar cells.
The researchers suggest splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen during the day whenever electricity from solar cells is not needed for anything else. At night the hydrogen could be burned or run through a fuel cell to create power.
The process, reported in Science, is similar to how plants work. When they do not need energy immediately, plants transform it into sugar which is stored. When energy is required, the sugar is used—regardless of whether the sun is up or down. Although their experimental work is yet to be commercialised, the MIT researchers suggest that within ten years solar cells using cobalt-based reactions to store energy could help to power some buildings.
Encourage migrants to stay to boost economy - report
Encourage migrants to stay to boost economy - report
* Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday August 26 2008
A thinktank close to the government has criticised current immigration policy, issuing a warning that the entrepreneurial spirit and inventive flair of migrant communities will be lost to the UK unless ministers change their thinking.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has found that employers and local economies benefit from the skills brought by migrants, but the full positive effects are not being realised since most migrants only stay in the UK for short periods.
The IPPR says that of more than one million migrants who came to the UK from the eight countries that joined the EU in May 2004, around half have now returned home. The thinktank says councils and the government need to try to reverse this.
The full report, which will be published next month, will suggest councils and businesses discuss with universities how to better harness the skills of their foreign students. It will also call for the accreditation of foreign qualifications, which enables migrants to be recognised in the UK, to be fast-tracked.
The IPPR's findings will shore up one element of the government's position - that migrants add value to the British economy. Ministers believe immigration added £6bn to the economy in 2006.
The researchers argue that any analysis of the economic value of migrants should also take into account how they expand the market for local firms through links to their countries of origin. Harvard research done in California shows that for every 1% increase in migrant population, Californian exports to their countries of origin increased by 0.5%.
The economic value of immigration was challenged by a House of Lords report in April which concluded that immigrants had "little or no impact" on the UK's economy, with a negative impact for the low-paid and an increase in house prices. The Lords, including two ex-chancellors, backed a limit on immigration levels, in line with the Tory party's position.
But Laura Chappell, research fellow at the IPPR, also raised concerns about the government's points-based system, which calibrates how much the UK needs the skills of a worker or student seeking to enter the country.
She said: "Under the new system, no low-skilled migrants will be allowed into the UK from outside the EU. That is a large amount of people who are being written off ... but who add a huge amount to the diversity of an area and local economy.
"We're also worried that the system is based on a short-term economic analysis of what migrants bring to a country ... A migrant may be entrepreneurial once they have arrived in this country - ie, they 'create' a skill. We just don't know."
The IPPR research draws on three studies conducted in the last few years in Germany and America, each showing that as the number of migrants in a community increased, so too did the number of inventions patented in that area.
A home office spokesman said: "Migrant labour is by no means the only solution to our tight labour market. The National Skills Strategy was launched to address the needs of our domestic labour force."
The Lib Dems welcomed the report, but said the government was not flexible enough to balance the benefits the IPPR report suggested with the extra pressures that can be placed on local services by extreme and concentrated immigration.
* Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday August 26 2008
A thinktank close to the government has criticised current immigration policy, issuing a warning that the entrepreneurial spirit and inventive flair of migrant communities will be lost to the UK unless ministers change their thinking.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has found that employers and local economies benefit from the skills brought by migrants, but the full positive effects are not being realised since most migrants only stay in the UK for short periods.
The IPPR says that of more than one million migrants who came to the UK from the eight countries that joined the EU in May 2004, around half have now returned home. The thinktank says councils and the government need to try to reverse this.
The full report, which will be published next month, will suggest councils and businesses discuss with universities how to better harness the skills of their foreign students. It will also call for the accreditation of foreign qualifications, which enables migrants to be recognised in the UK, to be fast-tracked.
The IPPR's findings will shore up one element of the government's position - that migrants add value to the British economy. Ministers believe immigration added £6bn to the economy in 2006.
The researchers argue that any analysis of the economic value of migrants should also take into account how they expand the market for local firms through links to their countries of origin. Harvard research done in California shows that for every 1% increase in migrant population, Californian exports to their countries of origin increased by 0.5%.
The economic value of immigration was challenged by a House of Lords report in April which concluded that immigrants had "little or no impact" on the UK's economy, with a negative impact for the low-paid and an increase in house prices. The Lords, including two ex-chancellors, backed a limit on immigration levels, in line with the Tory party's position.
But Laura Chappell, research fellow at the IPPR, also raised concerns about the government's points-based system, which calibrates how much the UK needs the skills of a worker or student seeking to enter the country.
She said: "Under the new system, no low-skilled migrants will be allowed into the UK from outside the EU. That is a large amount of people who are being written off ... but who add a huge amount to the diversity of an area and local economy.
"We're also worried that the system is based on a short-term economic analysis of what migrants bring to a country ... A migrant may be entrepreneurial once they have arrived in this country - ie, they 'create' a skill. We just don't know."
The IPPR research draws on three studies conducted in the last few years in Germany and America, each showing that as the number of migrants in a community increased, so too did the number of inventions patented in that area.
A home office spokesman said: "Migrant labour is by no means the only solution to our tight labour market. The National Skills Strategy was launched to address the needs of our domestic labour force."
The Lib Dems welcomed the report, but said the government was not flexible enough to balance the benefits the IPPR report suggested with the extra pressures that can be placed on local services by extreme and concentrated immigration.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Madame Matisse's Hat
London Review of Books
* LRB
* 14 August 2008
* T.J. Clark more detail icon
Madame Matisse’s Hat
T.J. Clark
Henri Matisse, 'Woman with a Hat'
Henri Matisse, ‘Woman with a Hat’
Henri Matisse’s portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse’s painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal L’Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have haunted our picture of 20th-century art:
What one finds above all, particularly in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still; painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting . . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings [des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct.
As a response to Matisse’s picture, these sentences may seem bizarre. To most viewers Woman with a Hat is the very epitome of the accidental and instinctive in painting. It is passionate and expressive. The hat sums up its mode. And yet Denis’s verdict, in my experience, will never entirely go away. The more one focuses on particular key passages in the painting, trying to see them as Denis-the-practitioner might have done (the strokes of colour that go to make Parayre’s mouth, nose and jaw, for instance, or the dab of purple underneath her chin), the more the element of plotting and calculation in Matisse’s procedure, almost of coldness, comes to the surface. ‘You strip [the world] of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason.’ This is absurd as a characterisation of the picture’s whole effect, but applied to Parayre’s face and look – her ‘expression’ – the words point to something real. ‘What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic.’ Wild expressiveness and cool reduction coexist. Why? With what result?
We know that Woman with a Hat was painted, at speed, towards the end of summer in 1905; a larger, more elaborate landscape painting, which Matisse had intended as the lynchpin of his exhibit at the Salon, had turned out to be unfinishable in the time remaining. Leo Stein said later that Matisse dared come only once to the Salon d’Automne to see his painting in situ, for fear of scoffers, and that Madame Matisse never came at all. Denis was not the only fellow-artist to join the hue and cry. The German painter Hans Purrmann, looking back later to his days as Matisse’s pupil and ally, tells the story of Matisse’s studio colleagues asking the painter ‘what kind of hat and what kind of dress were they that this woman had been wearing which were so incredibly loud in colour. And Matisse, exasperated, answered “Black, obviously”.’
It was a joke. But the joke was a good one; and therefore it concentrated an amount of conscious and unconscious thinking in a single reversal of terms. The joke set me thinking straight away of Baudelaire’s choice of black as the bourgeoisie’s prime colour, possessing its own ‘poetic beauty, which expresses the soul of the age; an immense cortège of professional mourners, politicians in mourning, lovers in mourning, bourgeois in mourning. We are all celebrating some funeral.’ Or, better still, of Giacomo Leopardi’s terrible Dialogue between Fashion and Death, from which Walter Benjamin chose the following line to epitomise his ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ (a line in which Fashion addresses its double directly): ‘Fashion: Mr Death! Mr Death!’ Or, best of all, of Malevich in 1923: ‘I envisaged the revolution as having no colour. Colour belongs to the past. Revolution is not decked out in colours, not ablaze with them. Colour is the fire of the ancien régime . . . Anarchy is coloured black.’
Woman with a Hat is not Malevich’s Black Square. The two are Modernism’s opposite poles: revolution on the one side, the fire of the ancien régime on the other. But they are, I believe, related. Black, in modernism, is always lurking on the other side of reds and yellows blazing. Matisse the cold calculator – ‘the anxious Matisse, the madly anxious Matisse’, as a friend described him in 1904 – is the same man as Matisse the sensualist. Colours, in a painting like Woman with a Hat, are forced apart from their normal identities so that some work of mourning, or cherishing – the two are the same, ultimately – can be carried out.
Genuine points of comparison for Woman with a Hat are few. The best seems to me a great portrait by Cézanne (we now call it Woman in Blue; it is shown overleaf), almost certainly painted just five years earlier. Nothing is known about that painting’s early exhibition history – it was eventually bought from Ambroise Vollard by Matisse’s key patron, the Russian Sergei Shchukin – but it makes sense that Matisse could have seen it, at Vollard’s or in one of the Cézanne retrospectives. In any case he certainly had the chance to study others very much like it. And Cézanne, of course, was his touchstone. It is as if Woman with a Hat began as an imagining of Cézanne’s Woman in Blue abruptly stirring from her armoured, downcast immobility and swivelling to meet the viewer’s gaze; so that the blue of Woman in Blue’s costume – which is really more negative, more deeply inhuman and inorganic even than Baudelaire’s black – leaps into coloured flame. Constraint and uneasiness are still the order of the day in Matisse, but they no longer hold the main character in a vice. Maybe there was a little too much Death in Woman in Blue for Matisse’s taste – it is easy to imagine Cézanne’s sitter contemplating a skull – and not enough of Fashion. Imagine Woman in Blue repainted by Van Gogh (another Matisse point of reference). There would still be plenty of tension and anxiety in evidence, needless to say, but everything would turn to confront us. Affect would be less painfully internalised. Modernity is outwardness, even in its moments of distress.
Paul Cézanne, 'Woman in Blue'
Paul Cézanne, ‘Woman in Blue’
Painters who revered Cézanne in the early 1900s often saw him as the master of pictorial uncertainty. They loved the strangeness of his drawing and the impenetrability of his space. Pictures he had left unfinished were especially celebrated. This enthusiasm was founded on various (by then familiar) modernist assumptions, having to do with the inherent instability and open-endedness of perception, the impossibility of totalising, the dispersal of identities in the space of desire. Do these beliefs subtend Woman with a Hat? Perhaps. Listen to Proust on the subject, in Le Côté de Guermantes – he is describing the process of giving Albertine a first kiss – and look back at Amélie Parayre’s cheek:
In short, just as at Balbec Albertine had often appeared to me different, so now, as if, prodigiously accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and changes of colouring which a person presents to us in the course of our various encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon which diversifies the individuality of a fellow-creature, and to draw out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities it contains – so now, during this brief journey of my lips towards her cheek, it was ten Albertines that I saw; this one girl being like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to approach it, gave way to another. At least so long as I had not touched that head, I could still see it, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas – for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made – suddenly my eyes ceased to see anything, and then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer smelled anything, and . . . at last I learned, from these obnoxious indications, that I was in the very act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.
Phew! Proust’s passage is irresistible, I feel, and very modern, precisely in its being unbelievable. It is an idea of observing oneself in the act of passion. Not a word of it – not even the crushed nose – rings true. But that might mean it applies all the better to what Matisse did in 1905. For Woman with a Hat seems to want to register above all the factitiousness – the made-up quality – of a face seen from inches away. All I would say is that, for me, the factitiousness in Matisse does not result in perceptual break-up or breakdown. It does not reduce the face – even the cheek and jawline – to ‘obnoxious indications’. The face is multiple, and we as observers struggle to reconcile its contrary aspects. But we can do it. The picture allows us to. The quote we need from Proust, therefore, is more modest. The human face, he writes at one point, is ‘like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but on different surfaces, so that one does not see them all at once’.
What is it we are looking at, exactly, in Woman with a Hat? I see a woman, maybe in her thirties, looking intently from under the brow of a hat. Madame Matisse was 33 in 1905, and had given birth to two children. Her hat is enormous. It participates, so historians of fashion tell us, in the mad upward climbing of hats in the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Apparently the year of maximum levitation was 1911. The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable. It is a set of signs for hat-ness, for puffing up and profusion, for Fashion at war with Death. There is never a moment at which its showmanship distracts from the intensity – the humanness – of what is going on underneath it.
We happen to know that Madame Matisse was a hatmaker, apparently a very talented one. She was a remarkably skilled needlewoman all round. Earlier the same year, in the Spring Salon des Indépendants, there had been a submission (now lost) under the name Matisse (Mme Henri): Écran tapisserie sur un carton d’André Derain. Her hatmaking, we learn from Hilary Spurling’s biography, had time and again kept her various families afloat.[*] In 1895, aged 23, she had gone to work for Aunt Nine, owner of the Grande Maison des Modes on the boulevard Saint-Denis. She did so because her father had just been thrown out of work – he was a political manager and general factotum for a financier-politician called Frédéric Humbert – by the failure of his boss’s newspaper. In 1899, a year after her marriage to Matisse, Parayre set up her own hat shop in the rue de Châteaudun, using her aunt’s contacts. It was the only way her new husband was going to be able to continue painting full-time – which apparently (Spurling makes the case humanely) she was determined to have happen. In the terrible year of 1902, when the Matisse family was swept up and all but broken by the father’s part in financial and political scandal, Parayre’s health failed and her hat-shop went under. (The shop had previously been searched by the police, looking for hidden bearer bonds.) By 1903, when the worst of the family crisis was over, she was back with Aunt Nine on the boulevard.
The hat is very far from being an innocent symbol, then. It is presumably Madame Matisse’s own handiwork, and in a sense Monsieur Matisse’s livelihood. Painting below, handicraft above. Or rather, since both spouses were emerging from a sequence of dismal years in which neither’s activity did much to pay the bills, the hat and the painting are put in an imagined (utopian) equilibrium. Fashion is livelihood, and maybe a bit of a burden; but the face – the face of survival and anxiety, the face of painting – burns underneath the flummery with a livid, unstoppable flame.
How, then, physically, did Matisse choose to show his wife facing the world? Let us say, in a preliminary fashion, that Parayre seems to be sitting somewhat sideways to us, obliquely, with her face perhaps turned back to intercept our glance. The face is not quite frontal. The two eyes equivocate about how much the further one, to our right, recedes into depth. Down below, in the body, most things are left in suspense. And I want to hang on to that uncertainty as long as I can. I do not want to see straight away what Madame Matisse is made out of. This is because I believe the painting expects its viewer not to see straight away, and even when she has seen, to be unsatisfied, or unsure, that the best-case scenario adds up.
The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?
The further I go, the more literal-minded about local colour I think I am entitled to be. And this is true to the picture: it is the other side of the implied contempt for literalness built into Matisse’s ‘Black, obviously.’ Of course there are things in the painting that are never going to settle into being equivalents for familiar parts of the world – the blue and green background on each side of the face, notably – but there are plenty of others that do so settle, or could so settle if we would let them. The neck might actually be orange, the dress might be green and blue, and the lip – that terrible, inconsolable lip – is lip-coloured. Matisse is never going to allow his viewers simply to give up on the question, ‘Do these colours refer?’ He is not willing, at this point in his career, to facilitate a viewing that settles for the whole modernist artefact being at one (consistent) imaginative remove from the world, existing stably as something the artist dreamed up. It is the jarring between likeness and transposition, or literalness and impossibility, that is the Matisse effect. And this was the jarring, the inconsistency, that put his fellow modernists’ teeth on edge.
Of course Matisse has used the ‘same’ colour, or very slight variants of it, for utterly different things. He expects us to notice this. Orange for the necklet and also the belt; pink for the jawline and for some sort of embroidery on the glove; a whitened orange (more or less a pink) to pin down something as solid as the bottom lip and the set of the chin, but then – and maybe, it seems, simultaneously – the same colour to suggest something as elusive, or at least as impalpable, as the halo round the gloved fingers; a dark purpled red (dried blood colour) for the eyebrows, the armpit, the hard line along the top of the far breast. The painting, that is to say, is sewn together by literal recurrences.
All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)
So . . . It is the local precision of colour on the face that holds the likeness together. I guess I am only stating the obvious. And so far I have only pointed to part of what happens. I have not looked at the colours and modelling on Parayre’s cheek and jaw – let us call them the Albertine part of the picture, the non-obnoxious Albertine part. And I have not really focused on the eyes – on the abstract patchwork of the two irises, and the slight shift and tilt between one eye and the next. The face is an intense circuit of equivalents, with every touch elated and investigative. The effect is all the more gripping because it goes along with the fact – which we soon become aware of, even at two or three feet away – that so much of the face is sparsely, minimally indicated. The jaw and cheek are touches, dabs, on top of largely unmodified liquid primer, tinted a light grey-green. The ear is an awkward blot, surrounded by traces of charcoal under-drawing. Always we are meant to be aware of haste, of manic and inspired economy, of sparseness on the verge of tipping over into outright erasure or inattention. But again and again the face composes itself out of the clusters and surfaces, and becomes, pace Proust, all one thing.
It is the face that matters. But the body and pose, in their very elusiveness, keep calling for a solution. At last I see what it is. Madame Matisse’s breast and shoulders – the whole spectacular lacework and corsage, or décolletage and bouquet – turn out to be no such thing. They refer, on the contrary, to the 19th century’s chief instrument of concealment, but also of signalling and revelation. Parayre is clutching a wide-open fan, with maybe a pattern of flowers on it, or even an actual bunch of flowers held against it, awkwardly. (So is the pink and yellow aureole really a crinkled paper wrapper? And is what I previously called a cane or parasol maybe not solid at all, more like the fan’s dangling tassel?) Perhaps the fan is rippled and buckled a little – as if torqued by Parayre’s grip. Would that explain what happens to its top edge towards the right? Of course, even when we opt for the fan solution to the puzzle, the marks that ought to make up the object go on escaping from the frame. The thick paint on the flowers – the white is by some way the thickest piece of paint in the picture – makes it impossible to have the flowers settle down into decoration on the fan. And yet they are never enough like real flowers to belong anywhere else. Towards the fan’s right edge the touches and patches of colour on it are truly cursory, wriggling on a dead light-purple primer. Here is the part of the picture most like poor Albertine’s cheek. ‘Obnoxious’ would be overstating things. But certainly indiscriminate – not really brought into focus.
So the interpretative question follows. Once the wide-open fan is registered as a possibility, how does Parayre change? Above all, what happens to her orientation to the viewer as a result – the way she addresses our gaze? I am not sure. I think that perhaps the fan’s presence has the effect of opening the figure slightly, and turning it more towards us. It helps the figure ‘face’ us. Or rather, it polarises the choice of readings on offer. Either the figure is facing us, or it is looking a touch obliquely – over the shoulder, with the quality of a look intercepted. The either-or quality becomes more distinct. The woman is looking and moving two ways, and the difference between the two poses becomes just a bit more noticeable, more irreconcilable, once the fan is in place – more a question of ‘duck’ versus ‘rabbit’. The face itself is still turning; but the body faces us four-square. Or maybe it is just that the fan conjures up the facing – gives us a fleeting, misleading impression of the body revealing itself – as fans were supposed to do.
Fan and hat are in cahoots. The hat’s absurd determination to face us and be a face, a second face, the face that respectable women could never, naturally, put on (a metaphor of sensuality rampant, a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises): all this, as I said before, is abstract. It cancels itself as it proliferates. It is just an idea of overtness – of sex being finally ‘in your face’. And the fan, for me, is ultimately the same kind of abstraction. Fan and hat both try to fight the face’s sensuality to a standstill, exactly by spelling out that sensuality, by making it tritely exterior. They are twin millstones. They crush and volatilise what they cover or protect. The cane is a neurasthenic’s prop.
Maybe this is too literary. But suppose we look again at the green that Matisse has put all over the place in the picture (to the right of the face especially), and see it not merely as a foil for the face’s sensuality, but as threatening and infiltrating Parayre’s vitality – a green sickness that turns her mouth into a bruise. Is this, too, forcing the note? Perhaps we could think of the green simply as a non-bodily colour, which by its nature cancels sensuality. So that even the vibrant reds and oranges of bodily orifices are not enough to conjure back fleshly existence into the space of Fashion. Is this the picture’s basic wager? Suppose we ask ourselves what we make, in this connection, of Madame Matisse’s ‘expression’? What word gets us on its wavelength? Is it guarded? Strained? Reproachful? Distrustful? Disdainful? Do you see it as touched with distaste, or anxiety, or even a mild fear? Or is she just distant? Somewhere out there on her own.
This was a woman, we know biographically, who had just been through public hell. She was tremendously armoured, but maybe understandably always waiting for the worst to happen. Spurling quotes her as saying later in life: ‘I am in my element when the house burns down.’ There were several such burnings over the course of her 20th century. And I interpret the remark as meaning that she did best – she was most fully herself – when actual catastrophe took the place of potential one. The potential catastrophe she had learned to believe life always was.
It is all very modern. Parayre’s eyes, mouth and eyebrows are how I imagine Freud’s Dora’s to have been, or Ursula Brangwen’s, or Maggie Verver’s. ‘Hold on tight, my poor dear,’ Maggie says to herself as the noose tightens, ‘without too much terror – and it will all come out somehow.’
Spurling believes that Woman with a Hat ‘is among other things a portrait of Amélie’s courage, her will and her passionate, exacting faith in the painter’. I admire the interpretation, and certainly prefer it to the usual patter in the textbooks, which hardly cares that the Woman is a woman, let alone a specific individual. All the same, Spurling’s vocabulary has me worried. I have the feeling that ‘courage’ and ‘will’ are exactly the kinds of totality that Matisse thought painting in 1905 – and beyond painting, modernity – had found it must do without.
Maybe we could approach the question by turning again, in a more generalising spirit, to the features of the painting that earn it a place in art history: its high-keyed colour, its high-risk handling. What were the colour and handling of? What did they stand for? Matisse’s exasperated ‘Black, obviously’ is not in the end a response simply to his acquaintances’ cheap jibes, but to the real question underlying them, to which none of us has a good answer. What is the transposition of colours in modernism – which is only the most flagrant example of a general de-realisation of means and materials, a forcing and negation built into the very texture of resemblance – intended to do?
My answer – Matisse’s answer – is that it opens onto black. It is a way of showing sensuality – sensuous experience – becoming something thought or manufactured, as opposed to felt. Denis’s ‘artificiality’ points this way. Or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘consciousness’. Here, for example, is the odious Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, rounding on Hermione:
‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! . . . Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness . . . If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography – looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’
I realise that this makes Proust, by comparison, seem a real lover of women. And Birkin, to be fair to Lawrence, is meant to be a violent and dangerous prig. (A portrait of the author.) Nothing could be further from Matisse’s tone. But tone is not everything: sometimes excess turns out to be a way to get difficult issues in focus; and I believe that Matisse’s and Lawrence’s proposals about modernity are closely linked.
Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself – to his own anxious sensibility. I think that Woman with a Hat is all about getting sensuality ‘in the head’, to use another of Birkin’s insults – making it discursive and reflexive. It is about having the immediate and passionate – having colour, in other words – become a matter of mind.
Maurice Denis was not the only modernist in 1905 to think that Woman with a Hat had got the relation between the mental and the sensual the wrong way round. André Gide, for example, wrote this of Matisse:
The canvases he shows on this occasion have the aspect of theoretical demonstrations [exposés de théorèmes] . . . a product of theories. Everything in them can be deduced, explained; intuition has nothing to do with it. No doubt when Matisse paints that woman’s forehead apple green . . . he can say to us ‘I do it because.’ Yes, this painting is reasonable, all right: it is positively argumentative [Oui, raisonnable cette peinture, et raisonneuse même plutôt].
Gide is over-clever; but he gets something right. Of course I realise that many readers, confronted by him and Denis (and the overlap between their vocabulary and arguments is striking), may feel like shaking the pair by the shoulders and telling them ‘Look again.’ How could anyone face to face with Woman with a Hat – and not just dazzled and terrified by it – have failed to see that in it intuition, accident and spontaneity are still palpably struggling with mind? And how could a painter like Maurice Denis – Nabi, neo-Catholic, ultra-Rightist – have dared call Matisse on the issue of modernism as mental game-playing? Gide and Denis’s mistake, we could say, was to think that they had identified a cold, hard condition Matisse had succumbed to, rather than one he tried to represent. As if the condition was avoidable! As if Gide and Denis were not sufferers.
Nonetheless, as I say, they were onto something. The ‘parce que’ built into the apple green line (and every other line and choice of colour in Woman with a Hat) has something truly chilling to it as well as exhilarating. For every act of sensuous realisation in Matisse has at the same time to be ‘an act of will in a field of artifice’. This is the picture’s wager, it seems to me – its root discovery about modernity. It is out to make a completely overt and sensuous likeness in which the sensuousness would be self-cancelling. It will show us sensuousness (colour) at the point of being or becoming all calculation and anxiety, all the idea of outwardness and contact, not its reality. To call this Fauvism, then, as the critics did in 1905, is one hundred per cent wrong – unless the wild beast is imagined as always looking back at the onlooker through the bars of its cage. Colour is a cage in Matisse, or a kind of armour – still reminiscent of the carapace in Cézanne’s Woman in Blue.
So Denis’s intuition of Woman with a Hat as dialectical, noumenal and self-cancelling strikes me as profoundly right. Denis, incidentally, spent a lifetime promoting a painting that would use the great outwardness of colour to vivify Idea – Idea with a capital I. But what Matisse is doing, he sees, is using colour to do an altogether different sort of dialectics. Colour would recapitulate sensuousness, but in the very process of negating itself and becoming a mental image. It would not be concentrated and intensified in the process: not supercharged and totalised by the artist’s vision, but put down in patches and fragments – acts of will, demonstrations, repetitions of the same overanxious ‘parce que’.
This is modernism as I see it. Or rather, it is modernism at its limits; at one of its moments of extremism and provocation, which do turn out (sometimes) to be its moments of renewal. Of course you will gather that I am on Matisse’s side in his dispute with Denis, but I nonetheless feel the dispute is a real one, and I feel sympathy for Denis’s side of things. Denis’s is also a modernist voice. And his wish for a form of art that would come to exist on the far side of formalism – formalism and paradox – is a vision, needless to say, that modernism has always been haunted by.
Modernism is paradox. It is dialectics. It is an art that continually, relentlessly proposes that human qualities, which once were implicit and embedded in the texture of experience – qualities of intensity, depth, directness, vividness – are on the verge of extinction. They have been outlawed, or, worse still, vulgarised and commodified, so that everywhere miniaturised and compressed kitsch images of them whirl by in the ether of information, as background to buying and selling. Modern art is an act of dialectical retrieval, in what it sees as desperate circumstances. The human will only be found again, it says, by pressing on towards the human’s opposite. Depth will be found in flatness, and spontaneity conjured out of cold technique. Absolute openness and vulnerability can only be discovered through a process of rigorous masking and formality. Affect and rationality are, at the moments that matter in Matisse, somehow bizarrely the same thing. The one is the form of the other. Fashion in modernism is always speaking Leopardi’s great line. Mr Death, it says, Mr Death. Orange is blue, and pink is sea-green. And all the colours of the rainbow are black.
Note
* Hilary Spurling’s The Unknown Matisse was reviewed by Peter Campbell in the LRB of 13 April 2000.
T.J. Clark teaches art history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book about Picasso between the wars.
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Madame Matisse’s Hat
T.J. Clark
Henri Matisse, 'Woman with a Hat'
Henri Matisse, ‘Woman with a Hat’
Henri Matisse’s portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse’s painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal L’Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have haunted our picture of 20th-century art:
What one finds above all, particularly in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still; painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting . . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings [des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct.
As a response to Matisse’s picture, these sentences may seem bizarre. To most viewers Woman with a Hat is the very epitome of the accidental and instinctive in painting. It is passionate and expressive. The hat sums up its mode. And yet Denis’s verdict, in my experience, will never entirely go away. The more one focuses on particular key passages in the painting, trying to see them as Denis-the-practitioner might have done (the strokes of colour that go to make Parayre’s mouth, nose and jaw, for instance, or the dab of purple underneath her chin), the more the element of plotting and calculation in Matisse’s procedure, almost of coldness, comes to the surface. ‘You strip [the world] of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason.’ This is absurd as a characterisation of the picture’s whole effect, but applied to Parayre’s face and look – her ‘expression’ – the words point to something real. ‘What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic.’ Wild expressiveness and cool reduction coexist. Why? With what result?
We know that Woman with a Hat was painted, at speed, towards the end of summer in 1905; a larger, more elaborate landscape painting, which Matisse had intended as the lynchpin of his exhibit at the Salon, had turned out to be unfinishable in the time remaining. Leo Stein said later that Matisse dared come only once to the Salon d’Automne to see his painting in situ, for fear of scoffers, and that Madame Matisse never came at all. Denis was not the only fellow-artist to join the hue and cry. The German painter Hans Purrmann, looking back later to his days as Matisse’s pupil and ally, tells the story of Matisse’s studio colleagues asking the painter ‘what kind of hat and what kind of dress were they that this woman had been wearing which were so incredibly loud in colour. And Matisse, exasperated, answered “Black, obviously”.’
It was a joke. But the joke was a good one; and therefore it concentrated an amount of conscious and unconscious thinking in a single reversal of terms. The joke set me thinking straight away of Baudelaire’s choice of black as the bourgeoisie’s prime colour, possessing its own ‘poetic beauty, which expresses the soul of the age; an immense cortège of professional mourners, politicians in mourning, lovers in mourning, bourgeois in mourning. We are all celebrating some funeral.’ Or, better still, of Giacomo Leopardi’s terrible Dialogue between Fashion and Death, from which Walter Benjamin chose the following line to epitomise his ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ (a line in which Fashion addresses its double directly): ‘Fashion: Mr Death! Mr Death!’ Or, best of all, of Malevich in 1923: ‘I envisaged the revolution as having no colour. Colour belongs to the past. Revolution is not decked out in colours, not ablaze with them. Colour is the fire of the ancien régime . . . Anarchy is coloured black.’
Woman with a Hat is not Malevich’s Black Square. The two are Modernism’s opposite poles: revolution on the one side, the fire of the ancien régime on the other. But they are, I believe, related. Black, in modernism, is always lurking on the other side of reds and yellows blazing. Matisse the cold calculator – ‘the anxious Matisse, the madly anxious Matisse’, as a friend described him in 1904 – is the same man as Matisse the sensualist. Colours, in a painting like Woman with a Hat, are forced apart from their normal identities so that some work of mourning, or cherishing – the two are the same, ultimately – can be carried out.
Genuine points of comparison for Woman with a Hat are few. The best seems to me a great portrait by Cézanne (we now call it Woman in Blue; it is shown overleaf), almost certainly painted just five years earlier. Nothing is known about that painting’s early exhibition history – it was eventually bought from Ambroise Vollard by Matisse’s key patron, the Russian Sergei Shchukin – but it makes sense that Matisse could have seen it, at Vollard’s or in one of the Cézanne retrospectives. In any case he certainly had the chance to study others very much like it. And Cézanne, of course, was his touchstone. It is as if Woman with a Hat began as an imagining of Cézanne’s Woman in Blue abruptly stirring from her armoured, downcast immobility and swivelling to meet the viewer’s gaze; so that the blue of Woman in Blue’s costume – which is really more negative, more deeply inhuman and inorganic even than Baudelaire’s black – leaps into coloured flame. Constraint and uneasiness are still the order of the day in Matisse, but they no longer hold the main character in a vice. Maybe there was a little too much Death in Woman in Blue for Matisse’s taste – it is easy to imagine Cézanne’s sitter contemplating a skull – and not enough of Fashion. Imagine Woman in Blue repainted by Van Gogh (another Matisse point of reference). There would still be plenty of tension and anxiety in evidence, needless to say, but everything would turn to confront us. Affect would be less painfully internalised. Modernity is outwardness, even in its moments of distress.
Paul Cézanne, 'Woman in Blue'
Paul Cézanne, ‘Woman in Blue’
Painters who revered Cézanne in the early 1900s often saw him as the master of pictorial uncertainty. They loved the strangeness of his drawing and the impenetrability of his space. Pictures he had left unfinished were especially celebrated. This enthusiasm was founded on various (by then familiar) modernist assumptions, having to do with the inherent instability and open-endedness of perception, the impossibility of totalising, the dispersal of identities in the space of desire. Do these beliefs subtend Woman with a Hat? Perhaps. Listen to Proust on the subject, in Le Côté de Guermantes – he is describing the process of giving Albertine a first kiss – and look back at Amélie Parayre’s cheek:
In short, just as at Balbec Albertine had often appeared to me different, so now, as if, prodigiously accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and changes of colouring which a person presents to us in the course of our various encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon which diversifies the individuality of a fellow-creature, and to draw out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities it contains – so now, during this brief journey of my lips towards her cheek, it was ten Albertines that I saw; this one girl being like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to approach it, gave way to another. At least so long as I had not touched that head, I could still see it, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas – for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made – suddenly my eyes ceased to see anything, and then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer smelled anything, and . . . at last I learned, from these obnoxious indications, that I was in the very act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.
Phew! Proust’s passage is irresistible, I feel, and very modern, precisely in its being unbelievable. It is an idea of observing oneself in the act of passion. Not a word of it – not even the crushed nose – rings true. But that might mean it applies all the better to what Matisse did in 1905. For Woman with a Hat seems to want to register above all the factitiousness – the made-up quality – of a face seen from inches away. All I would say is that, for me, the factitiousness in Matisse does not result in perceptual break-up or breakdown. It does not reduce the face – even the cheek and jawline – to ‘obnoxious indications’. The face is multiple, and we as observers struggle to reconcile its contrary aspects. But we can do it. The picture allows us to. The quote we need from Proust, therefore, is more modest. The human face, he writes at one point, is ‘like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but on different surfaces, so that one does not see them all at once’.
What is it we are looking at, exactly, in Woman with a Hat? I see a woman, maybe in her thirties, looking intently from under the brow of a hat. Madame Matisse was 33 in 1905, and had given birth to two children. Her hat is enormous. It participates, so historians of fashion tell us, in the mad upward climbing of hats in the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Apparently the year of maximum levitation was 1911. The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable. It is a set of signs for hat-ness, for puffing up and profusion, for Fashion at war with Death. There is never a moment at which its showmanship distracts from the intensity – the humanness – of what is going on underneath it.
We happen to know that Madame Matisse was a hatmaker, apparently a very talented one. She was a remarkably skilled needlewoman all round. Earlier the same year, in the Spring Salon des Indépendants, there had been a submission (now lost) under the name Matisse (Mme Henri): Écran tapisserie sur un carton d’André Derain. Her hatmaking, we learn from Hilary Spurling’s biography, had time and again kept her various families afloat.[*] In 1895, aged 23, she had gone to work for Aunt Nine, owner of the Grande Maison des Modes on the boulevard Saint-Denis. She did so because her father had just been thrown out of work – he was a political manager and general factotum for a financier-politician called Frédéric Humbert – by the failure of his boss’s newspaper. In 1899, a year after her marriage to Matisse, Parayre set up her own hat shop in the rue de Châteaudun, using her aunt’s contacts. It was the only way her new husband was going to be able to continue painting full-time – which apparently (Spurling makes the case humanely) she was determined to have happen. In the terrible year of 1902, when the Matisse family was swept up and all but broken by the father’s part in financial and political scandal, Parayre’s health failed and her hat-shop went under. (The shop had previously been searched by the police, looking for hidden bearer bonds.) By 1903, when the worst of the family crisis was over, she was back with Aunt Nine on the boulevard.
The hat is very far from being an innocent symbol, then. It is presumably Madame Matisse’s own handiwork, and in a sense Monsieur Matisse’s livelihood. Painting below, handicraft above. Or rather, since both spouses were emerging from a sequence of dismal years in which neither’s activity did much to pay the bills, the hat and the painting are put in an imagined (utopian) equilibrium. Fashion is livelihood, and maybe a bit of a burden; but the face – the face of survival and anxiety, the face of painting – burns underneath the flummery with a livid, unstoppable flame.
How, then, physically, did Matisse choose to show his wife facing the world? Let us say, in a preliminary fashion, that Parayre seems to be sitting somewhat sideways to us, obliquely, with her face perhaps turned back to intercept our glance. The face is not quite frontal. The two eyes equivocate about how much the further one, to our right, recedes into depth. Down below, in the body, most things are left in suspense. And I want to hang on to that uncertainty as long as I can. I do not want to see straight away what Madame Matisse is made out of. This is because I believe the painting expects its viewer not to see straight away, and even when she has seen, to be unsatisfied, or unsure, that the best-case scenario adds up.
The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?
The further I go, the more literal-minded about local colour I think I am entitled to be. And this is true to the picture: it is the other side of the implied contempt for literalness built into Matisse’s ‘Black, obviously.’ Of course there are things in the painting that are never going to settle into being equivalents for familiar parts of the world – the blue and green background on each side of the face, notably – but there are plenty of others that do so settle, or could so settle if we would let them. The neck might actually be orange, the dress might be green and blue, and the lip – that terrible, inconsolable lip – is lip-coloured. Matisse is never going to allow his viewers simply to give up on the question, ‘Do these colours refer?’ He is not willing, at this point in his career, to facilitate a viewing that settles for the whole modernist artefact being at one (consistent) imaginative remove from the world, existing stably as something the artist dreamed up. It is the jarring between likeness and transposition, or literalness and impossibility, that is the Matisse effect. And this was the jarring, the inconsistency, that put his fellow modernists’ teeth on edge.
Of course Matisse has used the ‘same’ colour, or very slight variants of it, for utterly different things. He expects us to notice this. Orange for the necklet and also the belt; pink for the jawline and for some sort of embroidery on the glove; a whitened orange (more or less a pink) to pin down something as solid as the bottom lip and the set of the chin, but then – and maybe, it seems, simultaneously – the same colour to suggest something as elusive, or at least as impalpable, as the halo round the gloved fingers; a dark purpled red (dried blood colour) for the eyebrows, the armpit, the hard line along the top of the far breast. The painting, that is to say, is sewn together by literal recurrences.
All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)
So . . . It is the local precision of colour on the face that holds the likeness together. I guess I am only stating the obvious. And so far I have only pointed to part of what happens. I have not looked at the colours and modelling on Parayre’s cheek and jaw – let us call them the Albertine part of the picture, the non-obnoxious Albertine part. And I have not really focused on the eyes – on the abstract patchwork of the two irises, and the slight shift and tilt between one eye and the next. The face is an intense circuit of equivalents, with every touch elated and investigative. The effect is all the more gripping because it goes along with the fact – which we soon become aware of, even at two or three feet away – that so much of the face is sparsely, minimally indicated. The jaw and cheek are touches, dabs, on top of largely unmodified liquid primer, tinted a light grey-green. The ear is an awkward blot, surrounded by traces of charcoal under-drawing. Always we are meant to be aware of haste, of manic and inspired economy, of sparseness on the verge of tipping over into outright erasure or inattention. But again and again the face composes itself out of the clusters and surfaces, and becomes, pace Proust, all one thing.
It is the face that matters. But the body and pose, in their very elusiveness, keep calling for a solution. At last I see what it is. Madame Matisse’s breast and shoulders – the whole spectacular lacework and corsage, or décolletage and bouquet – turn out to be no such thing. They refer, on the contrary, to the 19th century’s chief instrument of concealment, but also of signalling and revelation. Parayre is clutching a wide-open fan, with maybe a pattern of flowers on it, or even an actual bunch of flowers held against it, awkwardly. (So is the pink and yellow aureole really a crinkled paper wrapper? And is what I previously called a cane or parasol maybe not solid at all, more like the fan’s dangling tassel?) Perhaps the fan is rippled and buckled a little – as if torqued by Parayre’s grip. Would that explain what happens to its top edge towards the right? Of course, even when we opt for the fan solution to the puzzle, the marks that ought to make up the object go on escaping from the frame. The thick paint on the flowers – the white is by some way the thickest piece of paint in the picture – makes it impossible to have the flowers settle down into decoration on the fan. And yet they are never enough like real flowers to belong anywhere else. Towards the fan’s right edge the touches and patches of colour on it are truly cursory, wriggling on a dead light-purple primer. Here is the part of the picture most like poor Albertine’s cheek. ‘Obnoxious’ would be overstating things. But certainly indiscriminate – not really brought into focus.
So the interpretative question follows. Once the wide-open fan is registered as a possibility, how does Parayre change? Above all, what happens to her orientation to the viewer as a result – the way she addresses our gaze? I am not sure. I think that perhaps the fan’s presence has the effect of opening the figure slightly, and turning it more towards us. It helps the figure ‘face’ us. Or rather, it polarises the choice of readings on offer. Either the figure is facing us, or it is looking a touch obliquely – over the shoulder, with the quality of a look intercepted. The either-or quality becomes more distinct. The woman is looking and moving two ways, and the difference between the two poses becomes just a bit more noticeable, more irreconcilable, once the fan is in place – more a question of ‘duck’ versus ‘rabbit’. The face itself is still turning; but the body faces us four-square. Or maybe it is just that the fan conjures up the facing – gives us a fleeting, misleading impression of the body revealing itself – as fans were supposed to do.
Fan and hat are in cahoots. The hat’s absurd determination to face us and be a face, a second face, the face that respectable women could never, naturally, put on (a metaphor of sensuality rampant, a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises): all this, as I said before, is abstract. It cancels itself as it proliferates. It is just an idea of overtness – of sex being finally ‘in your face’. And the fan, for me, is ultimately the same kind of abstraction. Fan and hat both try to fight the face’s sensuality to a standstill, exactly by spelling out that sensuality, by making it tritely exterior. They are twin millstones. They crush and volatilise what they cover or protect. The cane is a neurasthenic’s prop.
Maybe this is too literary. But suppose we look again at the green that Matisse has put all over the place in the picture (to the right of the face especially), and see it not merely as a foil for the face’s sensuality, but as threatening and infiltrating Parayre’s vitality – a green sickness that turns her mouth into a bruise. Is this, too, forcing the note? Perhaps we could think of the green simply as a non-bodily colour, which by its nature cancels sensuality. So that even the vibrant reds and oranges of bodily orifices are not enough to conjure back fleshly existence into the space of Fashion. Is this the picture’s basic wager? Suppose we ask ourselves what we make, in this connection, of Madame Matisse’s ‘expression’? What word gets us on its wavelength? Is it guarded? Strained? Reproachful? Distrustful? Disdainful? Do you see it as touched with distaste, or anxiety, or even a mild fear? Or is she just distant? Somewhere out there on her own.
This was a woman, we know biographically, who had just been through public hell. She was tremendously armoured, but maybe understandably always waiting for the worst to happen. Spurling quotes her as saying later in life: ‘I am in my element when the house burns down.’ There were several such burnings over the course of her 20th century. And I interpret the remark as meaning that she did best – she was most fully herself – when actual catastrophe took the place of potential one. The potential catastrophe she had learned to believe life always was.
It is all very modern. Parayre’s eyes, mouth and eyebrows are how I imagine Freud’s Dora’s to have been, or Ursula Brangwen’s, or Maggie Verver’s. ‘Hold on tight, my poor dear,’ Maggie says to herself as the noose tightens, ‘without too much terror – and it will all come out somehow.’
Spurling believes that Woman with a Hat ‘is among other things a portrait of Amélie’s courage, her will and her passionate, exacting faith in the painter’. I admire the interpretation, and certainly prefer it to the usual patter in the textbooks, which hardly cares that the Woman is a woman, let alone a specific individual. All the same, Spurling’s vocabulary has me worried. I have the feeling that ‘courage’ and ‘will’ are exactly the kinds of totality that Matisse thought painting in 1905 – and beyond painting, modernity – had found it must do without.
Maybe we could approach the question by turning again, in a more generalising spirit, to the features of the painting that earn it a place in art history: its high-keyed colour, its high-risk handling. What were the colour and handling of? What did they stand for? Matisse’s exasperated ‘Black, obviously’ is not in the end a response simply to his acquaintances’ cheap jibes, but to the real question underlying them, to which none of us has a good answer. What is the transposition of colours in modernism – which is only the most flagrant example of a general de-realisation of means and materials, a forcing and negation built into the very texture of resemblance – intended to do?
My answer – Matisse’s answer – is that it opens onto black. It is a way of showing sensuality – sensuous experience – becoming something thought or manufactured, as opposed to felt. Denis’s ‘artificiality’ points this way. Or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘consciousness’. Here, for example, is the odious Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, rounding on Hermione:
‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! . . . Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness . . . If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography – looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’
I realise that this makes Proust, by comparison, seem a real lover of women. And Birkin, to be fair to Lawrence, is meant to be a violent and dangerous prig. (A portrait of the author.) Nothing could be further from Matisse’s tone. But tone is not everything: sometimes excess turns out to be a way to get difficult issues in focus; and I believe that Matisse’s and Lawrence’s proposals about modernity are closely linked.
Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself – to his own anxious sensibility. I think that Woman with a Hat is all about getting sensuality ‘in the head’, to use another of Birkin’s insults – making it discursive and reflexive. It is about having the immediate and passionate – having colour, in other words – become a matter of mind.
Maurice Denis was not the only modernist in 1905 to think that Woman with a Hat had got the relation between the mental and the sensual the wrong way round. André Gide, for example, wrote this of Matisse:
The canvases he shows on this occasion have the aspect of theoretical demonstrations [exposés de théorèmes] . . . a product of theories. Everything in them can be deduced, explained; intuition has nothing to do with it. No doubt when Matisse paints that woman’s forehead apple green . . . he can say to us ‘I do it because.’ Yes, this painting is reasonable, all right: it is positively argumentative [Oui, raisonnable cette peinture, et raisonneuse même plutôt].
Gide is over-clever; but he gets something right. Of course I realise that many readers, confronted by him and Denis (and the overlap between their vocabulary and arguments is striking), may feel like shaking the pair by the shoulders and telling them ‘Look again.’ How could anyone face to face with Woman with a Hat – and not just dazzled and terrified by it – have failed to see that in it intuition, accident and spontaneity are still palpably struggling with mind? And how could a painter like Maurice Denis – Nabi, neo-Catholic, ultra-Rightist – have dared call Matisse on the issue of modernism as mental game-playing? Gide and Denis’s mistake, we could say, was to think that they had identified a cold, hard condition Matisse had succumbed to, rather than one he tried to represent. As if the condition was avoidable! As if Gide and Denis were not sufferers.
Nonetheless, as I say, they were onto something. The ‘parce que’ built into the apple green line (and every other line and choice of colour in Woman with a Hat) has something truly chilling to it as well as exhilarating. For every act of sensuous realisation in Matisse has at the same time to be ‘an act of will in a field of artifice’. This is the picture’s wager, it seems to me – its root discovery about modernity. It is out to make a completely overt and sensuous likeness in which the sensuousness would be self-cancelling. It will show us sensuousness (colour) at the point of being or becoming all calculation and anxiety, all the idea of outwardness and contact, not its reality. To call this Fauvism, then, as the critics did in 1905, is one hundred per cent wrong – unless the wild beast is imagined as always looking back at the onlooker through the bars of its cage. Colour is a cage in Matisse, or a kind of armour – still reminiscent of the carapace in Cézanne’s Woman in Blue.
So Denis’s intuition of Woman with a Hat as dialectical, noumenal and self-cancelling strikes me as profoundly right. Denis, incidentally, spent a lifetime promoting a painting that would use the great outwardness of colour to vivify Idea – Idea with a capital I. But what Matisse is doing, he sees, is using colour to do an altogether different sort of dialectics. Colour would recapitulate sensuousness, but in the very process of negating itself and becoming a mental image. It would not be concentrated and intensified in the process: not supercharged and totalised by the artist’s vision, but put down in patches and fragments – acts of will, demonstrations, repetitions of the same overanxious ‘parce que’.
This is modernism as I see it. Or rather, it is modernism at its limits; at one of its moments of extremism and provocation, which do turn out (sometimes) to be its moments of renewal. Of course you will gather that I am on Matisse’s side in his dispute with Denis, but I nonetheless feel the dispute is a real one, and I feel sympathy for Denis’s side of things. Denis’s is also a modernist voice. And his wish for a form of art that would come to exist on the far side of formalism – formalism and paradox – is a vision, needless to say, that modernism has always been haunted by.
Modernism is paradox. It is dialectics. It is an art that continually, relentlessly proposes that human qualities, which once were implicit and embedded in the texture of experience – qualities of intensity, depth, directness, vividness – are on the verge of extinction. They have been outlawed, or, worse still, vulgarised and commodified, so that everywhere miniaturised and compressed kitsch images of them whirl by in the ether of information, as background to buying and selling. Modern art is an act of dialectical retrieval, in what it sees as desperate circumstances. The human will only be found again, it says, by pressing on towards the human’s opposite. Depth will be found in flatness, and spontaneity conjured out of cold technique. Absolute openness and vulnerability can only be discovered through a process of rigorous masking and formality. Affect and rationality are, at the moments that matter in Matisse, somehow bizarrely the same thing. The one is the form of the other. Fashion in modernism is always speaking Leopardi’s great line. Mr Death, it says, Mr Death. Orange is blue, and pink is sea-green. And all the colours of the rainbow are black.
Note
* Hilary Spurling’s The Unknown Matisse was reviewed by Peter Campbell in the LRB of 13 April 2000.
T.J. Clark teaches art history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book about Picasso between the wars.
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Consumer Nation
Consumer Nation
By Richard M. Abrams
A BLOOMING INDUSTRY among pundits, journalists, historians, and others celebrates, although more often deplores, America as “a consumer society.” One prize-winning historian has described the country as “A Consumer’s Republic,” suggesting that consumers own the place. Another argues how consumers “shaped” American politics even from the very beginning of the nation in the eighteenth century. Still another argues that it was consumer interests that “fueled liberal politics” from at least the beginning of the twentieth century. [1]
See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
Not everyone agrees on what is meant by the term. But the elements of the idea include the importance of consumer goods for recreation, for creature comforts, for self-esteem, for social standing, for the country’s prosperity, and in general for Americans’ access to affluence.
But can “consumer society” also accurately describe the American polity? I think not.
To characterize the United States as “a consumer society” at any time in its history misdirects attention from its most important and persistent trait. Whether the economy is fueled by Americans’ avid shopping for consumer goods or by industry’s consumption of capital goods, the focus of the economy and of public policy in America has remained on production. For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a surge of national legislation designed by and for consumer interests. Except for that brief window, American politics has turned almost exclusively on the competition for government favor among rival claims for the rewards of production. For businesses and employers, that meant tax exemptions, depletion allowances, infrastructure development, legal and police restraints on labor agitation and unions, protective tariffs to insure profits, direct subsidies to selected industries, assistance in promoting exports, tort reform, and various other profit-generating incentives. For labor, it meant support for improving wages and working conditions, social insurance, immigration restrictions, protective tariffs to ensure jobs, and collective bargaining rights. For farmers it also meant (different) tariff walls, special access to foreign workers during harvest season, government protection against the spread of agricultural pests and disease, subsidies for crop-improvement research, as well as direct subsidies to boost commodity prices and, indeed, to pad the incomes of certain farmers and agribusinesses.
The Food and Drugs and the Meat Inspection Acts of the Progressive Era might seem to be exceptions. But in fact they are not. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry, his focus was on working conditions—the conditions under which the producers labored. And although consumers must have responded as consumers to reports of contaminated meats, what pushed the legislation through was the pressure from Swift, Armour, Cudahy, and other big packers. They needed the government’s imprimatur to overcome the foreign embargoes against their export business that followed from the turn-of-the-century scandals about spoilage, contamination, and adulteration—a problem created mostly by small packers who needed to cut corners to survive in competition with the biggies. The same was true of the Federal Drug Administration, where honest-to-goodness pharmaceutical companies needed to overcome the popularity (among consumers) of the snake-oil hucksters and Lydia Pinkham’s highly successful patent medicine. These were producers’ triumphs, not consumer victories, however much consumers may have benefited as the result of the contest for advantage among competing sectors of an industry.
What about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? A consumer victory? Not so. U.S. antitrust policy originated primarily in an effort to protect competitors rather than consumers; to stop the “trusts” from “denying the rights of the common man in business,” as one congressman put it in 1900. [2]
The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
According to prevailing theory, a competitive multitude among producers not only checked the concentration of power in the country but, equally important, served to build individual character upon which the success of a self-governing people vitally depended. “Only through the participation by the many in the responsibilities and determinations of business,” wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in Liggett v. Lee, an early-twentieth-century antitrust case, “can Americans secure the moral and intellectual development essential to the maintenance of liberty.”
The nation’s political history simply does not support the notion of America as “a consumer society.” For only about the previously mentioned five years or so at the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century were federal and some state laws and regulations passed to protect consumers against flawed and dangerous products. Only then were manufacturers required to inform consumers with some precision just what it was that they would soon put in their house or in their mouth. Only then would producers be required to print on their packages the true ingredients of products and their net weights and to provide information about ingredients such as peanut or sesame oil that could activate fatal allergic reactions in some consumers. Only then did public policy transfer back to producers, at least partially, the external costs of production that for more than a century the society at large had absorbed in the form of ailments and injuries arising from hazardous product ingredients, hazardous working conditions, and polluted soil, air, and water.
It took a series of scandals to bring consumer interests to the attention of American politics. The thalidomide disaster of 1961–1962 called attention to the FDA’s poor servicing of consumers’ interest in safe pharmaceuticals. The work of Ralph Nader early in the sixties projected a spotlight on corporate arrogance by exposing the attempt by General Motors to cover up the flawed design of the company’s subcompact, Corvair, which had a lamentable tendency to flip over when making sharp turns.
BUT THE BRIEF enthusiasm for consumer interests soon dissipated. By 1975, government policies had reverted to their almost exclusive emphasis on producers’ concerns. As the deregulation movement got under way, new transgressions against consumers gained little attention. Ford management memoranda revealed that the company had coldly calculated that to recall its Pinto model, because the gasoline tank was dangerously situated, would be more expensive than to pay off the many victims of incendiary crashes (at an officially estimated cost of $200,000 per human life). There was no recall. The state of Illinois lost a criminal case against the company because it was determined that the government’s “risk/benefit” formula, designed to encourage “economic efficiency,” protected producers from liability when the cost of minimizing the risks to human safety exceeded the anticipated social benefits.
Congress and the American people continued to make clear their overwhelming preference for producer interests over consumer interests. Early in the decade, the government permitted the railroad companies to cut passenger service, thereby making it more difficult for people to travel and helping to clog the highways with automobiles. Even today, many states require passenger trains to yield the right of way to freight trains, further discouraging rail travel by greatly lengthening intercity trips.
In 1977, Congress defeated a measure to require used-car dealers to reveal to customers what might be wrong with the heaps they were hawking. The nation’s representatives followed that up by rejecting proposals to elevate a Consumer Protection Administration to cabinet level, alongside the producer-promoting departments of Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce.
In the 1980s, despite a decades-long-delayed court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission had to permit consumer interests to present their views to the commission at hearings on the distribution of radio and television frequencies, the FCC, with the tacit approval of Congress, persisted in giving its attention solely to producer groups. Only industry members continued to have meaningful access to the FCC, to the exclusion of consumers’ concerns for quality, educational, or public interest programming. [3]
See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
At the same time, the public’s interest in access to political information took a backseat to the media corporations’ “free speech” rights, when the courts ruled that the FCC could not require radio and television stations—increasingly controlled by a dwindling handful of megacorporate managers—to permit rebuttals to editorials and programs that promoted particular political, social, or religious causes. Consumers’ interest in a balanced, authoritative presentation of information—the crucial ingredient of “rational choice” in a market-oriented polity—was the distinct loser.
Producer lobbying—and that includes farmers, union workers, processors, and manufacturers—continued to frustrate the efforts of consumer groups and even foreign governments to require U.S. food marketers to properly label goods that contained ingredients that had undergone hormone or gene-altering treatment. There may be nothing wrong with the use of hormones or with gene-engineering for foods, but one might believe that consumers should have the right to know about them. Nor were efforts successful to require producers and distributors of many fresh food products to specify the country or state of origin.
With the advent of George W. Bush’s presidency, the reactionary drift became a landslide. Consumer interests were deliberately excluded from policymaking, whether in the shaping of energy policy, conserving open space, wetlands, and wilderness areas, controlling climate-changing and toxic industrial and vehicular emissions, or restraining monopoly power among producer firms, especially in the media, energy, and financial sectors. Pro-producer measures during the administration of George the Second would reach what many people once considered to be unimaginable levels. In 2005, for example, the agriculture department prohibited cattle ranchers from testing their own animals for Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease, because such testing might give consumers information that could injure the industry. The FDA refused to require pharmaceutical companies to make public the outcome of their own tests on their old and new products, although some of those secret tests turned up dangerous side effects. Inevitably, there arose scandals of cover-ups once individual tragedies came to light. [4]
See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2006, government agencies withheld information for several days about an E. coli outbreak traceable to domestic spinach on the grounds that such information might “panic” consumers and injure producers. Consumers’ access to information that could affect their health was blocked because of producers’ higher interests.
In 2003, Bush proposed eliminating or reducing to insignificance the income tax as the main source of government revenues, substituting instead a tax on consumption. The country had long been gravitating toward a revenue system that relied heavily on sales and excise taxes, and most particularly on user fees (tuition, tolls, licenses, permits, admission fees for museums, public gardens, and zoos, as well as parking fees at hiking trailheads, park picnic sites, and metro stations), all burdens imposed directly on consumers.
Then there are the judicial decisions that make it impossible to impose significant penalties on producers even after they are found guilty of having lied over decades about the dangers of their products. In August 2006, a federal judge ruled that the cigarette companies charged with violating racketeering laws had systematically deceived the public for five decades about the dangers of tobacco. The companies’ executives knew all that time that the products that they aggressively sold to the public had toxic and potentially fatal ingredients, while they publicly lied (at one time, under oath before a congressional committee) about the safety of their products. But, the judge said, she did not have the authority to order significant financial remedies. Why? Because an industry-friendly appellate court had ruled earlier that sanctions against the law violators must be “forward looking,” meaning the courts could not impose substantial fines for past crimes but essentially could only order a change in the industry’s future behavior. The Wall Street Journal remarked, “For most companies a finding from a federal judge that they were racketeers would be a stinging blow,” but “their efforts to hide the risks of smoking are well known,” and so there was no reason to expect that their already tarnished image would suffer any further. The ruling produced an immediate surge in the price of tobacco company securities. A producer-friendly appellate court earlier had also ruled that the government could not seek to recover from the industry the public’s costs in treating Americans whose health suffered from the fraud perpetrated over the decades by the companies.
BUT THE PRIORITY of producer over consumer interests should not require revelations from the media. It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and bodies to be comforted. Contemplate the design of most airplanes and airports and explain how high consumer/user interests rank in the society’s priorities. Enter an airport and sit, sometimes for hours, with a thousand other consumers of airline services in a stifling waiting room with a twelve-foot ceiling; or wedge yourself into a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch seat, where your neighbor’s backrest protrudes within a foot of your chest; or stand anxiously by one of the four or five toilets provided onboard to serve four hundred passengers and try to imagine how lucky you are to live in “a consumer society.” Nor do the rules seem consumer-friendly that allow overbooked airlines to bump passengers waiting to board; or to deny a passenger the right to switch to another airline without further charges when various troubles on the booked airline lead to many hours of delay, and sometimes cause cancellation too late for a passenger to find a reasonable alternative mode of travel—to say nothing of the costs of missing a connecting flight.
How consumer friendly are those gas stations (once called service stations) that require consumers to pump their own gas or else pay an outsize premium per gallon? And can there be more frustrating moments in a working day than fighting with an electronic “pay station” in parking garages and lots that employ no attendants at all (“cost savings”) and where the often balky machine must produce an entry ticket; and then later process the parking slip to permit exiting?
How are consumer interests served when personal telephone records are legally available for a price and for sale at a profit? (Locatecell.com is only one corporation that legally mines and then sells such information to any business or government agency that cares to pay for it.) Consumers of cell-phone services come last when producers see profit opportunities. The same applies to the records kept by department stores, brokerage houses, banks, and insurance companies whose “privacy” notices explain how their clientele have in fact no privacy rights whatever. (Read the fine print.) Nor are personal medical records exempted from the profiteering work of data miners. (Try the Medical Information Bureau.)
How well are consumer interests served when the law allows pushers of products to intrude at will upon our telephones, Internet, and fax machines? Or to pop ads onto television screens, more or less continuously, during an ongoing drama, sitcom, or sports program; or onto a computer screen, sometimes freezing a word-processing session? Can one rent a DVD anymore without having to endure multiple ads for other films before being permitted to see the film rented? To say nothing of the fifteen or twenty minutes of both film and product advertising forced on moviegoers before the film they have paid for appears on the screen. Even national public radio and television stations, partly supported by consumer subscriptions, now present several minutes of ads each hour, necessitated by cuts in congressional support. More than eighty years ago, that old radical Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce when radio was new, declared. “It is unconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising.” [5]
Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.
How quaint!
Consumers are themselves to blame, seeing themselves first as producers rather than consumers. If there are many who would complain, the media—which are dependent on producers’ ads—are not likely to give them much time or space. But who’s complaining?
If America has become truly “a consumer society,” its politics and policies hardly reflect it. It would be much more accurate to speak of “consumerism” as a producer’s target; or even as a producer’s invention. Of course, “All producers are also consumers; and probably most consumers are also producers.” But it is the capacity in which people conceive of themselves that drives policy. And if it is at all possible to infer that public policy reflects public desires, then we must deduce that for all the centrality of consumer goods for the maintenance of a prosperous economy, for bolstering self-respect, for satisfying recreational desires, and for making claims to social standing, Americans still think of themselves first and above all as producers rather than as consumers.
Richard M. Abrams is a professor of the Graduate School in the Department of History at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941-2001 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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FOOTNOTES:
* [1] See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
* [2] The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
* [3] See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
* [4] See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
* [5] Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.
Copyright: Dissent
By Richard M. Abrams
A BLOOMING INDUSTRY among pundits, journalists, historians, and others celebrates, although more often deplores, America as “a consumer society.” One prize-winning historian has described the country as “A Consumer’s Republic,” suggesting that consumers own the place. Another argues how consumers “shaped” American politics even from the very beginning of the nation in the eighteenth century. Still another argues that it was consumer interests that “fueled liberal politics” from at least the beginning of the twentieth century. [1]
See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
Not everyone agrees on what is meant by the term. But the elements of the idea include the importance of consumer goods for recreation, for creature comforts, for self-esteem, for social standing, for the country’s prosperity, and in general for Americans’ access to affluence.
But can “consumer society” also accurately describe the American polity? I think not.
To characterize the United States as “a consumer society” at any time in its history misdirects attention from its most important and persistent trait. Whether the economy is fueled by Americans’ avid shopping for consumer goods or by industry’s consumption of capital goods, the focus of the economy and of public policy in America has remained on production. For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a surge of national legislation designed by and for consumer interests. Except for that brief window, American politics has turned almost exclusively on the competition for government favor among rival claims for the rewards of production. For businesses and employers, that meant tax exemptions, depletion allowances, infrastructure development, legal and police restraints on labor agitation and unions, protective tariffs to insure profits, direct subsidies to selected industries, assistance in promoting exports, tort reform, and various other profit-generating incentives. For labor, it meant support for improving wages and working conditions, social insurance, immigration restrictions, protective tariffs to ensure jobs, and collective bargaining rights. For farmers it also meant (different) tariff walls, special access to foreign workers during harvest season, government protection against the spread of agricultural pests and disease, subsidies for crop-improvement research, as well as direct subsidies to boost commodity prices and, indeed, to pad the incomes of certain farmers and agribusinesses.
The Food and Drugs and the Meat Inspection Acts of the Progressive Era might seem to be exceptions. But in fact they are not. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry, his focus was on working conditions—the conditions under which the producers labored. And although consumers must have responded as consumers to reports of contaminated meats, what pushed the legislation through was the pressure from Swift, Armour, Cudahy, and other big packers. They needed the government’s imprimatur to overcome the foreign embargoes against their export business that followed from the turn-of-the-century scandals about spoilage, contamination, and adulteration—a problem created mostly by small packers who needed to cut corners to survive in competition with the biggies. The same was true of the Federal Drug Administration, where honest-to-goodness pharmaceutical companies needed to overcome the popularity (among consumers) of the snake-oil hucksters and Lydia Pinkham’s highly successful patent medicine. These were producers’ triumphs, not consumer victories, however much consumers may have benefited as the result of the contest for advantage among competing sectors of an industry.
What about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? A consumer victory? Not so. U.S. antitrust policy originated primarily in an effort to protect competitors rather than consumers; to stop the “trusts” from “denying the rights of the common man in business,” as one congressman put it in 1900. [2]
The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
According to prevailing theory, a competitive multitude among producers not only checked the concentration of power in the country but, equally important, served to build individual character upon which the success of a self-governing people vitally depended. “Only through the participation by the many in the responsibilities and determinations of business,” wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in Liggett v. Lee, an early-twentieth-century antitrust case, “can Americans secure the moral and intellectual development essential to the maintenance of liberty.”
The nation’s political history simply does not support the notion of America as “a consumer society.” For only about the previously mentioned five years or so at the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century were federal and some state laws and regulations passed to protect consumers against flawed and dangerous products. Only then were manufacturers required to inform consumers with some precision just what it was that they would soon put in their house or in their mouth. Only then would producers be required to print on their packages the true ingredients of products and their net weights and to provide information about ingredients such as peanut or sesame oil that could activate fatal allergic reactions in some consumers. Only then did public policy transfer back to producers, at least partially, the external costs of production that for more than a century the society at large had absorbed in the form of ailments and injuries arising from hazardous product ingredients, hazardous working conditions, and polluted soil, air, and water.
It took a series of scandals to bring consumer interests to the attention of American politics. The thalidomide disaster of 1961–1962 called attention to the FDA’s poor servicing of consumers’ interest in safe pharmaceuticals. The work of Ralph Nader early in the sixties projected a spotlight on corporate arrogance by exposing the attempt by General Motors to cover up the flawed design of the company’s subcompact, Corvair, which had a lamentable tendency to flip over when making sharp turns.
BUT THE BRIEF enthusiasm for consumer interests soon dissipated. By 1975, government policies had reverted to their almost exclusive emphasis on producers’ concerns. As the deregulation movement got under way, new transgressions against consumers gained little attention. Ford management memoranda revealed that the company had coldly calculated that to recall its Pinto model, because the gasoline tank was dangerously situated, would be more expensive than to pay off the many victims of incendiary crashes (at an officially estimated cost of $200,000 per human life). There was no recall. The state of Illinois lost a criminal case against the company because it was determined that the government’s “risk/benefit” formula, designed to encourage “economic efficiency,” protected producers from liability when the cost of minimizing the risks to human safety exceeded the anticipated social benefits.
Congress and the American people continued to make clear their overwhelming preference for producer interests over consumer interests. Early in the decade, the government permitted the railroad companies to cut passenger service, thereby making it more difficult for people to travel and helping to clog the highways with automobiles. Even today, many states require passenger trains to yield the right of way to freight trains, further discouraging rail travel by greatly lengthening intercity trips.
In 1977, Congress defeated a measure to require used-car dealers to reveal to customers what might be wrong with the heaps they were hawking. The nation’s representatives followed that up by rejecting proposals to elevate a Consumer Protection Administration to cabinet level, alongside the producer-promoting departments of Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce.
In the 1980s, despite a decades-long-delayed court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission had to permit consumer interests to present their views to the commission at hearings on the distribution of radio and television frequencies, the FCC, with the tacit approval of Congress, persisted in giving its attention solely to producer groups. Only industry members continued to have meaningful access to the FCC, to the exclusion of consumers’ concerns for quality, educational, or public interest programming. [3]
See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
At the same time, the public’s interest in access to political information took a backseat to the media corporations’ “free speech” rights, when the courts ruled that the FCC could not require radio and television stations—increasingly controlled by a dwindling handful of megacorporate managers—to permit rebuttals to editorials and programs that promoted particular political, social, or religious causes. Consumers’ interest in a balanced, authoritative presentation of information—the crucial ingredient of “rational choice” in a market-oriented polity—was the distinct loser.
Producer lobbying—and that includes farmers, union workers, processors, and manufacturers—continued to frustrate the efforts of consumer groups and even foreign governments to require U.S. food marketers to properly label goods that contained ingredients that had undergone hormone or gene-altering treatment. There may be nothing wrong with the use of hormones or with gene-engineering for foods, but one might believe that consumers should have the right to know about them. Nor were efforts successful to require producers and distributors of many fresh food products to specify the country or state of origin.
With the advent of George W. Bush’s presidency, the reactionary drift became a landslide. Consumer interests were deliberately excluded from policymaking, whether in the shaping of energy policy, conserving open space, wetlands, and wilderness areas, controlling climate-changing and toxic industrial and vehicular emissions, or restraining monopoly power among producer firms, especially in the media, energy, and financial sectors. Pro-producer measures during the administration of George the Second would reach what many people once considered to be unimaginable levels. In 2005, for example, the agriculture department prohibited cattle ranchers from testing their own animals for Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease, because such testing might give consumers information that could injure the industry. The FDA refused to require pharmaceutical companies to make public the outcome of their own tests on their old and new products, although some of those secret tests turned up dangerous side effects. Inevitably, there arose scandals of cover-ups once individual tragedies came to light. [4]
See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2006, government agencies withheld information for several days about an E. coli outbreak traceable to domestic spinach on the grounds that such information might “panic” consumers and injure producers. Consumers’ access to information that could affect their health was blocked because of producers’ higher interests.
In 2003, Bush proposed eliminating or reducing to insignificance the income tax as the main source of government revenues, substituting instead a tax on consumption. The country had long been gravitating toward a revenue system that relied heavily on sales and excise taxes, and most particularly on user fees (tuition, tolls, licenses, permits, admission fees for museums, public gardens, and zoos, as well as parking fees at hiking trailheads, park picnic sites, and metro stations), all burdens imposed directly on consumers.
Then there are the judicial decisions that make it impossible to impose significant penalties on producers even after they are found guilty of having lied over decades about the dangers of their products. In August 2006, a federal judge ruled that the cigarette companies charged with violating racketeering laws had systematically deceived the public for five decades about the dangers of tobacco. The companies’ executives knew all that time that the products that they aggressively sold to the public had toxic and potentially fatal ingredients, while they publicly lied (at one time, under oath before a congressional committee) about the safety of their products. But, the judge said, she did not have the authority to order significant financial remedies. Why? Because an industry-friendly appellate court had ruled earlier that sanctions against the law violators must be “forward looking,” meaning the courts could not impose substantial fines for past crimes but essentially could only order a change in the industry’s future behavior. The Wall Street Journal remarked, “For most companies a finding from a federal judge that they were racketeers would be a stinging blow,” but “their efforts to hide the risks of smoking are well known,” and so there was no reason to expect that their already tarnished image would suffer any further. The ruling produced an immediate surge in the price of tobacco company securities. A producer-friendly appellate court earlier had also ruled that the government could not seek to recover from the industry the public’s costs in treating Americans whose health suffered from the fraud perpetrated over the decades by the companies.
BUT THE PRIORITY of producer over consumer interests should not require revelations from the media. It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and bodies to be comforted. Contemplate the design of most airplanes and airports and explain how high consumer/user interests rank in the society’s priorities. Enter an airport and sit, sometimes for hours, with a thousand other consumers of airline services in a stifling waiting room with a twelve-foot ceiling; or wedge yourself into a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch seat, where your neighbor’s backrest protrudes within a foot of your chest; or stand anxiously by one of the four or five toilets provided onboard to serve four hundred passengers and try to imagine how lucky you are to live in “a consumer society.” Nor do the rules seem consumer-friendly that allow overbooked airlines to bump passengers waiting to board; or to deny a passenger the right to switch to another airline without further charges when various troubles on the booked airline lead to many hours of delay, and sometimes cause cancellation too late for a passenger to find a reasonable alternative mode of travel—to say nothing of the costs of missing a connecting flight.
How consumer friendly are those gas stations (once called service stations) that require consumers to pump their own gas or else pay an outsize premium per gallon? And can there be more frustrating moments in a working day than fighting with an electronic “pay station” in parking garages and lots that employ no attendants at all (“cost savings”) and where the often balky machine must produce an entry ticket; and then later process the parking slip to permit exiting?
How are consumer interests served when personal telephone records are legally available for a price and for sale at a profit? (Locatecell.com is only one corporation that legally mines and then sells such information to any business or government agency that cares to pay for it.) Consumers of cell-phone services come last when producers see profit opportunities. The same applies to the records kept by department stores, brokerage houses, banks, and insurance companies whose “privacy” notices explain how their clientele have in fact no privacy rights whatever. (Read the fine print.) Nor are personal medical records exempted from the profiteering work of data miners. (Try the Medical Information Bureau.)
How well are consumer interests served when the law allows pushers of products to intrude at will upon our telephones, Internet, and fax machines? Or to pop ads onto television screens, more or less continuously, during an ongoing drama, sitcom, or sports program; or onto a computer screen, sometimes freezing a word-processing session? Can one rent a DVD anymore without having to endure multiple ads for other films before being permitted to see the film rented? To say nothing of the fifteen or twenty minutes of both film and product advertising forced on moviegoers before the film they have paid for appears on the screen. Even national public radio and television stations, partly supported by consumer subscriptions, now present several minutes of ads each hour, necessitated by cuts in congressional support. More than eighty years ago, that old radical Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce when radio was new, declared. “It is unconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising.” [5]
Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.
How quaint!
Consumers are themselves to blame, seeing themselves first as producers rather than consumers. If there are many who would complain, the media—which are dependent on producers’ ads—are not likely to give them much time or space. But who’s complaining?
If America has become truly “a consumer society,” its politics and policies hardly reflect it. It would be much more accurate to speak of “consumerism” as a producer’s target; or even as a producer’s invention. Of course, “All producers are also consumers; and probably most consumers are also producers.” But it is the capacity in which people conceive of themselves that drives policy. And if it is at all possible to infer that public policy reflects public desires, then we must deduce that for all the centrality of consumer goods for the maintenance of a prosperous economy, for bolstering self-respect, for satisfying recreational desires, and for making claims to social standing, Americans still think of themselves first and above all as producers rather than as consumers.
Richard M. Abrams is a professor of the Graduate School in the Department of History at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941-2001 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
top | print | email
FOOTNOTES:
* [1] See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
* [2] The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
* [3] See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
* [4] See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
* [5] Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.
Copyright: Dissent
The 2008 Convention: Americans Gathering To Change The Course Of A Nation
The 2008 Convention: Americans Gathering To Change The Course Of A Nation
Program Schedule
Monday, August 25 – One Nation
Barack Obama’s story is an American story that reflects a life of struggle, opportunity and responsibility like those faced by Americans everyday. The opening night of the Convention will highlight Barack’s life story, his commitment to change, and the voices of Americans who are calling for a new direction for this country.
Monday’s headline prime-time speaker will be Michelle Obama.
3:00 PM - 7:00 PM (LOCAL)
Call to Order
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Former Governor of Vermont
Invocation
The Honorable Polly Baca – Greeley, Colorado
Former Colorado State Senator
President & CEO Latin American Research & Service Agency
Presentation of Colors
Navajo Code Talkers Association
Keith Little, Frank Willeto, Bill Toledo, Jimmy Begay
Pledge of Allegiance
Angela Morgan –Alexandria, Virginia
Served 9 years in the Marines and now runs a leadership development small business
National Anthem
Colorado Children's Chorale
Group over 30-years old – Tad Koriath (piano)
Local children (7-14) performing throughout US & the world (China, Asia, Europe, etc.)
Welcome
Reverend Leah D. Daughtry
Convention CEO & Chief of Staff, Democratic National Committee
Video - “Welcome to the West”
Introduction of and Report by the Credentials Committee
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Eliseo Roques-Arroyo
Co-Chair Credentials Committee
Former Executive Director, Democratic Party of Puerto Rico
James Roosevelt, Jr.
Co-Chair Credentials Committee
Pres. & CEO Tuffs Health Plan (HMO) and grandson of FDR
The Honorable Alexis Herman
Co Chair Credentials Committee
Former US Secretary of Labor
Introduction of and Report by the Rules Committee
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Sunita Leeds
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Chair of the DNC Indo-American Leadership Council
The Honorable Mary Rose Oakar
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Former Member of the US Congress, Ohio,
President of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee
The Honorable David Walters
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Former Governor of Oklahoma
President of Walters Power International
Video - Changing the Course of Our Nation
Featuring Ashley Baia -Native of Pennsylvania and an Obama field organizer mentioned in Obama's Philadelphia speech. Know as the "sandwich girl" who, at age 9, convinced her mother she liked mustard & relish sandwiches to save money while her mother was fighting cancer. She is now twenty-three.
Introduction of Convention Co-Chairs
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
The Honorable Shirley Franklin
Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia
The Honorable Leticia Van de Putte
State Senator, Texas District 26
The Honorable Kathleen Sebelius
Governor of Kansas
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the US House of Representatives
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
Permanent Chair of the 2008 Democratic National Convention
Turning Over the Gavel
The Honorable Howard Dean, temporary Chair of the Convention turns over the gavel to
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Permanent Chair of the 2008 Democratic Convention.
Remarks
The Honorable Doris Matsui, Parliamentarian
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
Andrew Tobias, Treasurer
Democratic Party Treasurer
Remarks by the Secretary and the Electronic Roll Call of Attendance
Alice Travis Germond - West Virginia
Secretary, Democratic Party
Member of the Democratic National Committee
Remarks – Presentation of Platform
The Honorable Patricia Madrid
Co-Chair Platform Committee
Attorney General of New Mexico
Judith McHale
Co-Chair Platform Committee
Business Executive (former President, Discovery Communications; Board of DigitalGlobal)
Remarks
The Honorable John Hickenlooper
Mayor of Denver, Colorado
Congressional Hispanic Caucus
The Honorable Joe Baca
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
The Honorable Grace Napolitano
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
The Honorable Silvestre Reyes
Member of the US House of Representatives, Texas
Remarks
Nancy Keenan
President, NARAL - Pro-Choice America
The Honorable Emil Jones, Jr.
State Senator, Illinois
Amanda Kubik
Young Delegate – North Dakota
Ret. Rear Admiral John Hutson,
Pres. Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord – lifetime Republican
Reg Weaver
President, National Education Association
The Honorable Manuel Diaz
Mayor of Miami, Florida
Video - Changing the Course of Our Nation
Featuring Gabrielle Grossman
New Hampshire Obama Supporter "U2 mamma for Obama"
Remarks
The Honorable Lisa Madigan
Attorney General, Illinois
The Honorable Dan Hynes
Comptroller, Illinois
The Honorable Alexi Giannoulis
State Treasurer, Illinois
Randi Weingarten
American Federation of Teachers
The Honorable Amy Klobuchar
US Senator, Minnesota
Musical Performance
John Legend (vocals & piano) and accompanied by:
Agape Choir - International Spiritual Center, Culver City, CA
Trans-denominational Spiritual Community founded by Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith
Video/Remarks
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the US House of Representatives
Permanent Chair, Democratic National Convention
Video - First Time Delegates: Renewing America's Promise
America’s Town Hall – Economy
Moderator: Senator Sherrod Brown - Ohio,
Panelists: Ned Helms, Lisa Olivares, Dr. Laura Tyson, Jon Schnur
Remarks
Margie Perez
New Orleans jazz singer & song writer from Musicians Village
President Jimmy Carter Segment
Jimmy Carter/New Orleans Video
Acknowledgment of President Carter
Remarks
Maya Soetoro-Ng
Half-sister of Barack Obama
High School teacher - Hawaii
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Remarks
The Honorable Jesse Jackson, Jr.
Member of the US House of Representatives, Illinois
Mike Fisher & Cheryl Fisher – Beech Grove, Indiana
Mike – Amtrak tech & Cheryl – hospital tech (hosted Obama for lunch)
Tom Balanoff
President, SEIU Local 1 (Chicago)
Senator Edward M. Kennedy Tribute
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg
Daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy
Video - Edward M. Kennedy Video
Remarks
The Honorable Miguel Del Valle
City Clerk of Chicago, Illinois
Candi Schmieder
Delegate Chair, Iowa County Convention
Jerry Kellman
Hired & supervised Obama at Developing Communities Project - Chicago, Illinois
Introduction of Jim Leach by
The Honorable Tom Harkin
US Senator, Iowa
The Honorable Jim Leach
Former Republican Member of the US House of Representatives, 1st District, Iowa
Introduction of Claire McCaskill by
Austin Esposito
Son of Senator McCaskill
The Honorable Claire McCaskill
US Senator, Missouri
Video - Michelle Obama Package
Introduction to the Michelle Obama Package
Craig Robinson
Older brother of Michelle Obama
Remarks
Michelle Obama
Wife of Presidential Candidate Barack Obama
Benediction
Don Miller -Portland, Oregon
Best-selling author & public speaker focusing on Christian spirituality
Recess
The Honorable Kathleen Sebelius
Governor of Kansas
Renewing America’s Promise.
Millions of Americans are struggling to get by. The failed policies of the last eight years have betrayed the country’s values and left an economy out of balance. Barack Obama believes a strong economy is unattainable with a weak middle class. Tuesday’s Convention program will feature the voices of Americans who share Barack’s concerns and strongly support his detailed economic plan to grow the economy, create jobs, restore fairness, and expand opportunity.
Senator Hillary Clinton will be the headline prime-time speaker and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner will deliver the keynote address on Tuesday night. Pay Equity pioneer Lilly Ledbetter will also address the Convention on Tuesday.
Other Tuesday speakers will include:
Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana; Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona; Governor Joe Manchin of West Virginia; Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin; Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania; Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio; Governor David Paterson of New York; Governor Chet Culver of Iowa; Senator Bob Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania; Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont; former Secretary of Energy and Transportation Federico Peña; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer; House Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel; Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Assistant to the Speaker of the House; and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chair Chris Van Hollen, who will use his time to showcase his top candidates for change.
Representatives Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mike Honda (D-CA), California Controller John Chiang, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, Change To Win’s Anna Burger, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney will also speak.
Wednesday, August 27 – Securing America’s Future.
Barack Obama offers a new, tough foreign policy that is neither Republican nor Democratic, but is a strong, smart American foreign policy to make our country more secure and advance our interests in the world. Wednesday night’s Convention program will feature the voices of Americans who share Barack’s vision of making America stronger and safer.
The headline prime-time speaker on Wednesday will be Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential Nominee.
Featured speakers will include:
Former President Bill Clinton; former Senator Tom Daschle; Governor Bill Richardson and Senators Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, John Kerry and Jay Rockefeller. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Convention home state Senator Ken Salazar, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, and Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) along with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA) and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth will lead a tribute honoring those who give so much to secure our nation’s future – veterans, active duty military and their families.
Thursday, August 28 – Change You Can Believe In.
On Thursday night, the DNCC will throw open the doors of the Convention and move to INVESCO Field at Mile High so that more Americans can be a part of the fourth night of the Convention as Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination. Obama will communicate the urgency of the moment, highlight the struggles Americans are facing and call on Americans to come together to change the course of our nation.
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, Jr. will address the Convention on Thursday night.
Additional details of the program to precede Barack Obama’s acceptance speech will be announced later this week.
Caucus Meeting Times and Locations
Monday & Wednesday
AAPI Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom 4 (10:00 – 12:00pm)
Black Caucus Wells Fargo Theater 2 (10:00 – 12:30pm)
Ethnic Coordinated Caucus Korbel Ballroom 1E (10:00 – 12:00pm)
First American Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4C&D; Wed: 1E&F) (10:00 – 12:00pm)
Hispanic Caucus Korbel Ballroom 2&3 (10:00 – 12:30pm)
LGBT Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom (Mon: 2&3; Wed: 1&2) (12:00 – 2:00 pm)
Rural Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4A-C; Wed 2A&B) (2:00 – 4:00pm)
Senior Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4A&B; Wed: 1D&E) (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Tuesday & Thursday
Disability Caucus Meeting Rooms 610 & 612 (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Faith Caucus Korbel Ballroom 4A-C (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Veterans & Military Families Caucus Korbel Ballroom 1 (2:00 – 4:00pm)
Women's Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom (10:00 – 1:00pm)
Youth Caucus Wells Fargo Theater 3 (12:00 – 2:00pm)
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Paid for by 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee, Inc. - 1560 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202 www.demconvention.com
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
To contact the DNCC: 720-DNC-2008 (362-2008) | TTY: (720) 362-2208 or info@demconvention.com.
Copyright © 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee, Inc.
Program Schedule
Monday, August 25 – One Nation
Barack Obama’s story is an American story that reflects a life of struggle, opportunity and responsibility like those faced by Americans everyday. The opening night of the Convention will highlight Barack’s life story, his commitment to change, and the voices of Americans who are calling for a new direction for this country.
Monday’s headline prime-time speaker will be Michelle Obama.
3:00 PM - 7:00 PM (LOCAL)
Call to Order
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Former Governor of Vermont
Invocation
The Honorable Polly Baca – Greeley, Colorado
Former Colorado State Senator
President & CEO Latin American Research & Service Agency
Presentation of Colors
Navajo Code Talkers Association
Keith Little, Frank Willeto, Bill Toledo, Jimmy Begay
Pledge of Allegiance
Angela Morgan –Alexandria, Virginia
Served 9 years in the Marines and now runs a leadership development small business
National Anthem
Colorado Children's Chorale
Group over 30-years old – Tad Koriath (piano)
Local children (7-14) performing throughout US & the world (China, Asia, Europe, etc.)
Welcome
Reverend Leah D. Daughtry
Convention CEO & Chief of Staff, Democratic National Committee
Video - “Welcome to the West”
Introduction of and Report by the Credentials Committee
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Eliseo Roques-Arroyo
Co-Chair Credentials Committee
Former Executive Director, Democratic Party of Puerto Rico
James Roosevelt, Jr.
Co-Chair Credentials Committee
Pres. & CEO Tuffs Health Plan (HMO) and grandson of FDR
The Honorable Alexis Herman
Co Chair Credentials Committee
Former US Secretary of Labor
Introduction of and Report by the Rules Committee
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
Sunita Leeds
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Chair of the DNC Indo-American Leadership Council
The Honorable Mary Rose Oakar
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Former Member of the US Congress, Ohio,
President of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee
The Honorable David Walters
Co-Chair Rules Committee
Former Governor of Oklahoma
President of Walters Power International
Video - Changing the Course of Our Nation
Featuring Ashley Baia -Native of Pennsylvania and an Obama field organizer mentioned in Obama's Philadelphia speech. Know as the "sandwich girl" who, at age 9, convinced her mother she liked mustard & relish sandwiches to save money while her mother was fighting cancer. She is now twenty-three.
Introduction of Convention Co-Chairs
The Honorable Howard Dean
Chair, Democratic National Committee
The Honorable Shirley Franklin
Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia
The Honorable Leticia Van de Putte
State Senator, Texas District 26
The Honorable Kathleen Sebelius
Governor of Kansas
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the US House of Representatives
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
Permanent Chair of the 2008 Democratic National Convention
Turning Over the Gavel
The Honorable Howard Dean, temporary Chair of the Convention turns over the gavel to
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Permanent Chair of the 2008 Democratic Convention.
Remarks
The Honorable Doris Matsui, Parliamentarian
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
Andrew Tobias, Treasurer
Democratic Party Treasurer
Remarks by the Secretary and the Electronic Roll Call of Attendance
Alice Travis Germond - West Virginia
Secretary, Democratic Party
Member of the Democratic National Committee
Remarks – Presentation of Platform
The Honorable Patricia Madrid
Co-Chair Platform Committee
Attorney General of New Mexico
Judith McHale
Co-Chair Platform Committee
Business Executive (former President, Discovery Communications; Board of DigitalGlobal)
Remarks
The Honorable John Hickenlooper
Mayor of Denver, Colorado
Congressional Hispanic Caucus
The Honorable Joe Baca
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
The Honorable Grace Napolitano
Member of the US House of Representatives, California
The Honorable Silvestre Reyes
Member of the US House of Representatives, Texas
Remarks
Nancy Keenan
President, NARAL - Pro-Choice America
The Honorable Emil Jones, Jr.
State Senator, Illinois
Amanda Kubik
Young Delegate – North Dakota
Ret. Rear Admiral John Hutson,
Pres. Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord – lifetime Republican
Reg Weaver
President, National Education Association
The Honorable Manuel Diaz
Mayor of Miami, Florida
Video - Changing the Course of Our Nation
Featuring Gabrielle Grossman
New Hampshire Obama Supporter "U2 mamma for Obama"
Remarks
The Honorable Lisa Madigan
Attorney General, Illinois
The Honorable Dan Hynes
Comptroller, Illinois
The Honorable Alexi Giannoulis
State Treasurer, Illinois
Randi Weingarten
American Federation of Teachers
The Honorable Amy Klobuchar
US Senator, Minnesota
Musical Performance
John Legend (vocals & piano) and accompanied by:
Agape Choir - International Spiritual Center, Culver City, CA
Trans-denominational Spiritual Community founded by Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith
Video/Remarks
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the US House of Representatives
Permanent Chair, Democratic National Convention
Video - First Time Delegates: Renewing America's Promise
America’s Town Hall – Economy
Moderator: Senator Sherrod Brown - Ohio,
Panelists: Ned Helms, Lisa Olivares, Dr. Laura Tyson, Jon Schnur
Remarks
Margie Perez
New Orleans jazz singer & song writer from Musicians Village
President Jimmy Carter Segment
Jimmy Carter/New Orleans Video
Acknowledgment of President Carter
Remarks
Maya Soetoro-Ng
Half-sister of Barack Obama
High School teacher - Hawaii
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Remarks
The Honorable Jesse Jackson, Jr.
Member of the US House of Representatives, Illinois
Mike Fisher & Cheryl Fisher – Beech Grove, Indiana
Mike – Amtrak tech & Cheryl – hospital tech (hosted Obama for lunch)
Tom Balanoff
President, SEIU Local 1 (Chicago)
Senator Edward M. Kennedy Tribute
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg
Daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy
Video - Edward M. Kennedy Video
Remarks
The Honorable Miguel Del Valle
City Clerk of Chicago, Illinois
Candi Schmieder
Delegate Chair, Iowa County Convention
Jerry Kellman
Hired & supervised Obama at Developing Communities Project - Chicago, Illinois
Introduction of Jim Leach by
The Honorable Tom Harkin
US Senator, Iowa
The Honorable Jim Leach
Former Republican Member of the US House of Representatives, 1st District, Iowa
Introduction of Claire McCaskill by
Austin Esposito
Son of Senator McCaskill
The Honorable Claire McCaskill
US Senator, Missouri
Video - Michelle Obama Package
Introduction to the Michelle Obama Package
Craig Robinson
Older brother of Michelle Obama
Remarks
Michelle Obama
Wife of Presidential Candidate Barack Obama
Benediction
Don Miller -Portland, Oregon
Best-selling author & public speaker focusing on Christian spirituality
Recess
The Honorable Kathleen Sebelius
Governor of Kansas
Renewing America’s Promise.
Millions of Americans are struggling to get by. The failed policies of the last eight years have betrayed the country’s values and left an economy out of balance. Barack Obama believes a strong economy is unattainable with a weak middle class. Tuesday’s Convention program will feature the voices of Americans who share Barack’s concerns and strongly support his detailed economic plan to grow the economy, create jobs, restore fairness, and expand opportunity.
Senator Hillary Clinton will be the headline prime-time speaker and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner will deliver the keynote address on Tuesday night. Pay Equity pioneer Lilly Ledbetter will also address the Convention on Tuesday.
Other Tuesday speakers will include:
Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana; Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona; Governor Joe Manchin of West Virginia; Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin; Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania; Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio; Governor David Paterson of New York; Governor Chet Culver of Iowa; Senator Bob Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania; Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont; former Secretary of Energy and Transportation Federico Peña; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer; House Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel; Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Assistant to the Speaker of the House; and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chair Chris Van Hollen, who will use his time to showcase his top candidates for change.
Representatives Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mike Honda (D-CA), California Controller John Chiang, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, Change To Win’s Anna Burger, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney will also speak.
Wednesday, August 27 – Securing America’s Future.
Barack Obama offers a new, tough foreign policy that is neither Republican nor Democratic, but is a strong, smart American foreign policy to make our country more secure and advance our interests in the world. Wednesday night’s Convention program will feature the voices of Americans who share Barack’s vision of making America stronger and safer.
The headline prime-time speaker on Wednesday will be Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential Nominee.
Featured speakers will include:
Former President Bill Clinton; former Senator Tom Daschle; Governor Bill Richardson and Senators Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, John Kerry and Jay Rockefeller. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Convention home state Senator Ken Salazar, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, and Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) along with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA) and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth will lead a tribute honoring those who give so much to secure our nation’s future – veterans, active duty military and their families.
Thursday, August 28 – Change You Can Believe In.
On Thursday night, the DNCC will throw open the doors of the Convention and move to INVESCO Field at Mile High so that more Americans can be a part of the fourth night of the Convention as Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination. Obama will communicate the urgency of the moment, highlight the struggles Americans are facing and call on Americans to come together to change the course of our nation.
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, Jr. will address the Convention on Thursday night.
Additional details of the program to precede Barack Obama’s acceptance speech will be announced later this week.
Caucus Meeting Times and Locations
Monday & Wednesday
AAPI Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom 4 (10:00 – 12:00pm)
Black Caucus Wells Fargo Theater 2 (10:00 – 12:30pm)
Ethnic Coordinated Caucus Korbel Ballroom 1E (10:00 – 12:00pm)
First American Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4C&D; Wed: 1E&F) (10:00 – 12:00pm)
Hispanic Caucus Korbel Ballroom 2&3 (10:00 – 12:30pm)
LGBT Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom (Mon: 2&3; Wed: 1&2) (12:00 – 2:00 pm)
Rural Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4A-C; Wed 2A&B) (2:00 – 4:00pm)
Senior Caucus Korbel Ballroom (Mon: 4A&B; Wed: 1D&E) (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Tuesday & Thursday
Disability Caucus Meeting Rooms 610 & 612 (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Faith Caucus Korbel Ballroom 4A-C (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Veterans & Military Families Caucus Korbel Ballroom 1 (2:00 – 4:00pm)
Women's Caucus Four Seasons Ballroom (10:00 – 1:00pm)
Youth Caucus Wells Fargo Theater 3 (12:00 – 2:00pm)
Newsletter Sign Up
* required fields
Paid for by 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee, Inc. - 1560 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202 www.demconvention.com
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
To contact the DNCC: 720-DNC-2008 (362-2008) | TTY: (720) 362-2208 or info@demconvention.com.
Copyright © 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee, Inc.
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