Calicoes and capitalism: or why the world was better off wearing Indian clothes

The subject of this post brings together two issues which bother me, to quite different degrees and in quite different ways, but which a reading of three recent books on global and South Asian history has convinced me are actually connected at quite a deep level. Issue no. 1 is - why is most Western clothing so dull? (Especially for men.) And issue no. 2 is - why is the current global economic dispensation so profoundly unjust? The books I draw on are David Arnold's history of South Asia, published in German as volume 11 of the Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte (Fischer Verlag, 2012) - David is professor emeritus at Warwick, and is a family friend since, as it so happens, he used to live in my parents' house; Prasannan Parthasarathi's Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Giorgio Riello's Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP, 2013).

I will start with issue 1, before moving gradually on to the heavier debates surrounding issue 2. Anyone who has travelled in Asia has surely been struck by the aesthetic contrast between modern Western clothes, the plain cotton trousers and check or striped cotton shirt that are the typical everyday choice for menswear  among the urban middle class, and the variety and beauty of traditional Asian dress and fabric styles, from Indonesian ikat and Indian saris to Japanese kimonos. The latter tend to be reserved for women, the home, or for special occasions, while the "public sphere" is almost always defined by Western codes of dress.One wonders why Eastern cultures do not make more consistent use of their own types of clothing. Is it a matter of inherent price and production costs? Surely not: many Asian styles require less sewing and fabric treatment than Western shirts and trousers do. Is it convenience? That depends very much on how you define convenience (certainly in terms of adaptability to climate and function, south Indian lunghis are much superior to trousers). Is it a question of manufacturing origin? But so much of the world's clothing is now made in Asia! Why are we in the West not yet following Asian fashions? Perhaps by the time China has reached a position of unchallengeable dominance in the world economy, it will be able to dictate to us, linguistically, culturally and sartorially. And yet as far as clothes go, China is duller and more Westernized than most Asian countries. When I spent a day shopping for clothes on a trip to Kunming in south-west China a few years ago, it was extremely hard to find any men's clothes in interesting colours or patterns.

It is worth looking at this in historical perspective: have Western clothes always been dull? Is it - to adapt the sort of argument that Rousseau and his contemporaries made - another reflection on the utilitarian nature of the cold, Northern countries, serving the needs for warmth and durability imposed by a harsh climate rather than answering the invitation of the warm South to leisure and aesthetic display? If one goes back far enough, then maybe one could find support for such a line of reasoning (Ice-Age furs versus Amazonian tattoos, even). But the argument is somewhat irrelevant, for there have been periods of European history when clothing has been much more overtly appealing. Take for instance an item of clothing now irredeemably historical, but quite easy to recognize as typical for well-off men in paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries: the robe de chambre or house robe, sometimes (misleadingly) described as a "nightgown". Here are three examples, from paintings by Vermeer, Francis Hayman and the Spaniard Jose de Alcibar (the pattern on the Vermeer is only visible in close-up, probably as a result of over-cleaning):

Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer (1668)

Francis Hayman, Maurice Greene and John Hoadly (1747)

José de Alcíbar, De Español y Negra, Mulato (ca. 1760-1770)

As this blog on costume history points out, robes such as this "appear all over Europe in the later part of the seventeenth century". Despite being predominantly a domestic item of clothing, Richard Steele in 1711 refers to "those who come in their nightgowns to saunter away their time" in coffee houses; and as the intellectual status of at least two of the subjects portrayed above suggests (Maurice Greene, in pink, was a professor of music), such gowns were used as symbols of learning and studiousness.

The plot thickens when we look at the more idiomatic words used to describe such words in Europe at the time: cambay in Dutch, and banyan in English. Both are Indian in origin: Cambay was a historical designation for Khambat, in Gujarat on the west coast of India; banyan or bania(n) is an Arabic and Portuguese word derived from the Gujarati for "trader" or a specific caste of merchants (bania).

This ought to come as no surprise. It is highly likely that all of the robes portrayed above actually came from India, as did an ever-increasing quantity of high-quality silk and cotton clothing from the 17th century (the VOC or Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602) up until the middle of the 18th century. And while silk had long been traded overland via the famous Silk Road, mass imports of cotton were something new to Europe - something that would in the end turn out, as Riello's subtitle implies, to be crucial to the Western economic regime of "modernity". In the meantime, in the hands of Indian manufacturers, cotton was a unique material: light, comfortable, relatively cheap, and most importantly, easy to dye and print, a combination of attributes that none of the fabrics known to the West, such as linen, hemp or wool, could match. The Indian textile industry had built up over centuries a tremendous expertise in dying fabrics, creating intense colours that were fast and did not fade. Riello reproduces fragments of the same vivid red and blue pattern found independently in Egypt and the Sulawesi islands in Indonesia, and produced in Gujarat in the 14th century, showing the antiquity, geographical extent and skill involved in the Indian Ocean textile trade. The V&A Museum's collection of Indian textiles (searchable online) is enormous, and contains pieces of astonishing beauty, among them these cotton ceremonial skirt-cloths (pha nung) for the Thai market:

Luxury printed cottons for Europe could also be impressively complex in design, on the scale of Turkish rugs. They were used for home furnishings, as bedcovers or wall-hangings, known as "palampores":

As that example demonstrates, with its palm trees surrounded by a more familiar-feeling flower-chain border, the designs of these fabrics were neither exclusively Indian nor European, but a melange or hybrid of motifs and styles, arrived at by a process of aesthetic negotiation between consumers, traders, and producers (Riello, p. 133). One contemporary term for Indian cottons was "calicoes", derived from Calicut, the old name for Kozhikode in the modern state of Kerala, and older histories of the textile trade used to refer to a "calico craze" on the European market (perhaps on the model of the "tulip mania" in the 1630s, also sparked by Dutch imports). This may be an accurate reflection of the popularity of Indian cotton, which was indeed massive; but it tends to make one think of this popularity as a passing fad, influenced perhaps by a curiosity for the exotic which would soon wear off. Recent historians such as Riello and Parthasarathi emphasize instead the slow process of material and aesthetic education involved in Asiatic commercial success: "consumers in Europe had to learn how to integrate cotton textiles into their dress and furnishings" (Riello, p. 6). Samuel Pepys provides an example. He recorded in his diary having "bought my wife a...painted East India callico for to line her new study", but only "after many trialls"; and only gradually did he progress from furnishings to purchasing a "banyan" for himself and a blue calico gown for his wife (Riello, p. 126).

Most importantly, there is evidence that the so-called "calico craze" brought beautifully-printed cottons into the lives not just of the rich and the middle classes in Europe, but also of the poor, right down to the lowest strata of society. The chief source for this is the 18th-century register for the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, Bloomsbury, which carefully preserved thousands of scraps of fabric used to identify the "foundlings" or abandoned babies taken in by the institution in case their mothers were ever in a position to come and reclaim them (few, sadly, were). Here are some:

As this Guardian review of a 2011 exhibition at the museum observes, the Foundling Hospital collection may well be one of the biggest archives of 18th-century fabrics in the world - certainly as far as the working class is concerned. Among them were girls so painfully poor that they had had to give up their child - but even they had access to the new world of taste, pattern and colour opened up by Indian cottons: "their dress may not have been a new one, but they had managed to acquire something that pleased the eye and soothed the touch. They had, perhaps, been able to express a preference for spots over stripes or wondered whether blue was more flattering than green. The tokens left behind at the hospital show a remarkable variety of design. Indeed, reports [John] Styles [the exhibition curator], it is rare for the same pattern to recur among the hundreds of different prints". What the author of the review, significantly, gets wrong is the suggestion that this world was opened up by home manufactures - by the Industrial Revolution. As Styles notes, the majority of these fabrics are from the 1740s and 1750s: Arkwright's spinning jenny, the first main technological innovation in the British textile industry, was constructed in 1764. These sorts of textiles were "hand made", either Indian or made in imitation of Indian designs by techniques not the least superior to those used in Asia. At this stage, the British textile industry was still learning from India - both in terms of taste and in terms of technology. It could not yet surpass it.

To answer the question of how English textiles did beat the Indian trade is really to answer both of my initial questions at once. The answer is however complex, surprising, and unfortunately, unlike the textiles above, also extremely ugly: aesthetically, politically, and morally. Its implications are also enormous in economic terms. For although the Dutch and English East India Companies provided key links in the trading network that opened up the European market to the East, and thus made sizeable profits themselves, this did not stop a process which strikingly resembles that by which China has recently grown to a position of economic strength: the gradual transfer of currency reserves from West to East. Today the currency is US dollars; in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was gold and silver bullion, mined in the New World. Parthasarathi quotes Andre Gunder Frank's assertion that, well into the 18th century, "the two major regions that were most 'central' to the world economy were India and China" (Parthasarathi, p. 22). Silver flowed into Asia in vast quantities in exchange for porcelain and silk from China and cotton from India; for Europeans could not pay with anything else. They did not know how to produce anything that the Asian economy wanted. Finding out how to produce things that the Indians and Chinese did want - or could be persuaded to want - and how to make them economically dependent on those goods, would be the secret to reversing the trade deficit and the balance of global economic power.

The first factor in the British success was simple, and in fact morally quite neutral, though it is regarded as heresy by most economists today: protectionism. The flood of Indian textiles was threatening to ruin English weavers, who could not compete. They protested, in print and on the streets, often violently, in favour of an import ban. The litany of complaint was more extreme than one might expect to hear today, but in at least one respect it was familiar: the English accused Indian weavers of undercutting them, of accepting impossibly low wages simply to ruin the competition. A 1719 pamphlet by J. Roberts entitled "The Spinster" inveighed against "a tawdrey, bespotted, flabby, ragged, low-priced thing called callico...made...by a parcel of Heathens and Pagans that worship the Devil and work for a half-penny a day" (cit. Geoffrey Turnbull, A History of the Calico Printing Industry of Great Britain (Altrincham: J. Sherratt, 1951), p. 21). Daniel Defoe, who had at first been employed to write propaganda in favour of the East India Company's interests in calico, later wrote on behalf of the English wool industry, "The People who make all these fine Works [calico] are to the last Degree miserable, their Labour of no Value, their Wages would fright us to talk of it, and their way of Living raise a Horror in us to think of it...the Wages they get cannot provide better food for them; and yet their rigorous Task-masters lash them forward as we...sometimes do our Horses" ("A Plan of the English Commerce" (1728), cit. Parthasarathi, p. 34). 

As logical as such accusations might have seemed, they were unfounded. As Parthasarathi convincingly demonstrates using primary sources, Indian cottons in most global markets were "by no means the lowest-priced cloths" (p. 35), simply the best-quality ones in a medium price-bracket; and the standard of living among Indian weavers was high, certainly quite comparable to that of their European counterparts. They ate a varied diet, and the more successful of them bought luxuries such as ghee and lived in multi-storey stone houses, the marks of rich villagers (Parthasarathi, p. 44). This particular global system of textile trade - the "old cotton system", which Riello calls "centrifugal" or distributive, rather than "centripetal" or exploitative, and into which the Dutch and British had to fit carefully, to begin with, rather than being able to dominate or transform - was not based on undercutting or the unjust treatment of labour. It was instead based on diversification, co-operation, and high quality.

In any case, the fact that the Indian textile industry was competing fairly was not common knowledge in Europe, and might not have changed the course of events even if it had been. The furore about cotton imports grew into possibly the largest issue in English politics in the decades around 1700, and parliament responded to the weavers' demands in a series of Calico Acts, progressively restricting the import of calico. This is an era not often given much space by historians, and usually summed up in the dull figure of Queen Anne. In fact the Calico Acts were crucial to the Industrial Revolution - and therefore to the course of global history. Unless the British government had protected their native textile industry, and at the same time systematically encouraged both the collection of knowledge and innovative research, British clothes would not have been able to compete with Asian imports. (Illegal imports of calico made things difficult as it was.)

The particular course of development taken by the industry before Arkwright's spinning jenny and the other innovations of the Industrial Revolution would prove almost as important to the future of cotton as the new technologies. One intermediate step was to promote the production of "fustian", a fabric with cotton weft going in one direction and linen threads for the warp that ran perpendicularly to it. Fustian was inferior to pure cotton fabric and everyone in England knew it, because linen did not hold dyes or show patterns to advantage as cotton did (which had been the main reasons for the popularity of calico). However it would do reasonably well as a method of producing striped and check patterns, with dyed cotton threads enlivening a plain linen background. The area around Manchester was already known for fustian, and was also near the major port of Liverpool. This was an advantage because the carefully-struck protectionist balance of the Calico Acts did not ban the calico trade completely (as had been done in France, and would have put the East India Company out of business had it been insisted on in Britain). Rather, it allowed it to continue for the re-export of cottons to Africa and the Americas. Cotton cloth was too important an ingredient in the Atlantic trade to be eliminated. The other ingredient in the Atlantic trade network of which the same could be said was, of course, African slaves.

The connection between industrially-produced cotton and slavery is well-known, but what Riello and Parthasarathi point to is its importance - as a trading rather than labour relationship - even prior to the establishment of the great cotton plantations in the American South. It was precisely the West African market, which was furthest away from the Indian Ocean trade and showed the most demand for lower-grade textiles, that allowed the Manchester cotton trade to expand, by a safe process of what Riello calls "re-export substitution". This is so termed by analogy to "import substitution", in which home industries attempt to manufacture themselves whatever products are being bought in from abroad; here the Lancashire textile industry was trying to substitute its own products for cheap Indian calicos which were imported by the East India Company and then re-exported in exchange for African slaves. Before it became a cotton port, Liverpool was a slave port. The two "goods" became equivalent. Parthasarathi reports that over the 18th century as a whole, two-thirds of British exports to West Africa consisted of textiles (p. 24), thus furnishing the main means of exchange for buying slaves from African slave traders. Between 1752 and 1754, 60% of British cotton cloth exports were exchanged for slaves in West Africa (Parthasarathi, p. 134).

An ugly business, then - in more senses than one. The re-exported cloth was not the English substitute for the kind of printed calico we saw above, for which the London market was primarily responsible, but cheap, dull and nasty fustians in gingham patterns. Riello confirms the connection:

The majority of 'cottons' from Manchester were mixed linen and cotton with dyed cotton yarns being woven as the weft of stripes and checks... Manchester's cotton production boomed in the 1750s when quantities increased and the overall quality of production seemed to have risen. From the mid century the so-called 'Manchester linen checks' became a significant part of the region's production, accounting from 48 to 86 percent of all exported cottons between 1750 and 1774. These products were of sufficient quality to find a market in West Africa, as suggested by...Thomas Melvin, the British governor of Cape Coast Castle (p. 153).

Cape Coast Castle, in case you need reminding, was the principal "slave castle" on the west coast of Africa, a fort extended by the British by the addition of underground dungeons that could hold up to 1000 slaves awaiting transport to America:

It still stands today in modern Ghana, and is as powerful a symbol of the monstrosity of Britain's Atlantic trading enterprise as Auschwitz is of the worst crimes of European anti-semitism. A friend visited in 2011 and wrote this excellent piece on its importance. Cape Coast Castle's operation was supported from 1750 by the sale of Manchester textiles, most in the so-called "gingham" or check pattern now ubiquitous on shirts, tea-towels and tablecloths all over the globe:

I personally find gingham hideous, and as it turns out, there are some pretty good historical and moral reasons for such a reaction. (Incidentally, the word even changed its meaning as a result of the Manchester trade: it originally came from the Malay word geng-gang, meaning "striped". Most earlier ginghams were striped, sometimes quite prettily so, but check patterns gradually took over a larger proportion of Manchester output, and with it, the word itself.) The spiralling exploitation of the English labour-force that went hand in hand with the expansion of the Lancashire cotton mills is the other side of the coin, of course, and was the major source of evidence in Marx and Engels' indictment of modern industrial capitalism.

But the "new cotton system" did not just concentrate labour; it concentrated the entire organization of the industry, orienting everything towards the factory and streamlined mass production (hence Riello's designation "centripetal"). Everything quite literally served the machine, from the deskilled factory operatives to the standardised patterns given to the appearance of the textiles themselves. Riello explores how the factory "brought standardisation: the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton factories inaugurated a notion of production based on predictability and consistency over time. Unlike a putting-out system, the cloth's pattern, its finishing and quality were not left to the decision of individual producers. The product of one factory might be indistinguishable from that of another...in a way quite dissimilar from the idiosyncratic production of individual Indian weavers" (p. 229). The process of aesthetic negotiation and diversification that had formed a natural part of the long Indian supply chains was replaced by a mechanical, centrally imposed series of patterns. Moreover, those patterns were now "protected" by property rights. The aesthetic value of textiles was centralized and legally fixed in order to prevent "piracy" (just as in the 19th century, that of music would also be centralized and fixed in the form of the score and, later, the recording, for much the same reasons). Designs were safeguarded for fixed periods, which "made it possible for those who had invested in the creation and marketing of new patterns to legally retain the right to exploit them against all those imitators who could otherwise steal them 'through a shop window'...as one contemporary put it" (p. 234). (Again, there was considerable irony, not to say hypocrisy in this: in the 17th century British piracy, both real and intellectual, was rampant, and played a major part both in the disruption of Mughal shipping and in the transfer of Indian technical knowledge about cotton production and dying to Europe.)

All this led to massive gains in efficiency, which enabled cotton cloth to be produced far more cheaply than had been possible under the previous system. The global trade in cotton was turned around.  In 1820 the British East India company ceased trading in Indian cottons, and by 1840 British cloth imports exceeded native production. The impact on the Indian weavers was calamitous: even the British Goveror-General George Bentinck opined that the decline in their prosperity "hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India" (cit. Riello, p. 273) - a dramatic image quoted by Marx himself in his contemporary writings on the Anglo-Indian economy. But even at this juncture, terms such as "efficiency" and "superior technology", with their implication of an irresistible, inherent trajectory of development whose consequences were simply "unfortunate" for those still "undeveloped", do not fully explain the situation. Subduing the Indian competition would not have been possible without the exploitation of Britain's political and military control over the subcontinent - in other words, without the Empire. The present-day economic and social situation of India is a result of a fatal combination of imperialism and globalized industrial capitalism.

One thing not often realized about pre-colonial India was how different it probably was to the present day. Orientalist stereotypes of the eternal and unchanging East obscure the fact that the advent of European influence had a huge impact, as indeed it has had everywhere else around the globe. India was not always poor; the population was not always either expanding or succumbing Malthusian-fashion to famine or disease; the main support of the Indian peasantry was not always agriculture; the caste system was not always a rigid framework hindering social mobility and progress; even the extended family - so often presented as the key to South Asian social identity - was not always quite so "extended" as it is supposed to be today. As we have seen, India was running up a trade surplus in the 18th century; the population was stable and protected from harvest failures and famines (which were rare) by a system of state-run financial aid, the so-called taccavi; as little as 25% of the peasantry were engaged in agriculture; the caste system was flexible and often helped commerce by promoting trust (because members of the same caste were engaged in the same trade); and surveys of Indian households in the early 1820s found  an average of less than 5 people per family and little more per house (including servants) - a figure entirely comparable to Europe (cf. Parthasarathi, chap. 3). Change across all these areas was primarily a result of colonialization.

And in economic terms, colonialization meant exploitation and unfair advantage. (It is one of the great ironies of history that the English have managed to claim "fair play" as one of our cardinal virtues - from the perspective of the rest of the world, nothing could be further from the truth.) Military power lay at the basis of British policy. It was a year after the battle of Buxar in 1764 - the real turning-point in the establishment of Company power in Bengal, historians now concur, rather than the more famous victory at Plassey in 1757 - that the British received the diwani or right to collect taxes in the provinces of Bengal and Bihar. As David Arnold puts it, "Nominally the British thereby became vassals of the Great Mogul, but in practice this meant they had a licence to prey upon the riches of the province. In this way Bengal became a bridgehead, from which the British could extend their dominion step by step" (p. 337). In his history of Bengal, Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011), Nitish Sengupta highlights how, "as a result of a series of crucial economic changes during the first hundred years of British rule, Bengal, traditionally a prosperous country, was transformed into an economically depressed, low-income country...a typical colonial economy which supplied raw materials for industries in Great Britain and served as a market for British goods" (p. 199).

The first of these changes was the ruthless levying of land taxes accompanied by an almost total lack of interest in actual agricultural development or investment. The system used changed - from private collection to fill the pockets of Company nabobs to the more detached zamindar system (based on the large-scale estate landholding system in England) that appeared with the Permanent Settlement in 1793, but the exploitative character of the arrangement remained. As painfully recollected in the lyrics of Bengali folk songs from the period that are still sung today, rents could be raised without limit and peasants evicted if they were unable to pay. In the south of India the relationship between landowners and peasants deteriorated to the point where the latter were actually physically tortured for non-payment of rent (as revealed by the Madras Torture Commission of 1855 - Arnold, p. 392). Nevertheless, more and more peasants were forced into agriculture because domestic industries were being destroyed by unfair tariffs. The situation did not just affect cotton: Sengupta reports that British silk imports into India received a charged of 3.5% while Indian silks going the other way were charged a duty of 20%; the ratio for woollen textiles was even worse (p. 201). Salt could not be manufactured at all in India and had to be imported (hence the symbolic value of Gandhi's famous "Salt March" in 1930). By the mid-19th century, when the East India Company had been ousted from its monopoly position and duties were reduced, England had acquired political control over most of the country and an unbeatable technological advantage at home, while decimating Indian manufactures and driving native banians or merchants out of trade and into the lower ranks of the British bureaucracy.

Then came the railways. They were not as much of an altruistic investment in local infrastructure as it might seem, for as Arnold points out, their "most important effect was the [further] opening of Indian markets for British industrial products and the facilitation of the export of raw materials" (p. 401). Together with the building of canals, they led to massive deforestation, and their embankments had unforeseen consequences for the drainage of water during the monsoon floods. Arnold's analysis reveals that the British were even to some extent thereby culpable for the growth of malaria to epidemic proportions in the subcontinent, for the areas of stagnant, undrained water that were created in the reshaped Indian landscape proved to be perfect mosquito breeding-grounds.

Malaria claimed even more lives among an undernourished population. From the Bengal famine of 1770 to that of 1943, famines in the province occurred with "unfamiling regularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for fifteen years between 1880 and 1895" (Sengupta, p. 204). With some exceptions, it is difficult to hold British officials directly responsible for Indian deaths from famine; but there is little doubt that the number of mortalities resulting indirectly from British economic policy over the long period of colonial rule would exceed by some margin the numbers of victims of the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags put together. The so-called Madras famine of 1877 resulted in the death of between 5.5 and 8 million people.

Arnold quotes an estimate of 20 million dead from famine between 1860 and 1910. Many were a direct result of lack of state intervention, of a laissez faire policy that allowed grain exports to double at the height of the 1877 famine and made aid conditional on "relief works", doling out rice only to those who performed a whole day of strenuous labour to earn it.

If you don't think Victorian economic policy could appear any more criminal, well, think again. Parallel to the Atlantic economy in which cotton was structurally connected to slavery, in Asia it became intimately bound up with the opium trade. Opium turned out to be the chief "good" that the Chinese didn't actually want but could be "persuaded" to want, and it came from India (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan), where it was bought in exchange for - what else - cotton textiles from Manchester.

It was by means such as this that the British global trade network was built up - a far more important entity than the "Empire" measured in crudely territorial terms, and also far more durable. We can no longer take a map of the world and colour a quarter of its land surface in pink; but we can still point to the trade exchanges that continue to exploit factory labour and concentrate capital in the hands of wealthy Western urban elites. And the justification for such unjust economic processes continues to be the same given by the Manchester mill-owners and the governors of British India: that trade must be "free", and the market must be left to operate without state intervention. That argument rewrote the realities of 18th-century economic history as if they conformed to Adam Smith's "classical" economic theory. In fact, they contradicted it. Britain's economic success was built on 18th-century protectionism and state intervention - and as far as that went, there was nothing wrong with such policy. The problem was that Britain then prevented Asia from reclaiming her advantage by similar means (until the last few decades, during which, as Will Hutton has shown, Asian industry has been successful precisely because it has protected its markets and invested large amounts of state capital in its industries). The "killer apps" ensuring the "rise of the West" were not science, the work ethic or competition, as Niall Ferguson has argued. Rather - and in this respect they really were "killers" - one should list factors such as slavery, the drug trade, naval and general military power, empire, child labour at home and forced labour abroad, racism, ecological devastation, and moral and political hypocrisy, hypocrisy of precisely the kind that encouraged others to respect absolutely an ideology of economic freedom to which the West only adhered when it suited it.

Proust and the webcam

With grateful acknowledgements to Anna Goodman...

The real title of what follows ought to be "Proust and metaphor", since this is what has recently recaptured my interest in the writer whom I all too regularly cite as my favourite of all time. But since one can easily imagine (without needing to seek them out) a hundred academic essays bearing such a heading, all substantially more comprehensive than what I am about to offer, I decided on something a little more piquant. Proust and the webcam genuinely do have something to do with one another, and something surprising, namely the former uses the latter as a metaphor even though it does not exist yet. (All quotes with page numbers that follow are from the first volume of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, Remembrance of Things Past.)

"'I gather that Mme de Villeparisis', [Albertine] remarked to Octave, 'has been complaining to your father'. I could hear, underlying the 'I gather', one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; every time I realised that I had forgotten them, I would remember having already caught a glimpse behind them of Albertine's determined and typically Gallic mien. I could have been blind and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, in those notes just as plainly as in the tip of her nose. They were equivalent and might have been substituted for one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound" (p.992)

Et voila, la webcam! Quite how a visual image could be "clearly outlined in sound" is clearer in the case of the Proustian imagination (the tenor of his metaphor) than in any conceivable "photo-telephonic" apparatus (the vehicle). The corresponding visual image here is surely not an accident: the narrator is picturing Albertine wrinkling the tip of her nose slightly just as she lets her voice take on the characteristic note of social disapproval. Perhaps the details of digital communication, the translation of both the tip of the nose and the tone of voice into identical binary strings, could form some sort of analogy - to us - for the way they blend in Proust's mind; needless to add, they were not accessible to him!

And with that example we get a sense of how unusual Proust's use of metaphor was. His images are very often as rechérché as the "lost time" of his title. Commentators have in fact suggested a connection: for Wallace Fowlie the juxtapositions of separated moments of time created by the workings of involuntary memory parallel the "function of a metaphor which brings together objects which have no relationship in ordinary life...explain[ing] the unknown by the known". This last is a very common observation about metaphor, particularly if we are allowed to equate knowledge and vision, and thus assume its equivalence to the other common observation that metaphor explains the invisible through the visible. It surely has some truth to it: why else do music and religion both so persistently invite metaphorical language? But Proust loves to disrupt this neat reasoning: even the very Proustian metaphor that Fowlie inserts just before his (proto-Rumsfeldian) identification of metaphorically known unknowns - the "waiters in the restaurant of Rivebelle, compared, in their agility and flight, to angels" - actually contradicts it. After all, we have much more definite knowledge of waiters than we do of angels.

In fact on turning to the passage that Fowlie appears to quote, one finds a metaphor even more extended and unusual. Proust only implies the angelic status of the waiters: the direct comparison is of the restaurant's round tables with heavenly bodies, which soon expands into an entire pre-prandial cosmological vision -

"I looked at the round tables whose infinite assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him...a few insignificant remarks, at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters who, because they were on their feet instead of being seated like the diners, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere... Seated behind a bank of flowers, two horrible cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches occupied in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might from time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to the scientific conceptions of the Middle Ages" (p.868)

The incessant revolutions of the scene are elsewhere acknowledged to have been artifically enhanced, namely by the narrator's consumption of a "dose of beer, and a fortiori of champagne...adding...a few drops of port which I was too bemused to be able to taste"! In this case, then, the narrator's perceptions are not purely the result of perceptiveness: but that does not stop him "pitying all the diners, because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies" (p. 869). The situation makes light of a serious point, one which Alain de Botton (whose How Proust Can Change Your Life should not be disdained by the Proustophile: de Botton's style and succinctness are truly enviable) regards as a principle of Proustian philosophy - the need to destroy our habitual lack of sensitivity to the world. In this, the use of metaphors or analogies that begin with the usual and transfigure it by reference to the unusual is enormously helpful. They do not have to select a mundane subject and find a transcendent image for it, as with the astral tables. The relationship can go the other way too, as with an example cited by de Botton:

"Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself."

An example like this is, as well as being exquisite, important in emphasizing that Proust's technique is not mere poetic hyperbole. The moon is a conventional "poetic" image, an actress waiting to come on stage is not, but this is irrelevant: the second is a more unusual and interesting sight, and thus a fit vehicle for refreshing our perceptions of the first.

On returning after many years to the most famous passage of Proust, which itself I expected to find no longer capable of making me hold my breath in the way it did at first reading - the tasting of the madeleine - I was after all captivated, and moved, by two extremely peculiar images that Proust employs, neither of which I have ever found reference to in their original context:

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have reognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our past" (p.47)

"And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (p.51)

For all that the Japanese have been long known for their ingenuity with paper, one almost wonders whether this game really exists... But of course by this point in a first reading (this is the last paragraph of the passage), one has also ceased to pay attention to the literary means by which the epiphany is being communicated. The Proustian metaphor functions, as one blogger puts it in a suitably extravagant metaphor of his own, "like one of those massively complex atoms created in cyclotrons that disintegrates radioactively in milliseconds"; it catalyzes the reaction going on in the reader's own experience. New Critical readings of metaphor that analyze it as a "structural element" would surely find Proust wanting: frequently metaphors vanish mid-sentence, as happens even in an oft-quoted passage such as the following, in which the vase persists for no more than four or five words:

"An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them–a connexion that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it–a unique connexion which the writer has to rediscover in order to link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together."

But the pleasure created by the metaphor lasts much longer; for (to end with another technological Proustian metaphor) -

"Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people" (p. 932)

vita contemplativa

In Bengal, landscape and mind seem to meet naturally in a state of contemplation. This is not an epic country. South of Darjeeling, there are no dramatic peaks and falls, no mist-swathed hills, not even the romance of the desert. But the flat plain has an expansiveness and an imaginative tinge to it that one might miss in the north German plateau or the East Anglian fens. The land is still occupied, in a full sense, and the occupants are waiting always, for the transformations brought by the weather that sweeps across the plain, the grand and yet subtle sequence of the Bengali calendar's six seasons.

In consequence the country's literature seems also to have a lyric, contemplative quality. Pather Panchali (1929) is celebrated as the greatest Bengali novel of the past century not for plot, complex psychology or social critique, but for its rootedness in a child's vivid experience of his place in the world, defined by personal relationships of course, but also by space and the power of imagination. For Opu, the horizon of his knowledge and vision is tinged with a vague wonder, a sense of imagined distance that appears at dusk in the illumined beauty of the tops of the palm trees standing furthest away from his house, in the bewitched, nervous sense of strangeness as he passes the buildings of an old, deserted British indigo plantation on a walk with his father at the outskirts of the village, or in the inconceivable excitement of the railway line which his sister takes him to see (one of the most memorable scenes in Ray's celebrated film adaptation). Naturally Opu is "imaginative" in the conventionally childlike way too - he loves swashbuckling stories from the old epics, and the jatra, the travelling village theatre - but that Bibhutibashan gives him this more numinous, more immanent vision of the wonder of his surroundings seems to me not just poetizing wishfulness, but an understanding of the freshness of a child's perceptions, of how exactly scenes in one's life become meaningful, memorable.

And despite his majestic adult appearance, Tagore too could see with the eyes of a child. Among the prose works of his that I have read, the ones that appeal the strongest to me (and to many other commentators also) are not the big social-issue novels, but the slim memoirs of his early life - My Reminiscences and Boyhood Days. His early childhood was more confined than Opu's: from the dark family house in Jorasanko in north Calcutta, only his gaze and his fancy could go out roaming. They did not immediately scramble in search of stories. Young Rabi was a patient observer, willing to dwell, like a Dutch old master, on homely details of life on the streets, courtyards and rooftops of the town. As he wrote in a letter of 1930:

"A greater part of my early years was spent in observing the world of nature. It gave me intense joy to watch things. I would sit quietly by the window, or climb on a packing-box to peep over the wall of our balcony to feast my eyes upon a host of things - the early morning sun touching the top of a row of coconut palms, the drove of ducks diving in and out of the water of the tank, the deep blue grandeur of the rain-laden clouds rising suddenly from behind the balcony, the walls of varied sizes of a neighbouring house, across the lane looking mysterious in moonlight, the low sheds where lived the milkmen with their cattle beyond the walls of the inner apartments, the sun glistening on a shallow pool of water where the buffaloes bathed, the deep green of an avenue of trees that stood atop a long line of roofs of assorted heights to the east - all of them seemed to fascinate me. The first idea that came the instant I left my bed was that there was no end of things to see..."

In the last years of life - when Tagore began to paint - his visions became more symbolically charged. He wanted to find a meaning or even a moral in what he saw; as in the description of a train ride (from Calcutta to Madras) from the same letter –

"My mind is content with the thought that I had taken in all there was to see. The train moves on fast and I cannot go over the once reconnoitred ground. Those who counsel giving up the world because nothing in it lasts, should take a lesson from the man in the moving train... As I look out of the compartment and observe a thing of indescribable beauty on this sunbathed noon of early spring - I realise at this very instant that this will not last, that this will vanish out of my line of vision. And yet...is my present experience an illusion? I am not prepared to accept this to be so. This picture that I see this instant is not merely a source of joy to me personally, as to an unrelated individual. My response does not depend on my flitting fancy...it is an experience I share with my fellow man, as part of humanity... The joy that Kalidasa poured into his verses, on seeing the beauty of the earth bathed in the deep shadows of the early monsoon clouds, will live... It is a cumulative joy to which all of us contribute our share."

Kalidasa, the great Sanskrit poet whose work "The Cloud Messenger" (Meghadutam) Tagore had in mind in writing this, also described, in that greatest of his poems, a journey across the Indian landscape – not by a train but by a drifting monsoon cloud. It is an extended and yet entirely contemplative poem, the likes of which one will scarcely find in ancient European literature ( – just as, conversely, ancient Indian literature contains no tragedies). For the Sanskrit aestheticians, literature and the arts were vehicles of the rasas, aesthetic emotions which should be "tasted" and dwelt upon rather than cathartically discharged in shocks. The connection when one's eyes and mind are held by an image, the essential timelessness of that moment of appreciation, are what the artist aims to engender. Hence why a single north Indian raga can be "developed" for an hour or more (and here one should best understand that word in something like the sense of the "development" of a photographic image, a gradual emergence into clarity); or why south Indian forms of dance-drama such as Kathakali will dwell on a single tableau or gesture for lengths of time that in the Western theatre would seem absurd. As teachers will sometimes express it, a raga is like the remembered image of a beautiful face; what you play must outline and manifest this inner vision, not distort it.

Tagore's opening "preamble" to My Reminiscences suggests a similarity to the writer's task in dealing with his memories. Chronology is merely external: the rasa is in the images laid down under the flow of time.

"I do not know who has painted the pictures of my life imprinted on my memory. But whoever he is, he is an artist. He does not take up his brush simply to copy everything that happens; he retains or omits things just as he fancies; he makes many a big thing small and small thing big; he does not hesitate to exchange things in the foreground with things in the background. In short, his task is to paint pictures, not to write history. The flow of events forms our external life, while within us a series of pictures is painted. The two correspond, but are not identical."

To "make many a big thing small and small thing big" - a procedure that might work for more than just reminiscence. Other writers of the period in Europe believed in it - Joseph Roth was one, as I've written on this blog, Proust (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) another. It carries on in Bengali literature, for me most convincingly in the work of Amit Chaudhuri. The first of his novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, was autobiographical. Here is an especially beautiful passage, in the course of which Chaudhuri describes his own view of fiction and its “stories”:

“...why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story — till the reader would shout ‘Come to the point!’—and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.”

Many scenes in Chaudhuri’s books dwell on "memory pictures", episodes, impulses, or routines, quite insignificant from a narrative point of view – the rituals and inconveniences of Indian household life, the homesickness of the young Indian student in England, the middle-class housewife's modest determination to take music lessons. They are not there to give “body” or a sense of location to a story, a story in terms of which people’s lives take on meaning. It is rather as if the characters are waiting for a story to shape itself (for the housewife to realize her dreams as a successful singer, perhaps). And when time flows on and that still does not happen, it is these “images” from their life which, redeeming their quiet disappointment, absorb the meaning instead, gently soaking up the rasa of passed time.

Aesthetics and conceptual art

The following is an edited extract from a dialogue I took part in which originally appeared on http://www.beardscratchers.com/ (currently undergoing reconstruction - I'll put a direct link here when it becomes available), on the general topic of aesthetics. My interlocutor, in bold type, was a student of art history.

More than any other area of philosophy, in my opinion, philosophical aesthetics needs to be linked directly to aesthetic experiences, so that we don't remain wholly on the level of theory. Examples are good; or even better, let's start with direct 'criticism' (in the broadest sense - slapping a few labels on your reaction to a piece of art first of all), and then try and tease out more general implications. Unlike mathematics, where one's reaction to the shape of a specific triangle has to be suppressed in order to recognise the abstract properties it shares with other triangles, aesthetics is an area of theory which acknowledges its own basis in particular, sensuous experiences. Longinus' or Burke's discussions of the sublime are very good at exemplifying (reading Burke is a whole aesthetic experience in itself: meditating on which parts of a woman's body he finds most aesthetically pleasing, he calls attention to the region "about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried." Mmmm...sorry, got carried away there!)

Burke however, like Kant, was more concerned with aesthetic experience in general - our reactions to landscapes, people, animals or everyday objects. The question which has come to the fore of discussion since those two were writing back in the eighteenth century is, what links our aesthetic experience in general with the category of 'art'? I think it is a particular delineation of the contents of our experience, a certain 'marking off' in space and time - one which is emphasised in traditional art by the frame of a painting. By using a device like this, the painting is almost asking us to direct our attention in a certain way, to focus on it, so that everything outside the frame - both in the outside world of the gallery and in our just-passed thoughts and sensations of that hour or that day - is put, for the time being, out of focus, relative to the things within the frame. Which is not to say that there can't be a relationship between inside and outside - that the painting can't engage with feelings or beliefs that we had long before stepping in front of it, or that it must only be appreciated 'in itself' - but this relationship must be of a certain kind. It can be comparative, symbolic or metaphorical, for instance: allegories do this quite bluntly, but something 'realistic' like a Vermeer also creates its own little world, in which certain people or objects, or even something as insubstantial as the light entering a room, incite one's memory or sympathy, relate subtly to one's 'external' thoughts.

What I think it should not be - this would destroy the 'focus' I mentioned earlier - is a casual, everyday or 'environmental' relation (I'm grasping around for the right word here), such as exists among the other things one might find in an art gallery: when you go in the door, your attention scans over the walls, the labels, the skylight, the security guard etc, and you think, 'yep, typical art gallery' - you recognize the scene and nothing in it holds your focus. But if you do that with the paintings as well - and let's be honest, it's often hard not to much of the time, unless we happen to be real connoisseurs - then we're missing the aesthetic experience they are trying to provoke; this is 'gallery drift', where you walk past a wall of paintings with a glazed expression, glance at their labels for five seconds, look up, think 'oh yeah, another one of those...maybe the next one's more interesting...', and move on. Big 'blockbuster' exhibitions of famous artists often encourage this tendency.

In my opinion - I'm sure some of you artistic people out there will disagree, and please do! - a lot of modern, 'conceptual' art can do the same: partly because it challenges the traditional idea of 'framing' (the object, or by implication, one's attentive experience of it) by explicitly calling up our 'environmental' idea of 'what belongs' in an art gallery, or what should be in or out of focus, and trying to disrupt it. This is a great tactic for capturing one's attention straight off - 'a urinal in an art gallery?! wow - crazy! that'll shock the bourgeois!' (Duchamps) or 'hey, there's nothing in this gallery...wait a minute, they just turned the lights off...and they've gone back on again: this isn't just part of the gallery, this is the artwork. Now that's clever.' (Martin Creed). But once the point is realised, does it actually encourage the separate, sustained focus one needs to have an aesthetic experience? It challenges 'gallery drift', it makes one stop in one's tracks for a moment - but this kind of art also relies on our characteristic inattentive mode to achieve its instantaneous effect; what it doesn't do is help us out of it, because all too often there isn't the depth to develop our focus. You couldn't really say that Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin create a 'world' with their art, one that draws you in in the way that Vermeer does - rather, they rely on the everyday 'world' of the gallery. (I don't want to exclude all modern art and sound horribly conservative, so I'll add that some modern installations can create their own world out of the gallery space - Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread have done it for me.) So, in that sense, when people pose the question a propos of Lucas or Emin, 'but is it really art?', they do have a point; such art may have value of a kind, but it isn't a kind that links our experience of it with other cases of 'aesthetic' sensation, something that is not only pleasurable, but 'marks itself out' from the rest of our experience, instead of blurring together (like too many similar boozy nights on the town!).

We no longer care about what art is, but what art can do and mean for people. Dada, conceptualism and Fluxus broke the mold of what art had to be, and I'm sorry if you lament that, but wake up and smell the coffee! Things have changed! A great deal of art these days is certainly not 'pleasureable' and may not 'mark itself out' from its environment, but that is no longer the ideal for many artists. I find it exhilarating that artists today are seeing themselves as political and social commentators rather than living room decorators, and I think it is this politically and socially conscious strain of art that we should nurture. We would be missing something if we abandoned the current practice of contextualizing contemporary art exhibitions with art historical ones, but I would hate to favor traditional painting and sculpture over the exciting things happening today.

What is important about much contemporary art is that it does blur boundaries. It colors the way we interact with our environment and other people. Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lee Mingwei personally interact with visitors in and outside of the gallery, the former cooking and eating meals with them, the latter asking them to give him a tour of locations of personal importance. Acts such as these require a sustained focus and surely result in later reflection on the part of the viewer/participant. Before you retort by saying that such artists cannot interact with every visitor, let me add that the resulting documentation of such events, exhibited in the gallery space, also requires sustained attention from viewers. Furthermore, there is still opportunity for a high level of craftsmanship if your aesthetics must require it. Artist Sarah Sze installs sculptural landscapes in uncommon places with uncommon materials. Last summer at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, she created aquatic environments out of surgical supplies that were displayed under glass tiles in the museum's conservatory. These landscapes were wondrously complex and delicate.

In response to your Martin Creed reference, I would like to cite an artist who can actually pull off conceptual pieces that hold viewers' attention: Robert Gober. He created one of the most arresting conceptual pieces I have ever seen, which I saw installed at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston a few years ago. He installed a fake window high up on the wall of a small room. Outside the window, which was barred to look like a jail window, was a bright blue sky. As soon as I walked into the darkened space, I felt claustrophic, sad and hopeful all at once. The work does not occupy a discrete space in the gallery but had the kind of magnetic impact that a painting can have. Yet Gober's window goes further than any painting can because it is formally beautiful but also affects the space around it, transforming it into a place that feels radically different from the gallery in which it places itself.

It is difficult to find works that satisfy all the requirements that many critics seem to put forth: that it be formally beautiful, maintain the viewer's attention and inspire contemplation, and have significant meaning. Works like Sze's can only offer meaning such as the viewer, curator, or artist herself projects it. Tirivanija and Mingwei's work cannot touch all viewers in the way the artists would like, but they continue their work anyway. After all, it is the gesture that counts and not just the time spent or the belly filled.

The Robert Gober sounds great, and that's precisely the kind of (supposedly) 'conceptual' art that I think connects to our non-artistic aesthetic experience in the way I'm talking about. The fact that it's not a painting makes absolutely no difference to what kind of art it essentially is. The way in which modern media allow the artist to affect so much more strongly the space the viewer finds him/herself in is a major advantage over painting; but I wouldn't say that this new use of space has anything innately conceptual about it - rather, it strengthens the potential of the core aesthetic experience. It's new, but it's still an 'artistic' resource in the strong, aesthetic meaning of the word I've been using.

As for Fluxus, it did explore, and cross, the boundaries - in music for instance, John Cage did much to disrupt those between music and noise, music and silence, musical performance and other kinds of performance. A lot of his work, and that of others at the time such as LaMonte Young, was very definitely not music by any even vaguely sensible use of the word; but as I said cautiously a propos of Emin, that doesn't mean it can't have value of some kind. The value you stress in conceptual art is that of social and political commentary, which is all well and good as an aim. But - this'll lead to more controversy, but what the hell, it's interesting - can it be a central aim of art? It seems to me that much of the most significant social and political commentary is in words, not in installations. Writers can express their vision of society precisely, at considerable length, utilising scores of ideas backed up with hard analysis, facts, metaphors and powerful rhetoric: artists are limited to ambiguity and a low level of structure to their 'commentary'. Until you show me a conceptual artist whose work has had, or could have, anything like the influence that the writings of Plato, Hegel, Marx and company have had on Western society, I remain unconvinced. Good traditional (in the broad sense, i.e. aesthetic) art can, as a side-effect, change the way people look at society; but the visceral impact that enables it to do so has nothing to do with concepts, or being clever - it arises from an aesthetic engagement.

Obviously I haven't experienced the works by Tiravanija and Mingwei that you cite, so I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have an impact on me, but your description doesn't convince me that their activity belongs in the same class of 'art' as Gober, or Whiteread. Again, it may have value - the similar ideas and antics of the Situationists back in the 50s-60s I think are great, wish I'd been there; and given that it doesn't have a recognised name, 'art' might do as well as any; but I think it's more a species of utopian philosophy-in-action than a genuinely aesthetic endeavour. If you think my critical requirements too narrow, I'll say that craftsmanship isn't a big issue for me. Craft doesn't guarantee aesthetic appreciation; the latter depends on values that go beyond pure skill. And I take back any suggestion that art has to be 'pleasurable', since in order to sustain it you'd have to stretch the meaning of pleasure so far as to be incomprehensible. But distinctiveness, depth, a 'metaphorical' rather than 'environmental' relationship to reality, and thus the capacity to create a 'world' - these feel to me to be important characteristics of art that are more valuable to explore than to throw aside.