Notes on: illusion of the spectator

The philistine is not normally considered a cultural rival so
much as a rival to culture. We have to add, straightaway, I think,
that the total loss of culture may be an ideological claim about the
philistine, just as it was about so-called primitives. The appearance
of the philistine’s lack of culture is better understood as a lack of
cultural capital. In this way, the common idea of the philistine’s
externality to culture – of having no culture – can be regarded as
the ideological proof that the philistine holds the place of art’s part
des sans-part, the subject characterized by the total loss of culture.
What this means is that, the philistine is a figure within cultural
discourse, by virtue of being perceived as a figure without culture.
And what I would want to add is that consequently the philistine
holds its own promesse du bonheur by exceeding art’s horizon of
cultural universality.
The philistine, like the part des sans-part, is not another way
of talking about the proletariat, but it occupies an analogous place
in a different structure. Their structural promise is based on their
absolute lack of immediate promise. Marx did not argue that the
working class were better educated, had better manners or were
better equipped to govern than the bourgeoisie. And no defense of
the philistine could get very far by starting from the assertion that it
is culturally superior to the aesthete, connoisseur etc. In fact, there
is nothing positive about the philistine that would justify any hope
placed in it. Like the proletariat in the economy, though, or the part
des sans-part of politics, the philistine holds a unique place within
the totality which means that it is the key to understanding culture
and, potentially, a powerful agent in transforming it. If we take
Marx’s equation of impoverishment and emancipatory potential, we
can see that the philistine, as culturally bereft, fits the bill perfectly.
Marx characterises the position of the revolutionary class as being
able to say of itself “I am nothing and I should be everything”, and
politically this is exactly the position of the part des sans-part and
culturally the same goes for the philistine.
DAVE BEECH