Sunday Afternoon

"Still life" means "everywhere there is an orderly way of life...a tidiness of the house and a cheerfulness of mind...domestic, everyday life" and even the life of the court is only a heightened version of this: eroticized boredom.

Arcadia and the pastoral idyll: "everlasting spring", fullness and roundedness; primitivism and childhood were the only modes of authenticity against the backdrop of a once familiar landscape that was slowly receding from our eye's view, fading into our memories. The only way in which the increasing mechanical world of routine, rationalized organisation, and production could be held at bay: pleasure, art and culture as the last bastions of relative autonomy from the markets.

Nature is re-imagined as a place of respite from the onsetting forces of capital. But even here, leisure is soon colonized, brought into the folds of the space of flows.

But there is an older, "eternal sunday" that is depicted as a land of abundance where, as in the great feasts, there is " no sign of anything beyond what can be drunk, eaten boiled or roasted" and a certain innocence prevails. Here, there is the "unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness...an immediate other world beyond hardship." Here humanity is reconciled with nature, at ease with itself; there is only the present and self-presence and it is full, ripe, and serene.

On the negative side, however, there soon emerges another picture, "a single mosaic of boredom...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box", intensely pre-occupied. We see a "hapless idleness" and "expressionless brooding...an [internal] infernal utopia of distance and such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon is the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself."

"Cezanne transforms even his still life in which things are rigorous and sedentary, in which happy ripeness has settled, ...into a witness to a heavy contentment."

The dullness of modern regularity beckons, stretching across the horizon like a clouded gaze, extending its grey monopoly over anything that it approaches. Sameness hangs over us like fate. Henceforward, with the road to metaphysics closed, there could only be a detached and studied idleness, or a descent to eccentricity, random spontaneity, madness even-all signifying, in one way or the other, the presence of a genuine human soul behind the mask.

To fall, to burn a path with one's own eyes...is this not infinitely preferable to the mundane, shopkeeper's mentality? An act of the will, even if misguided, indicates the shimmering of the spark more than a thousand years of this sleepwalking, of this still life....the "repose of a settled nature".

The Allama would say: the ink is not dry!

Gaugin, who in his European world-weariness seeks happiness and colour beyond the deep blue seas. To find the "remote and primitive world", far away from the rigid, familiar world of hierarchy and stratification...as if contact with the exotic would unlock some deep part of him that had long been lost; the body, the sensual, hedonistic pleasure as an escape from the monotony of industrial society. It is the dream of freedom-freedom from anxiety, guilt and responsibility.

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilising old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.

But the insipid "sunday afternoon" , with its sickly glow and peaceful slumber, its sun-and -wheat-consciousness, in so far as it expresses, with its wistful glances, rigid, well-defined personal spaces nothing but the desire for solitary contemplation, for uninterrupted being, and forgetfulness it knows nothing of real presences and connectedness-modern awareness is infinitely atomized and divided, ; in this sense, even as a negative image it carries over with it, and is structured by, the memory of the conditions it is trying to escape. Either as a temporary respite from mind-numbing routine, or as a final goal to be achieved, the afternoon is a long-drawn out realisation that the life of abundance, of the Eloi, is a shallow one.

Leisure: " a means of favouring bourgeois ends: the reproduction of working power"; the need to "kill time", to throw oneself into the whirlpools of chance through adventure, gambling, exploration, intoxicants...anything to get "out of oneself", the claustrophobia of "being" that is also an unbearable lightness of being, an eternal Sunday of sunshine. Anything can be endured except the succession of fine days. "Sociability as the form of play in a society confirms this society in even escaping it." The one-dimensional garden -as well as the desire for a dizzying escape from it in pleasure-are both marked by the closed spaces of capitalism and its work-routine.

The pressing question then becomes how can "free time" be used, "consumed", "valued". In late capitalism, leisure is either a moment of recuperation or it is a method of stupefaction: entertainment and the culture industry become a way of mesmerizing people, riveting them to series of fragmentary images and sounds, each as fleeting as the next-whether it is an image of fear or pleasure is of little import. The flight from boredom and indifference can, from now on, only be solved by the industries that manufacture dreams of escape and rebellion...the very same organizations that generated the levelled-down world in the first place!

"We have time and example neither for the grace nor the peace of happiness " because work has burnt us out. Culture: been there, done that. Tick. And move on. Only the hobby indicates " a private appearance of what activity with pleasure and love could mean."

Bourgeois presentation and administration of culture: " such cultural transmission resembles a promenade concert in small spas, and the Sunday supplement in the bourgeois conformist press."

The past then becomes "history", something to be viewed from the safe distance of behind a window plane...a museum piece. Culture is a matter for our educated tastes, our refined sensibilities, but never something that continues to inform our whole personality (rather than just the mind), rarely something that does not cease to affect our very way of thinking and living as soon as we step outside the walls of the gallery, museum, or concert hall.

"Really experienced history, namely that experienced in terms of forming history oneself, provides no legacy for ...the sunday room, instead, it is a house that has more staircases than rooms."

(Citations from J.Franzen, intro to the Gambler and from Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope, vol II)