Towards the New Realism

“Recently we have seen a growing interest in realism, which for a long time seemed historically passé.”

“One often understands “realism” to mean the production of mimetic images of “reality.””

“However, the question remains: How do we initially meet reality? How do we discover reality in order to become able to make an image of it?”

“realism usually involves the reproduction of an average, ordinary, profane view of the world. However, this profane vision of the world is not especially exciting. The desire to depict and reproduce this profane image of the world cannot be explained by its alleged “beauty,” which it obviously does not have”

“We initially discover reality not as a simple sum of “facts.” Rather, we discover reality as a sum of necessities and constraints that do not allow us to do what we would like to do or to live as we would like to live.”

“Reality is what divides our vision of the imaginary future into two parts: a realizable project, and “pure fantasy” that never can be realized”

“the object depicted by realist literature and art was not reality itself—as described by the natural sciences—but the human psyche suffering from the shock of a failed reality test.”

“Nineteenth-century realism was, in actuality, psychologism. Reality was understood not as a place of “objective” scientific investigation but as a force of oppression that endangered or even crushed the hero.”

“Modern and contemporary art are, by contrast, products of the long history of depsychologization that many critics—for example, Ortega y Gasset—experienced as a history of dehumanization.”

“they understood art as a specific kind of technology that was able to change the world by technical means. In fact, the avant-garde tried to turn art spectators into inhabitants of the artwork—so that by accommodating themselves to the new conditions of their environment, these spectators would change their sensibilities and attitudes”

“Speaking in Marxist terms: art can thus be seen as either part of the superstructure, or part of the material base. In other words, art can be understood as either ideology or technology.”

“The radical artistic avant-gardes pursued the second, technological way of world transformation. This was pursued most radically by the avant-garde movements of the 1920s: Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl.”

“internet”

“Artworks by a particular artist can be found on the internet in the context of other information about the artist”

“Here the artwork becomes “real” and profane because it is integrated with information about its author as a real, profane person. Art is presented on the internet as a specific kind of practical activity: as documentation of a real working process taking place in the real, offline world”

“it is a reality of which we are informed”

“It is this positivist facticity of contemporary art that produces a nostalgia for realism”

“this discontent, this conflict with reality, calls for a new description: the New Realism”

“Indeed, the psyche cannot be accessed and scientifically investigated. However, this does not mean that the assumption that there is a psyche—i.e., that there is an internal discontent with the reality that cannot be diagnosed externally—can be rejected as purely fictional.”

“This becomes clear when one goes back to Hegel’s description, in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, of the moment when self-consciousness—and the assumption of the self-consciousness of the Other—initially emerges. In this moment we experience the other as a danger—even as a mortal danger.”

“The entirety of psychological literature is basically crime literature. It treats human beings as especially dangerous animals—dangerous precisely because they are “psychological” animals.”

“It is very telling that contemporary post-Deleuzian, neo-Dionysian, accelerationist, and “realist” admirers of technological progress explain their admiration in exclusively psychological terms: as the ecstasy of a self-annihilation that produces extreme intensities in their psyche.”

“Realism describes reality not “as it is” but as it is psychologically experienced by artists. That is why Marx, and Lukács after him, liked Balzac and other French authors of the realist school so much.”

“Whereas science described social, economic, and political reality as a “system,” these writers described it “psychologically” as the place of antagonistic conflicts and despair. In this sense they thematized the revolutionary potential of the psychological discontent produced by capitalist society—a discontent that was covered up by “objective” statistical data and that had not yet broken through the surface of everyday life.”

“Fiction becomes reality when it enters reality—when the psychological conflicts described by art lead to revolutionary action. Before this revolutionary moment, “realist fiction” remains a fiction.”

“writers and artists, if they want to be realist, have to learn to live with the suspicion that their descriptions of the human psyche are pure fiction—until history confirms the realism of their work.”