An Old Criterion

What do you think about quoting Henry Kissinger addressing a group of fellow conservatives? The June New Criterion features Kissinger’s remarks at “the inaugural Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society at The New Criterion’s 30^th Anniversary Gala in New York City on April 26^th, 2012 (“The Limits of Universalism," The New Criterion, 6/2012)  Those who hate The New Criterion should remember that T.S. Eliot, the author of a wonderful essay about the impersonality of the artist, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was the editor of The Criterion after which The New Criterion is ostensibly named. For Eliot haters, this fact will only fuel fire over The New Criterion’s often procrustean traditionalism. The talk is an attempt to adjudicate what Kissinger calls “a family quarrel” between neoconservatives who aim to import democracy and Burkean conservatives who take a more gradualist approach.  “For Burke,” Kissinger remarks, "society was both an inheritance and a point of departure” and he goes on to further quote Burke who argues that it’s better to follow a cautionary path that “leads us to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea, than to push for the more perfect which cannot be attained without tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth.”  Kissinger points out that Burke  “sympathized with the American Revolution because he considered it a natural evolution of English liberties” and “opposed the French Revolution, which he believed wrecked…the prospect of organic growth.” Even though he’s quoting Burke, the tone is admiring and it’s odd at this late date to be making value judgments about something which next to the Russian Revolution is a virtual primer in Hegelian dialectics. But Kissinger invokes the same Burke quote about acquiescence twice in his speech and he also uses Burke’s argument as a way of distinguishing the organic approach it avers from "Realpolik” or the supposedly idealist or value orientated approach that some of his neoconservative colleagues support. Which brings us back to Eliot and tradition. Turns out Eliot and Burke had lot in common.

Objectified

Two ideas from the world of literature came to mind at a recent screening of Gary Huswit’s Objectified at the Philoctetes Center in New York City. Objectified is Hustwit’s sequel to his first film on design, Helvetica.  (When asked in the post-interview with design guru Steven Heller about the third film of his proposed trilogy, Huswit was elusive, but did reveal that it was about something that was an integral but largely unnoticed part of our daily lives—Water? Vapor? Roads?).

    

Ezra Pound said, “Make it new,” and T.S. Eliot talked about the “impersonality of the artist” in his in his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent."  Apple designer Jonathan Ive coalesces both ideas in demonstrating how the design of the MacBook makes advances that don’t call attention to themselves yet maximize the efficiency of the object.   

    

At one point Rob Walker, design columnist for the Times, encourages consumers to appreciate the objects they have, rather than constantly searching for the new.The camera cuts to several venerable old alarm clocks and a rugged chest of drawers that is clearly an heirloom. There is something mournful in this riff, and Heller alluded to it in the post-film discussion, invoking William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in l9th century England, which resisted industrial design in favor of handmade objects.

Objectified communicates the exponential obsolescence that is the quintessence of modern industrial design. To cite another literary source, modern design is the opposite of Keats’s Grecian urn, conforming rather to Moore’s law, which dictates that smaller and smaller chips will achieve ever-higher capabilities. Of course the quantum chip working on two atoms is the ultimate arbiter. Design has surmounted the old Bauhaus equation. Form may no longer follow function. But where does that leave the rest of us who are doomed to spend our lives trying to figure out how each new gadget works?