KultureFlash ::: Artworker of the Week ::: Catherine Yass

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #11

Satus, 2003 (work in progress)
Excerpt from his current work in progress, Satus Anxiety that will be published in spring 2004. Satus Anxiety will be Alain de Botton's seventh book.

Additional Image: Book Diagram
Additional Image II: Purpose of Art
Additional Image III: Balance
Additional Image IV: Sucess & Value

Sherman Sam: Why Satus?

Alain de Botton: I started off writing essays about love; the kind of love we want from another person, sexual/romantic love. Then gradually, it struck me that we really spend our lives pursuing two very different kinds of love -- romantic love, and what you could call 'love from the world', from friends, colleagues, people we come across. The way I'm interpreting status is as a kind of love; the person with high status is also beloved...

SS: Am I correct to say that then there is an element -- and only an element -- of class involved?

AdB: I specifically didn't want to limit my book to a discussion of economic classes. Because of the enormous influence of Karl Marx's work, the notion of classes has had huge prestige and is endlessly considered in academic debates. It seemed more important therefore to consider the more emotional side of the issue, for which the word status seemed appropriate.

SS: With this in mind, is there a certain ideal de Botton reader?

AdB: She's beautiful but doesn't know it, somewhat misunderstood by the friends around her, prone to melancholy, a combination of practical and reflexive, a bit shy, cheeky, impatient, kind, with a passing resemblance to a Bellini Madonna.

SS: Status Anxiety seems an appropriate title for England. Do you not consider that the status of philosophical thought is always lowered here, that despite the obvious stratification of society we collectively think lowly of philosophy?

AdB: I think that there's always been a high value placed in England on being 'pragmatic', down to earth, unpretentious and unemotional. To start asking friends, down at the pub, 'what love really is?' or 'Why we work?' is to risk encountering some suspicious looks -- and recommendations that one "lighten up", "relax" or even "chill." Whereas in France of course... Now one doesn't want to idealise the French, or the Dutch, or the Italians, or the Danes, but it is true that in many European countries, there is more indulgence towards abstract speculation. It doesn't change that much really, people aren't cleverer as such; it just means you can air topics that here get censored much more quickly.

SS: So is this your sneaky way of smuggling philosophy into the lives of the English? I noticed that you have given a talk with Jonathan Ree as part of a dialogue between philosophy and the public. And how have you been received outside of this country?

AdB: I do enjoy trying to get difficult topics "under the radar" as it were. My recent book about travel is really an essay on aesthetics and notions of the picturesque and sublime dating from the 18th century. However, if I'd called the book Aspects of the aesthetic of landscape no one would have read it -- not out of nastiness, simply because there's a lot off-putting academic work out there, and people are rightly wary of it. So I enjoy trying to get around prejudice, to show people they might be interested in things they never knew they cared about. I've become very bored of late of all these attempts to "bring philosophy to a wider public." This seems too blunt an ambition and it's resulted in some very bad books indeed. By all means, it's great to combine intellectual substance with an easy style, but the current vogue for "popular philosophy" books often has more to do with the personal ambitions of academics than with any authentic artistic impulse. From my very first book, I've had a number of foreign publishers, perhaps more than other writers. My books do very well in some countries, much less well in others. I'm particularly big in Brazil, Italy, Switzerland and the Americans have been good to me too.

SS: Judging from your chapter breakdown, you're approaching status also as a state of being, which -- I’m guessing -- will lead to a whole being in society. How did you come to think/imagine these "states" (lovelessness, snobbery, etc)?

AdB: I'm attracted to neat architecture in my books and so my book is divided very simply into two parts, causes of and solutions to Status Anxiety. In each case, I pick on five likely candidates (one could of course find more) and explore. To my mind, one of the functions of literature is to explore ordinary problems and concerns, not necessarily to find some definitive solution, but to remind us that we're not alone. Reading for me is a substitute for a kind of communication that rarely happens in real life.

SS: Do you then consider the dialogue between author and reader more direct? More Socratic perhaps? I’m intrigued by this communication that "rarely happens in real life"? Are there regular themes? Or have these changed with the times?

AdB: There are two things missing from ordinary conversation, to my mind. The first of these is rigour -- conversations tend to meander, a subject is raised and then dropped, there is usually little logical progression, people get distracted, the phone rings, someone walks in... And secondly, honesty is difficult in conversation, because most people (especially men) have difficulty revealing vulnerabilities. So there's a lot of life that gets left unsaid -- and that's where literature can come in and take up some of the slack.

SS: It seems that the solutions (art, philosophy...) are a continuation -- and deepening -- of the thinking evident in The Consolations Of Philosophy. Both in general an attempt to bring philosophy back from academia and return it to the living? Do you consider having lived an important aspect of being able to write such books? How in this particular instance -- perhaps via an example -- has experience brought the notion of "status" to your mind?

AdB: I envisage the task of my writing in two ways: a) to understand beauty/happiness b) to make sense of pain. If you went to any British university and outlined this as your project, you'd be shown the door, if not the way to the insane asylum. So I do definitely have an unusual practical view of what thinking might be about. When I called my book 'How Proust can change your Life,' I had my tongue in my cheek -- but only because I was at heart so serious. I was so far from joking, I had to make things into a joke. Like most people, I haven't lived through dramatic events, unless of course, one counts as dramatic the process of growing up, falling in and out love, wrestling with issues of career, witnessing death, being anxious, being human etc... Nevertheless, there's plenty of "material" to be getting on with in these everyday stories and events. As for what bits of my life made me think of status, I think that a lot of it was being a writer living in a city. Writers are obsessed with status and are very competitive. However, I didn't want to write about writers. It was only when I realised that what writers feel is felt by everyone to a lesser or greater extent that I knew I "had" a book.

SS: I like the idea that you describe yourself as a "practical" thinker. Given the maps you have presented in the headers (beauty/pain & reason/emotion) there is -- as you have said -- a clean architecture to your planning. It is striking that "beauty" and "happiness" are two themes important to you, as it seems that they are pretty important themes to life, and yet so not touched upon in some aspects of academic philosophy and the university curriculum despite the fact that most students seem to work actively towards these goals themselves. Can I say then that a general theme to your work is looking for happiness, or perhaps understanding how to be happy?

AdB: Yes, you're absolutely right, this is my general theme. And you're also right to point out that this very important subject tends to get left out of the university curriculum. Subjects like history, economics, geography tend to be discussed without reference to the ultimate ends of human life -- namely, happiness. That's in part why we've ended up with a very strange world.

SS: You have written that you felt guide books work a bit like art, that they make you look rather than see. Being an artist myself, I like this idea that perhaps my work is like a guide book, but like all art making it follows from a moment of epiphany or perhaps many small such moments. Perhaps you've had one? A moment of realisation that "what writers feel is felt by everyone to a lesser or greater extent"?

AdB: I'm very interested in the notion of epiphanies -- by this one really means, some kind of a privileged moment where one stands outside the ordinary business of life and grasps something or sees something in a new light etc... I think that art is often built on such moments. If you read Tolstoy, his novels are full of them and in most art forms, the idea can be applied successfully.

SS: Is love and dignity not the most important thing in contemporary society? Have we lost them?

AdB: Your question seems to imply that there might one day have been a golden age of love and dignity. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be true, but what is true is that there are particular pressures now that militate against love and dignity. I'm thinking particularly of economic pressures and the pressures that come from media-dominated lives in mega-cities. Not that living in mountain huts is simple either. It's just differently complicated.

SS: It seems that your books are "intellectual" self-help guides -- contradiction perhaps, but then again we do need help with our Proust -- would you consider the state of society perhaps in need of help? And that you've placed yourself in an appropriate niche? And this shifting of thinking's "status" is necessary in our busy world?

AdB: There tends to be something derogatory about the idea of "self-help" books, largely because most books in this genre are very badly written, patronising and stupidly optimistic. That said, I love the IDEA of self-help books, the idea of a book with a desire to help the reader -- this seems a beautiful concept, one that would have been absolutely familiar to Seneca and Montaigne, to take just two examples. So I suppose I'm trying to revive an idea of consoling literature that has died out in the modern age, I'm trying to make a claim to seriousness in a field that has largely abandoned intellectual ambition.

Sherman Sam is on staff at KultureFlash and also an artist and writer. He has written for Blueprint, Contemporary and Mordern Painters, and his paintings are included in the travelling exhibition Sight Mapping currently at the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao and will be in a group drawing show Drawn 2 B Alive at Hales Gallery this June.