When the fountain figure Pomona was erected at Skillebekk in Oslo in October 1877, it triggered an immediate and violent emotional immune response in Morgenbladet. The newspaper’s writers used all their academic and linguistic capital to rage against «The municipal sense of art».
The established civil service aristocracy was deeply outraged that a zinc sculpture, mass-produced at the German industrial foundry A. Castner in Berlin, should enter the public space. For these academic gatekeepers art was to be unique and elevated; they suffered from an elitist fear of contact with industrial realism and popular utility value.
Instead of assessing the fountain on the basis of its actual and material function – which was to bring pure, running water to the city’s citizens over a municipal budget of 300 speciedaler – Morgenbladet chose to raise a moralising exception narrative. In 1898 they even managed to cook up a pure myth that the sculpture was a free grease gift from a British plumbing firm in order to secure contracts. This untruth stood uncritically in public archives for over a century. Today Pomona stands safely re-erected behind the solid walls of the Kirkeristen bazaars, as physical proof that the elite technocrats’ moral panic always weathers away, while the documented reality on the ground remains standing.
This historical art debate reveals with surgical precision exactly the same mechanisms that characterise today’s public space. The specifically Norwegian power establishment and its flock of know-it-alls still use form, jargon and moral «make-up art» as an administrative gatekeeper to maintain social class distinctions and shut out ordinary people’s life experiences.
To understand this decay we must bring forth the French sociologist and situationist Guy Debord and his main work from 1967, La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle). Debord described a historical transition where being was replaced by having, which in our neoliberal age has mutated further so that everything is about appearing. In the society of the spectacle the actual realities on the ground are devalued in favour of visual representations and outer form. Politics and social life are reduced to a theatre where it is no longer contextualised what things actually are, but how they look on the surface.
It is in this class game that my own experience as an independent social analyst and IT support technician becomes an asymmetric power factor. I have no institutional muzzle, no leadership position I must protect, and no security clearances that the state can use as a sanction mechanism to demand my silence. When I met the popular professional politician Trond Giske at the traditional, popular watering hole Dovrehallen in Storgata, we first established a relation through my own Trønder roots and the Stene name. But in the second that I laid my published naval war chronicle from Dagens Næringsliv on the table, the political spectacle collapsed. He became silent. One of Norwegian history’s most rhetorically schooled politicians had nothing to answer. He was paralysed because he was suddenly confronted with a cool, structural and material analysis, instead of the predictable, emotional culture war that professional politicians are programmed to handle.
The men of power are drilled to handle those who fall into the trap and answer with flaming rhetoric and maximal metaphors. As Noam Chomsky has dissected in his models of power and propaganda, the most effective way to control a population is to allow a very lively and intense debate within a strictly limited spectrum of opinions. The debaters who rage over emotional symbols from below instead of structural power shifts from above give the system a free ticket to activate its moral immune response and dismiss them as irrational. They remain slaves to the premises the elite has constructed. My meeting at Dovrehallen and my chronicle portfolio prove that the Norwegian public space has great headroom for fundamental system criticism, as long as one retains intellectual honesty and uses the Socratic method. By building a philosophical defence based on dry data and empirical fault lines, the counterpart is forced over onto the arena of substance.
The actors of power in the administrative systems answer with silence because muzzles and duties of loyalty force them to it, and because they lack the intellectual ammunition to meet the realities. The real democratic challenge lies in forcing the discourse out of the society of the spectacle’s moral adornment and back to the physical and material realities that the population must relate to every single day.
https://oslohistorie.no/2024/
https://www.dn.no/innlegg/
https://oslohistorie.no/2024/