Marc James Léger

Introduction to Special Issue of the journal Art & the Public Sphere, 'The Struggle Before Us',  11:2 (2022), published February 2024. Essays by Alain Badiou, John Roberts, Benjamin Duke, Chris Marsden and Marc James Léger; edited by Marc James Léger.

Contribution to the anthology 'The Heritage We (Don't) Renounce,' produced on the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin. Although a valuable and important compendium, there are some entries of a dubious quality. The book review in Review of African Political Economy is ant-Trotskyist without rationale.

This book was intended as a post-postmodern rejoinder to Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic. It explores questions of cultural production, creative labour, class struggle and oppositionality in the new century. Originally titled "Spleen: Institutions of Cultural Production," it was also meant to identify the role of PMC bourgeois bohemianism in cultural administration. It has chapters by Rosalyn Deutsche, Gregory Sholette, BAVO, Angela McRobbie, Gerald Raunig, Aras Ozgun, Critical Art Ensemble, Mathieu Beauséjour (artwork), David Tomas, Bruce Barber and Slavoj Zizek.

Includes chapters on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vera Chytilova, Vaclav Vorlicek, Olivier Assayas, Hal Hartley, Oliver Ressler, Vincent Gallo, Harmony Korine and Jim Jarmusch. Includes a Foreword and an interview with Bradley Tuck.

In the past several decades, progressive leftists have gradually replaced socialism with populist criticism of elites and single-issue coalitions. As global economic crisis deepens, the spectre of both the radical left and the extreme right have re-emerged. Max Horkheimer famously stated that whoever does not criticize capitalism has nothing to say about fascism. With a focus on the American scene, Too Black to Fail adds to this the argument that whoever does not criticize identity politics has nothing to say about capitalism. Taking the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama as a touchstone for the contradictions of our era, Léger questions the Obama legacy in relation to the neoliberalization of society and culture. Arguing for the renewal of emancipatory universalism, Too Black to Fail makes an unsparing critique of woke aesthetics and black capitalism, drawing the connections between today’s racialist agenda and the ideology of post-representation.

In 2016 and 2020, the Bernie Sanders campaign gave American leftists a path towards social change through electoral politics. After progressive Democrats discovered that Hillary Clinton and party insiders had blocked the Sanders nomination, the Democratic Party establishment fabricated Russiagate as a diversion from the fact that it lost the election to a Reality TV demagogue. In 2020, they pursued the same agenda of neoliberal policies combined with identity politics. In order to combat Trump’s reactionary uses of identity, the 2020 Sanders campaign combined a working-class agenda of universalist policies with various forms of social movement activism. In doing so it compromised on universalist principles and socialist radicalism in order to appeal to demographic groups and win the election. Making use of Žižekian ideology critique as well as the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, and other critics of the professional-managerial class, Bernie Bros Gone Woke reveals how intersectional politics contributed to the failure of the Sanders campaign – a lesson that the organized left must learn if it is to challenge progressive neoliberalism and move beyond postmodern post-politics.

Since 2010 several women have accused the filmmaker Roman Polanski of sexual assault crimes that would have occurred in the 1970s, around the same time as his conviction for the statutory rape of Samantha Geimer. With the 2019 release of Polanski's film about the Dreyfus Affair, J'accuse, MeToo activists have protested the comparison that he has made between himself and Alfred Dreyfus, in particular, with regard to the way that his life has been exploited by the media. The film has more in common with MeToo than activists acknowledge. In particular, the emphasis on whether or not the public should judge the work or the artist reinforces a naïve approach to aesthetic autonomy that otherwise functions as a bulwark for more recent trends in post-structuralism that promote identity politics at the expense of a culture and politics of the left that is premised on notions of emancipatory universality.

In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bour-dieu's sociology of culture to Peter Bürger's historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the "institution art," a new "avant garde hypothesis" becomes possible for today's age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

Debates in radical cultural praxis reflect conflicting viewpoints on the left. While one might assume that the enormity of the challenges facing the left would lead to a common front this is rarely the case as communist and horizontalist viewpoints clash. This essay addresses new possibilities for thinking about avant-garde art and vanguard politics by considering the recent debates between Slavoj Žižek and McKenzie Wark and further, by looking at the limits of the cultural revolution as we have known it since the late 1960s. The impasse of Occupy Wall Street, Strike Debt, and similar protest movements has led Žižek to shift from a view of the party in terms of the Lacanain Discourse of the Analysis to more general reflections on the Discourse of the Master. The consequent critiques of Žižek that are examined are shown to have evaded his ideas, failing to advance radical cultural praxis beyond postmodernism. On the other hand, one finds that Žižek's renewal of radical thought is challenging others on the progressive left to do the same.

Covers leading theories of socially engaged art, Occupy Wall Street and alter-global art activism, the Quebec Maple Spring protests as psychogeography, the communist critique of ultra-left agonism, a review of the work of the industrial band Test Dept in relation to post-Fordism, and the last chapter is a first published foray into the class viz identity, Marxism viz postmodernism debate.

Brave New Avant Garde examines the theoretical premises and the real possibilities for contemporary avant-garde practices. Echoing Alain Badiou, it considers whether the 'avant garde hypothesis' must be abandoned. The book stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and addresses 'sinthomeopathic' practices of over-identification as one possible alternative to the culturalization of politics.

How do art exhibitions serve as liminal sites for the investigation of the invisible institutional forces and influences that condition contemporary visual art practices? How can an apartment space, as a distinct form of socio-cultural environment, operate differently from public exhibition spaces? How does curatorial praxis provide a framework for making art through an extended, affective bond of commitment and friendship? These are some of the questions that are raised by Millet Matrix.

Millet Matrix is a singular exchange between the Montreal-based artist Rosika Desnoyers, artist, theorist and curator David Tomas and cultural theorist Marc James Léger. The co-authored catalogue archives texts that describe the production and conceptualization of the three post-institutional apartment exhibitions Millet Matrix I (2010), II (2012) and III (2013). It features Tomas' essay on Desnoyers' error-based needlegraph work as a form of conceptual art and programming language as well as interviews with Tomas by Marc James Léger.

Theoretical paper and review of Zine Magubane's review of Kenan Malik's 'Not So Black and White' and an interview with Gabriel Rockhill in Monthly Review. Keywords: Marxist Theory, Cultural Marxism, Cultural Studies, Left Postmodernism, Dialectical Materialism