Léger gathers up what remains of the avant garde’s
once-vaunted radicality and hurls it into a whirling Žižekian
accelerator. Like a “pervert’s guide” to contemporary art,
Brave New Avant Garde reveals a multitude of interventionist
practices and rapidly revolving dark particles that in light of
recent events in Tunisia and Egypt no longer appear exotic,
but instead vibrate prognostic, as if heralding the dawn of a
sweeping phase change in twenty-first century art and
politics.
Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in
the Age of Enterprise Culture
In this critical tour de force, Marc Léger successfully exposes
the contradictions that animate contemporary art and that
govern the actions of those who “participate in the game of
culture” in the age of neoliberalism. And yet Léger is not
content to simply critique, he also proposes alternatives
through the medium of his concept of a sinthomeopathic
cultural praxis, the product of a successful act of balancing on
and moving along a pro-avant-gardist tightrope woven of
recent politically and socially engaged art practices.
David Tomas, author of Beyond the Image Machine: A
History of Visual Technologies
Marc James Léger’s informed and thought-provoking analysis
of critical art practices and related theories provides essential
orientation for anyone looking for ways to resist and subvert
what Peter McLaren has defined as the two thieves of
capitalism and representative democracy.
2
Oliver Ressler, artist and filmmaker, author of Alternative
Economics, Alternative Societies
3
Brave New
Avant Garde
Essays on Contemporary Art
and Politics
4
Brave New
Avant Garde
Essays on Contemporary Art
and Politics
Marc James Léger
Winchester, UK
Washington, USA
5
First published by Zero Books, 2012
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd.,
Laurel House, Station Approach,
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For distributor details and how to order please visit the
‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text copyright: Marc James Léger 2011
ISBN: 978 1 78099 050 7
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The rights of Marc James Léger as author have been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright,
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
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Design: Stuart Davies
Printed in the UK by CPI Antony Rowe
Printed in the USA by Offset Paperback Mfrs, Inc
6
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all areas of our business, from our global network of authors
to production and worldwide distribution.
7
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Avant Garde Hypothesis
Chapter 1: Andrea Fraser and the Subjectivization of
Institutional Critique
Chapter 2: Community Subjects
Chapter 3: In a Way We Are All Hokies: Polylogue on the
Socio-Symbolic Frameworks of Community Art
Chapter 4: A Brief Excursus on Avant Garde and Community
Art
Chapter 5: Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On
Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle
Chapter 6: The Subject Supposed to Over-Identify: BAVO
and the Fundamental Fantasy of a Cultural Avant Garde
Chapter 7: The Revolution Will (Not) Be Aestheticized
Chapter 8: From Artistic Activism to Geocritique: A Few
Questions for Brian Holmes
Notes
8
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the
encouragement of the colleagues and comrades I have worked
with in the past few years. In 2006 I completed my doctoral
dissertation in the program in Visual & Cultural Studies at the
University of Rochester. Thanks go to my supervisor Joan
Saab for her support of my research, which gave me the
intellectual freedom I needed to make the move from radical
democracy towards Žižekian ideology critique. My
dissertation would never have been accomplished had it not
been for the loving support of Rosika Desnoyers. Upon
completion of my thesis I set out to consider the challenges to
Marxism that have been posed by contemporary anarchist
theory and post-operaism. During this time I have enjoyed a
productive relationship with Bruce Barber, whose book
Performance, [Performance] and Performers I had the
pleasure and privilege to work on as editor. The chapter “In a
Way We Are All Hokies” was first presented at a Universities
Art Association of Canada panel chaired by Bruce in 2007.
We also co-chaired a UAAC panel in 2010 on the subject of
“the neoliberal undead.”
Working on Bruce’s [performance] books gave me the
inspiration to produce a project of my own, which turned out
to be the edited text Culture and Contestation in the New
Century, published by Intellect in London. Many wonderful
exchanges came from this project, including a collegial
friendship with Aras Ozgun, with whom I co-chaired a panel
on “Creative Labour and Creative Industries” at UAAC in
9
2008, and collaborations with Oliver Ressler, which includes
an interview that was published in Art Journal as well as a
North American presentation of his exhibition “A World
Where Many Worlds Fit” at the Foreman Art Gallery in
Sherbrooke, Québec, in 2010. During this time I have had the
pleasure of meeting and working with, in person or through
correspondence, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Lucia
Sommer, Vitaly Komar, Brian Holmes, Gregory Sholette,
Mathieu Beauséjour, Rosemary Heather, Izida Zorde, Gerald
Raunig, John Jordan, Petra Gerschner, Jackie Sumell, Pierre
Allard, Federico Zukerfeld, Yahya Madra, Isabelle Lelarge,
Jelena Stanovik, Christina Ulke and Marc Herbst. All the
while I also enjoyed the abiding support of my teacher Claude
Lacroix, who gave me the opportunity to present new
research to his students at Bishop’s University.
Thanks go to the magazines and journals that supported my
ideas during this time. In particular, I want to acknowledge
the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, where I first published a
version of “A Brief Excursus on Avant Garde and
Community Art” in the 2008 issue. A different version was
also published in C Magazine #98 (Summer 2008).
“Community Subjects” was first published in the Montreal art
magazine Etc #81 (2008). The chapter “Welcome to the
Cultural Goodwill Revolution” was published online by
Journal of Aesthetic and Protest in 2009 and parts of it also
appeared in “Avant Garde and Creative Industry,” which was
published in Creative Industries Journal in 2010. A shorter
version of the interview with Brian Holmes was published in
Art Papers (Summer 2010).
Thanks go to my family and especially my mother, Denise
Léger, for never tiring of talking with me about religion and
10
politics. And lastly, I want to thank Cayley Sorochan, who
has lovingly worked alongside and supported me these past
years and who lets me borrow her Badiou books.
11
Introduction
The Avant Garde Hypothesis
In an essay on the critique of institutions and the desire of
radicalized artists to work outside the limits of established
disciplinary structures, Brian Holmes argues that the most
productive areas of contemporary critical art practice –
discourse-based context art and institutional critique – have
undergone a significant phase change, a shift toward
extradisciplinary, transversal assemblages that link actors
from the art world to projects oriented toward political
contestation.1 The world in which networked artists and
activists operate is one that is today characterized as
“cognitive capitalism,” where affect and creativity,
immaterial and communicative labour are held to be key
components of the biopolitical engineering of subjectivity, a
voluntary mechanical enslavement within a bureaucratically
regulated process of continuous evaluation that is increasingly
oriented towards a service economy. Such forms of critical art
practice, associated with social and political movements,
autonomous collectives, and alternative media, bear a striking
resemblance to what was once referred to as the avant garde,
which Alain Badiou associates with a “subtractive tendency,”
the willingness to sacrifice art, in the artistic gesture itself,
rather than to give up on the real.2
To pursue Badiou’s thought a bit further, we could paraphrase
his critique of contemporary conservatism with the notion of
an “avant garde hypothesis” that would correspond to his idea
of a communist hypothesis.3 With this we could ask the
12
question: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned?
What does the idea of the avant garde have to offer us in the
present moment? There is no doubt that it has become
conventional for contemporary cultural workers to deny that
what they do is or can be conceived of as avant-garde. Avant
garde is associated with modernist notions of teleology and
totality and with the Marxist view that capitalism creates its
own obstacle and means of overcoming in the form of the
industrial prolatariat. With the growth of the tertiary middle
class in the postwar consumer age, and with the appearance of
the new left and new social movements from the 1950s to the
1980s, the idea of the political avant garde has by and large
been replaced by constituent forms of power that act
autonomously and in solidarity with one another, without the
directives of a centralized political party. Yet the bourgeois
state remains and prevents the full realization of progressive
responses to the mercenary assault of free market ideology. In
a similar way, in the art world, the operations of the
“institution art,” or the field of cultural production, puts
pressure on activist art practices through the normalizing
effects of cultural administration and through creative
industry reengineering of policy and institutions. Progressive
cultural workers are thus obliged to develop forms of
resistance that can allow them to act politically while still
retaining in their work some legitimizing features that would
allow this work to be read and understood as cultural
intervention. Although the rhetoric of such artists often
eschews the term avant garde, I would argue that the avant
garde idea continues to operate as the repressed underside of
the contemporary forms of extradisciplinary practice. And so,
this book is concerned with the present form of the “avant
garde hypothesis.” As such, it stands in opposition to the
pieties of “new times” cultural studies and the belief that
13
progressivism can be absorbed into strategies of postmodern
complicity, social constructionism and speculative
indeterminacy. If a postmodern, rhizomatic avant garde could
be said to represent the “precarious inscription of new hybrid
and fluid identity positions,” as Johanne Lamoureux has
argued, then the avant garde hypothesis that I speak of here is
one that in no way conforms to the post-structuralist doxa of a
“beyond left and right” micro-politics.4 A contemporary
avant garde is one that seeks a path beyond what Hal Foster
has termed the “double aftermath” of modernism and
postmodernism and responds to Mao’s injunction: “Reject
your illusions and prepare for struggle.” In this, today’s avant
garde represents not so much the transnational class of
civilized petty bourgeois culturati, but a counter-power that
rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration.
The term that I have given to the concept of struggle that best
corresponds to a contemporary avant garde is
sinthomeopathic practice. Whereas the transversal activists
who have been inspired by the “post-political politics” of
Italian workerism and the schizo-anarchism of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari have called for an “exodus” from the
established
institutions
of
cultural
production,
sinthomeopathy does not pretend to succeed Marxism and
claims, as Jacques Rancière asserts, that the power of the
proletariat is a power that declassifies and affirms the
community of equals.5 Sinthomeopathy does not propose an
escape from institutions but works towards the egalitarian
transformation of institutions, which includes the nebulous
state of art discourse. As far as transversal activists are
concerned, the problem of avant garde representation is
cancelled by both the critique of party-based and
state-oriented politics and by the current modes and relations
14
of production, which, through their own contradictory
movement and the weakening of public institutions, produce
the multitude as a form of constituent power.6
Sinthomeapathy, in contrast, does not so much propose a
counter-cultural critique of institutions, but a transformation
of its mediating functions through occupation and
radicalization. Any kind of prefigurative politics must
therefore take into consideration rather than ignore the
alienating structures that condition radical social praxis. One
such structure is that of leadership and organization. In
cultural terms this can take the forms of authorship and
autonomy.
In its willingness to break with predecessors, today’s avant
garde finds itself in the paradoxical position of not defining
itself as avant-garde. This is not only due to the postmodern
prohibition on meta discourses, but to the very prohibition on
the prohibition since so many who are today complicit with
the Fukuyaman view that there is no imaginable alternative to
liberal capitalism also consider themselves progressive
democrats. As Slavoj Žižek asserts, emancipatory struggle
should be defined today as the struggle against liberal
democracy, the predominant ideological form that is often the
background of the usual topics of progressive academia.
Žižek writes: “What, today, prevents the radical questioning
of capitalism itself is precisely this belief in the democratic
form of the struggle against capitalism.”7 And so, it has been
much easier for the artworld to absorb the plurality of
practices that speak to democratic inclusiveness than it has for
it to self-comprehend itself as the byproduct of surplus value,
generated on a global scale.
15
One of the tactics used by extradisciplinary artists to resist
capitalist integration has been the critique of various aspects
of bourgeois art production, usually understood in terms of
individual studio work designed for incorporation into the art
market. We find instead the radical practices of art collectives
who produce didactic and aesthetic interventions in the public
sphere. We can list here, as examples, the work of
REPOhistory,
Group
Material,
Guerrilla
Girls,
WochenKlausur, ACT UP, Critical Art Ensemble, the
Institute for Applied Autonomy, the Laboratory for
Insurrectionary Imagination, Bureau d’Études, Ne Pas Plier,
Temporary Services, HaHa, the Yes Men, Surveillance
Camera Players, Ala Plastica, the Errorist International, Oda
Projesi,
PublixTheatreCaravan,
®TMark,
Superflex,
Yomango, Cultural Transmission Network, BüroBert, Hirsch
Farm Project, Platform, Terra Cultural Research Society,
ATSA, Collectivo Cambalache, Protoplast, The Art of
Change, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Ultra Red,
Radical Software Group, Park Fiction, Carbon Defense
League, The Atlas Group, Infernal Noise Brigade, Visual
Resistance, Toyshop Collective, N55, Instant Coffee, Raqs
Media Collective, Paper Rad, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, It
Can Change, Collective Jyrk, Chto Delat and Next Question,
not to mention the countless progressive artists who work
more or less individually. Brian Holmes argues that the
pluralism of 60s and 70s art, and the discourse-based
institutional critique of the 80s and 90s, has been superceded
by a phase change wherein artists now circulate between
disciplines and adopt the various counter-cultural positions of
social movements, political associations and autonomous
zones. He writes:
16
The projects tend to be collective, even if they also tend to
flee the difficulties that collectivity involves, by operating as
networks. Their inventors, who came of age in the universe of
cognitive capitalism, are drawn toward complex social
functions which they seize upon in all their technical detail,
and in full awareness that the second nature of the world is
now shaped by technology and organizational form. In almost
every case it is a political engagement that gives them the
desire to pursue their exacting investigations beyond the
limits of an artistic or academic discipline. But their analytic
processes are at the same time expressive, and for them, every
complex machine is awash in affect and subjectivity. It is
when these subjective and analytic sides mesh closely
together, in the new productive and political contexts of
communicational labor (and not just in meta-reflections
staged uniquely for the museum), that one can speak of a
“third phase” of institutional critique – or better, of a “phase
change” in what was formerly known as the public sphere, a
change which has extensively transformed the contexts and
modes of cultural and intellectual production in the
twenty-first century.8
The argument that I make in these pages is that such work
typically does not escape the conditions of capitalist
integration but responds rather to the existing hegemony of a
new mode of cultural production in which biocapitalist
networking rather than individualism is the norm, in which
petty bourgeois allodoxia and the thesis of classlessness
replace the politics of class struggle, and in which affinity and
reformism replace avant-garde autonomy. Discourses
regarding the multitude of struggles confirm the kinds of
postmodern politics that are allowed by the system. A
keystone in the shift away from class politics to the multitude
17
of decentred struggles is the repudiation of universality and
the inflation of culture wars and identity conflicts that are
generated and championed by the liberal capitalist system.
We should not of course disregard the progressive aspects of
civil rights and the extension of the “democratic idea” to all
social actors, but we should be aware that the idea of an
equivalence between the different kinds of oppression – based
on race, class, gender and sexuality – work to obfuscate the
predominant features of class struggle. Not surprisingly,
political correctness and identity politics, not to mention
artistic tendenzkunst, can most readily be found on the
reformist social democratic left.
It is not my purpose with this book to provide a catalogue of
the various pre-existing conceptions of the avant garde. Art
theory is replete with already existing models, including Peter
Bürger’s bohemian, historical and neo avant gardes, Hal
Foster’s neo-avant garde as “deferred action,” Benjamin
Buchloh’s “post-neo-avant garde,” and benign postmodern
versions such as Sianne Ngai’s cutting edge of “cuteness” or
Norman Bryson’s “post-ideological avant garde.”9 Needless
to say, there is a long tradition of avant-garde engagement
with the intersections of art and everyday life that is
understood not only in terms of modernism but in terms of
Marxist aesthetics. In his book on the concept of totality,
Martin Jay argues that “Western Marxism has been open and
experimental in a way that is not comparable with anything in
this [twentieth] century except perhaps aesthetic modernism,
which also exploded in a whirl of movements and
counter-movements.”10 Today’s phase change, however,
relates not so much to a break with a previous artistic
tendency, but with a previous politico-philosophical tradition:
namely, Hegelian Marxism and its various permutations in
18
postwar existentialism, structuralism, and Frankfurt School
Freudo-Marxism. It is my view that beyond the deadlock of
the postmodern critique of meta-narratives, artists, theorists
and activists have begun to revisit questions of radical praxis
that were prematurely consigned to the dustbin of history.
One can see this clearly in the case of the social revolutions
taking place in Tunisia and Egypt and across the Arab world.
While Facebook and the Internet are credited with providing
social movements with important channels of communication,
it is the radical praxis of trade unions and leftist social
movements that paved the way for the spectacular
broad-based social revolts that even produced echoes of
resistance in the U.S. and Spain. It is apparent that if the
peoples of these countries wish to find a way out of the kinds
of dictatorial terror and underdevelopment that is promoted
by transnational capitalism, they will need to rely on the
guiding principles of socialism. What then, and in this world
transformative context, is an adequate model of avant-garde
cultural practice and what are its theoretical premises? Most
will view the Leninist notion of the engaged artist as a
communist party artist to be evidently out of step with an
actuality in which there are no revolutionary organizations or
even nation states that are powerful enough to lead the
capitalist democracies to a new world situation. On this count,
the socio-historical conditions that led to the emergence of the
avant gardes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have
shifted perceptibly toward the biocapitalist administration of
culture, confirming rather than denying Bürger’s thesis on
art’s tendency towards autonomization, understood here in
terms of capitalist reification. Autonomy in contemporary
culture, however, finds itself enacted paradoxically through
dispersed strategies of complicity, compliance, identification
and relationality. These cool, affirmative strategies, pressured
19
by the logic of networking and careerism, are often little more
than survival strategies within conditions of biocapitalist
governance. The following response by the American artist
Andrea Fraser to the Frieze questionnaire “How has art
changed?” describes this situation:
We’re in the midst of the total corporatization and
marketization of the artistic field and the historic loss of
autonomy won through more than a century of struggle. The
field of art is now only nominally public and non-profit
institutions have been transformed into a highly competitive
global market. The specifically artistic values and criteria that
marked the relative autonomy of the artistic field have been
overtaken by quantitative criteria in museums, galleries and
art discourse, where programmes are increasingly determined
by sales – of art, at the box office and of advertising – and
where a popular and rich artist is almost invariably considered
a good artist, and vice versa. Art works are increasingly
reduced to pure instruments of financial investment, as
art-focused hedge funds sell shares of single paintings. The
threat of instrumentalization by corporate interests has been
met in the art world by a wholesale internalization of
corporate values, methods and models, which can be seen
everywhere from art schools to museums and galleries to the
studios of artists who rely on big-money backers for
large-scale – and often out-sourced – production. We are
living through a historical tragedy: the extinguishing of the
field of art as a site of resistance to the logic, values and
power of the market.11
Fraser is enough of a close reader of the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu to know how the contradictions of the field of
cultural production are, from the outset, tied to the social
20
relations that produce surplus capital. What has perhaps been
forgotten, or just plain abandoned, in contemporary art
discourse is the fact that the critique of the “institution art”
was developed as part of a critique of class society and is not
perfectly synonymous with the critique of institutions.
Our thinking can thus benefit from a relative “disembedding”
of art from society and politics to avoid what Lacanians refer
to as premature historicization. Autonomy provides this very
short-circuiting of a political perspective that is realist only to
the extent that it insists on current conditions.
Sinthomeopathy therefore insists, in dialectical fashion, that
no pure synthesis is possible between the levels of art and
politics, a claim that resists the post-structural reduction of art
to a cultural politics of representation and a social
constructionism that acts as little more than a new version of
the thesis of false consciousness. Instead what we require is a
concept of ideology that allows us to renew with the project
of a critical realism in which art’s awareness of its
inconsequentiality as innocuous museum art leads not only
back to life – cultural advocacy from within institutions and
without – but back to a critical vision of the present: creative
labour and cultural institutions in the service of a universal
emancipatory project. As Badiou writes, “[a]ll those who
abandon this hypothesis [of emancipation] immediately resign
themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary
democracy – the form of the state suited to capitalism – and to
the withdrawal and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous
inequalities.”12
The first chapter of this book discusses the work of Andrea
Fraser. In 2006 I was asked to give a lecture on postmodern
art at the University of Regina. The concerns of postmodern
21
theory were at that time the furthest thing from my then
current research. It seemed to me that Fraser’s work had
provided an adequate answer the postmodern problem of
“radical uncertainty.”13 Whereas Fraser’s work, like most
postmodern art, was certainly ironic, it distinguished itself
from most other practices through its emphasis on
determinacy rather than indeterminacy, critique rather than
ambivalence, and decision rather than undecidability. Instead
of postmodern double coding, her work confirmed the
Lacanian truth that art always dies twice – the first time as
formalist autonomy and the second as culture industry. The
question remaining for me, and which runs like a red thread
throughout this collection of essays, is how the subject lives
in this state between two deaths.
The most immediate answer I could give to this problem
when I first encountered it was Lacan’s notion of the
sinthome, the synthesis of symptom and fantasy and the
political version of identification with the symptom.14 The
subject of postmodernism is split between the space of
representation (experienced in terms of distance and
detachment) and the space of identification (experienced as
immersion and interestedness). Postmodernism brings into
effect a nostalgia for modernism that it conceals from itself by
gentrifying what it sees. The tendency of postmodern culture
is to blind itself to present-day insecurities. It compensates for
this state of insecurity by imaginging the modernist past as
quaint and outmoded. The postmodern notion of the end of
meta-narratives thus acts like a symptom. It has the status for
us of a meaningless bit of dogma that we adhere to as an
alternative to class struggle. Psychoanalytically speaking, the
temporality of meaningless doxa is that they seem to “come
back from the future” in the form of a return of the repressed.
22
They act in an unconscious way. Fraser’s works from the
1980s and 90s announced a new kind of practice that was
concerned with a working through of the meaninglessness and
futile knavery of postmodern irony. In this her work gave
meaning to meaninglessness, a para-doxa-logical activity in
which ideology became operative once again as a necessary
illusion. Many years later, one hardly needs to convince
people that a certain kind of postmodernism is finished and
that we have become somewhat less contemptful of the
sacrifices made in the past by those who struggled for a better
world. Consider as an example of this, and also as an example
of a kind of sithomeopathic practice, the recent
glow-in-the-dark works of the Costa-Rican artist Juan
Ortiz-Apuy. These works are based on pages taken from The
Freedom Fighter Manual, a CIA document that was
parachuted by airplains over Latin American countries in the
1980s. The images that Ortiz-Apuy exhibits appear to be
blank in daylight but when the lights are out, their green
luminescence allows a momentary glimpse of the pictograms,
which teach civilian populations how to sabotage state
socialist regimes. The same documents could of course serve
insurgent forces fighting oligarchic regimes and this
possibility I think is captured by the momentary flash, which
is presented in the form of a “negative” image. The barbaric
depravity of the texts is altered through a para-doxa-logical
reading that brings to realization the constitution of
subjectivity within ideological struggle. Another case is the
work of Neue Slowenische Kunst, the Slovene collective that
formed itself as a conceptual, virtual state after 1989, in the
aftermath of the establishment of the new postsocialist states
of the former Yugoslavia. According to Alexei Monroe, NSK
State approaches the state as an abstract signifier of power
and extracts from it utopian energies to provide a conceptual
23
form of identification for individuals from various
nationalities.15 It issues passports that divert political energy
into cultural form. Members of the musical group Laibach
sometimes use these passports to travel from place to place,
making the territory of the mind into a meta-construction that
imposes everywhere it goes the alientated relation that people
have to specific home nations, thereby rejecting the capitalist
capture of identity through the pragmatism of security
regimes and national differentiation. The responsibility for the
use of the passports, once they have been issued, is left to the
individual user. Through their verisimilitude with real
passports, they appropriate mechanisms of state power.
According to Monroe, NSK State is a holding area for the
repressed traumas of twentieth-century utopianism. It brings
to light the falseness of the claims that are made by
contemporary states to be concerned only with pragmatic
political and economic reason and thereby reveals the absence
in neoliberal governmentality of any meaningful expression
of human hopes and desires.
24
If the field of cultural production, as Pierre Bourdieu defined
it in Distinction, could be considered the effect of
long-forgotten traumas, then the field itself can operate in this
framework as symptom.16 Transference, which operates as a
25
fundamental misrecognition, allows us to think of the field of
culture as precisely, postmodernism’s historical necessity, a
misrecognition of the orthodoxies of the theory of the end of
ideology. Transference thus allows us to link fantasy with the
artworld as symptom. In other words, when we operate in the
field of art we are working in a space this is almost
pathologically unable to incorporate the needed political
awareness of its conditions of existence. As the avant-garde
artist or critic begins to dissolve the state of transference, she
becomes the subject responsible for her state of being, she
begins to subjectivize the institutions that operate as
mediating devices in the reproduction of social classes and
the divisions of labour. Access to a critical understanding of
the uses of the theory of the end of ideology is paid for with
the loss of enjoyment. Having died twice, the artist is neither
modern nor postmodern, yet caught in the order of time
conditioned by her relation to the symptom, her relation to the
artworld. Sinthomeopathy traverses the surplus enjoyment of
end of ideology postmodernism and yet, in practice, identifies
with the pathological particularity of culture in the age of late
neoliberal capitalism. It was Andrea Fraser’s work that first
offered me this insight and it is to this subject that I turn to in
the first chapter.
26
Chapter 1
27
Andrea Fraser and
Subjectivization
Institutional Critique
the
of
Ever since the potentialities of aesthetic autonomy have been
thought to have be negated by their disciplinary incorporation
into the culture industries, artists working in mode of
institutional critique, figures like Marcel Broodthaers, Hans
Haacke, Michael Asher, and Daniel Buren, have sought to not
only underscore the socioeconomic function of art, but to
radically alter its place of production. As Peter Bürger
surmised in his Theory of the Avant Garde, the social
function of art does not depend on works, but on institutions.
Avant-garde autonomy, if we can still speak of it today,
continues not only to mine the contradictions of art’s
institutional incorporation but proposes an ethical engagement
that seeks to expose and transform the social relations of
domination that condition the very mode of critique. In her
work from the late 1980s and 1990s, the American artist and
critic Andrea Fraser offered some of the most complex
performances of critical autonomy by subjugating herself to
the manifest and unofficial mandates of various institutional
contexts. Fraser’s work has complicated the mode of
institutional critique by amplifying the dimension of
subjectivity through a feminist and a psychoanalytically
informed performance of the way the “institution art”
operates through fantasy, desire and identification. In
particular, the institution-specific performance project,
28
Museum Highlights (1989), and the less well-known
collaborative work, Services (1994), enacted many of the
insights that Fraser presented in theoretical terms in her
published essays. By extending institutional critique to
feminist grounds, and by remaining committed to sociological
concerns with questions of economic and class structure in
relation to aesthetic autonomy, these works provided a
powerful critique of the professionalization and
corporatization of the artworld. They did so by betraying the
manner in which the public mandates of art institutions allow
them to ignore the socio-political presuppositions of
contemporary art. What marks the specificity of Fraser’s
analysis of the relations between the field of cultural
production and the field of power, however, is Fraser herself.
Paradoxically, the siting of the specificity of Fraser’s work,
overtly privileged in terms of the unique figure of the artist, is
provided by her close adherence to sociology. In the
following I examine the shift in Fraser’s work from the
construct of the “split” figure Jane Castleton/Andrea Fraser in
Museum Highlights to the collaborative figure Andrea Fraser/
Helmut Draxler in Services. In both instances Fraser draws on
feminist approaches to psychoanalysis as a means to explore
the sociological determinants of what I argue is a distinctly
petty-bourgeois and transnational mode of creative cultural
production. “Working through” the desire of the “institution
art” and its obscene demand for cultural consecration, Andrea
Fraser’s work supplies institutional critique with a curious
instance of avant-garde contestation.
29
What Does Autonomy Want?
Fraser’s presence as an art theorist was first noticed in an
article she wrote for Art in America concerning the work of
Louise Lawler.1 In Fraser’s essay, Lawler’s critical analysis
of the postmodern museum is appreciated for bringing
feminist issues to bear on institutional critique. The lucidity of
Fraser’s critique of cultural institutions was further
established through the publication of the transcript of
Museum Highlights in a 1989 issue of the journal October, a
piece that occasioned the critical reception of her artwork.2
The October transcript was followed in the 1990s by a series
of essays that provided a fairly gender-blind analysis of the
working conditions of artists who produce context-specific
project work.3 While a number of theoretical approaches have
been used by Fraser to describe her practice and her concerns,
she has consistently made reference to the influence of the
Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and in particular his book
Distinction, a work which argues that taste functions as a
marker of social class.4 There is no doubt that Bourdieu has
allowed Fraser to complicate the grammar of feminist-based
body art and performance and simultaneously – through the
performance of embodied social position – to address the
limitations of the male-dominated tradition of institutional
critique, where the names of Broodthaers and company have
predominated. Throughout this short period, however,
Fraser’s writing became increasingly focused on a
class-oriented sociological analysis. If second wave feminism
could be thought to have refused the prioritization of class
politics along with house cleaning, Fraser’s work from the
1990s could be said to have challenged the mythologization
of feminism in its art institutional setting.
30
Fraser’s work invites viewers to decipher the complex
relations that support and sustain the functioning of art
institutions and the subject positions that are constructed in
relation to them. She credits Bourdieu for having developed a
reflexive sociology that acknowledges the ambivalence of
artists and intellectuals who are positioned disadvantageously
in a field of practice that works to sustain forms of social and
symbolic domination through the force of cultural
judgement.5 Through the maintenance of the autonomy of
artistic practice, artists and intellectuals reproduce structures
of social inequality. Because of this, she argues, the artist
must develop a reflexive practice that first uses aesthetic
autonomy as a weapon against oneself, a kind of
self-instrumentalization of resistance.6 Inasmuch as there is
no critique of the field of artistic production that does not
involve a relation of desire, a fluctuating and intermittent
motivation, there is no pure object of institutional art
discourse, but rather a subject of art discourse caught in the
fantasy of appearances, an objectively subjective relation to
the autonomy of the field.
By attempting to embody culture’s impossible reduction to its
material and economic supports, the purpose of Fraser’s work
has been, defiantly, to postpone and deter the reification of
radical autonomy by exploring the ways that the field of art
appears to her.7 The subjectivization of the space of art
institutions is noticed in the following statement by Fraser:
“It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the
institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are,
what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of
practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”8
The reflexive secret to this action of subjectivization is
effectively discerned in the emphasis on questions of taste
31
and manner, which Bourdieu described in his theory of
habitus, an account of the subjective predispositions towards
culture, taste and conduct that are affected by objective social
conditions, including education, social origin, and upbringing.
The habitus is, according to Bourdieu, a structured structure
(a synchronic complex) and a structuring structure (a process
of social formation), a diachronic practical logic that
continually reflects on and departs from its previous premises
and, as such, is open to modification. The value of the
concept of habitus, then, is that it de-idealizes the social
conditions that produce individual actors as well as social
classes and proposes some determining conditions and limits
that are operative “below” the level of conscious
decision-making. Bourdieu writes:
The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of
classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they
function below the level of consciousness and language,
beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control of the
will. Orienting practices practically, they embed what some
would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures
or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body...
and engage the most fundamental principles of construction
and evaluation of the social world, those which most directly
express the division of labour (between the classes, the age
groups and the sexes) or the division of the work of
domination, in divisions between bodies and between
relations to the body which borrow more features than one, as
if to give them the appearance of naturalness, from the sexual
division of labour and the division of sexual labour.9
32
For Bourdieu, all culture and cultural knowledge has the
structural dimension of a fundamental misrecognition that is
based in sociological difference. In his words again:
The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an
alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital, the
balance-sheet of a power relation, into a system of perceived
differences, distinctive properties, that is, a distribution of
symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is
misrecognized.10
Fraser’s defense of the sovereignty of the artist mimics the
“unconscious” discourse of the museum as a secret language
whose meanings are unknown, or misrecognized by its most
adept adherents. We always play the game of culture,
Bourdieu argues, but without ever knowing what the game is
and without a clear understanding of the rules and who makes
them. As such, one’s personal disposition towards culture
always entails the achievement of a certain level of
competence related to these official and unofficial rules,
beliefs and codes of performance.
Fraser’s work, I would argue, is largely based on the mimicry
of socio-cultural positions and dispositions that directly or
indirectly support and challenge the unstated and unwritten
rules of interaction, at times performing them effectively and
at other times making statements and “slips” that would not
likely be part of the habitus of one and the same performer.
Mistakes and discontinuities are disclosed through
defamiliarization techniques like quotation, juxtaposition,
assemblage, collision and conflation. Once the codes of a
structure are exposed, what may at first have appeared as a
necessary causality is put into question. Among the forms of
33
inconsistency that are evident in Fraser’s performances are
discursive fluctuations, transdisciplinary confusions, role
reversals, modulations of affect, self-reflexivity, the
gratuitous rendering of normally unstated and unconscious
motives, and a sometimes casual, sometimes aggressive,
attitude toward her audience. Her scripts incorporate what is
normally not the province of the artist, but rather what is
associated with the “more impersonal” and “less creative”
aspects of administrative procedures, marketing, maintenance
and fundraising.11 Fraser brings to light the ways in which the
mechanisms of managerial competence form the unstated
basis of all cultural production, including careers in
institutional critique.
Following her 1986 gallery talk/performance, Damaged
Goods Gallery Talk Starts Here, and her 1988 collaboration
with Louise Lawler (called The Public Life of Art: The
Museum), Museum Highlights (1989) initiated an
unprecedented mode of site-specific performance. Presented
as a docent tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the work
introduced a character called Jane Castleton, a figure that
Fraser defines as a site of identification. Subjective
identification with Castleton, performed by the artist herself,
allowed Fraser to elaborate the objective social position of the
contemporary artist. Museum Highlights, we could say,
contracts in the figure of Fraser/Castleton the stages that
someone like Fraser goes through in order to become an
artist. Sociologically speaking, and to paraphrase Simone de
Beauvoir, one is not born an artist, one becomes one. To
become a critically recognized artist requires a high volume
of cultural acculturation. According to Bourdieu, cultural
capital is most often acqired through education, and it is in the
field of education that different cultural competencies among
34
agents with unequal social capital encounter the limits of the
schools’ objective mechanisms of elimination and channeling.
Beyond the highest levels of educational capital, it is the
effects of the field of power, defined narrowly in terms of
social and economic capital, that can reestablish what
magically appears to be the miracle of inequality.
In Museum Highlights, Fraser takes on the guise of both
Andrea Fraser (embodied) and Jane Castleton (performed).
The institutional role played by Jane Castleton is that of a
museum docent. This position, as it is traditionally embodied,
is linked to someone who is associated with a high volume of
social and economic capital, and who aspires not to a high
level of scholastic and cultural competence, but to a varied
composition of all of these in order to achieve and maintain a
high level of social power, displayed on the institutional site
35
as a friendly, competent disposition towards legitimate
culture. The docent, who is most often female, and who is
typically unpaid for her services, functions as a vehicle of
cultural transference, understood both in a psychoanalytic
sense and a sociological sense, a mediator of different
dispositions toward the museum.12
Fraser mentions the significance of Bourdieu’s work in
coming to an understanding of her personal investments in art
as a system of cultural authority and domination. Distinction,
she writes,
exposed the paralyzing experience of illegitimacy with
liberating clarity: the muting and mutilating violence of
cultural judgments, the crushing authority of consecrated
competence, the anguish that filled the gap between
knowledge and recognition, the sense of imposture, the
distinguishing force of aspirations structured according to
socially and materially foreclosed possibilities.13
Playing herself, Fraser acknowledges her own investment in a
process of cultural legitimation and domination. As Castleton,
she dissimulates these investitures, and also fails to do so,
with the manners of an ambitious and shrill socialite.
Castleton is aware of the unequal social relations that
structure her activity but disowns them by associating herself
with the official letter of high culture as a space of formal
equality. Her function as a docent allows her to imagine high
culture to also be a reflection of her personal culture, a free
relation that is seemingly unconstrained by necessity.
Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology thus becomes a model for both
a subject-specific institutional critique and site-specific
critique of the subject.
36
Through the collage construct of Fraser/Castleton, the artist
presents and interrupts her own desire for critical
consecration. Castleton mixes sociologically distinct
dispositions – disenchantment, passionate investment,
didacticism, resentment, reverence – not only towards
legitimate culture, but also towards different museum
functions: gallery spaces, lobbies, giftshops, washrooms and
cafeterias. We could easily understand her confusion of
cultural dispositions as consistent with what Bourdieu defined
as the allodoxia of middle-brow culture, the “mistaken
identifications” and “undifferentiated reverence” that
transform artistic experiment into accessible versions and
educational entertainments.14 The attitude of “cultural
goodwill” defines the indeterminacy of the petty-bourgeois
social position as the tendency to accept extortion by the
dominant class through the acceptance of ready-made
judgements and the reproduction of the “origins of
capitalism” through privations aimed at future recompense.
The indeterminate position of the petty bourgeois culture
industries, trapped between cultural conservatism, on the one
hand, and the administration of a mass-mediated museum
culture on the other, has undergone a structural
transformation from the time of Bourdieu’s studies. As the
farm owning and manufacturing middle classes of the
nineteenth century became the “classless class” of a now
global consumer culture, and as the gap between the
extremely wealthy and white collar employees increases, the
contradictions of class polarization exert their influence on
the social coordinates of cultural production. Today, even if
one is economically middle-class, one’s cultural disposition
has a tendency to be petty bourgeois. Bourdieu’s model of
class distinction from the late 1960s is therefore not so much
out of date as it is out of joint.
37
In her essay on Louise Lawler, Fraser associates art practice
itself with the maintenance of a system of beliefs and social
values, a “profession of social fantasy” based in ideologies of
autonomy that deny the material interests of producers.15 The
structures of aesthetic discourse are supported by fantasies of
artistic competence, revamped in terms of avant-garde
transgression and political contestation. Psychoanalytically
speaking, the desire for cultural consecration in the form of a
recognizable signature is associated with the form of a
castration that inscribes subjectivity in a system of imaginary
identifications with symbolic authority. For Fraser, the
significance of Lawler’s work was that it did not deny this
relation.16 It is an open question, however, the extent to
which this admission merely operates a form of capitulation.
In Museum Highlights, Fraser’s identification with Castleton
is conditioned by her association with the museum as an
exchange station for various kinds of capital: cultural, social,
economic and intellectual. How is it that Fraser can consider
Jane Castleton to be “the museum‘s exemplary viewer” when
docents like her have remained marginal to the more
scholastic, curatorial functions of cultural institutions?17
Fraser writes,
Jane is determined above all by the status of the docent as a
nonexpert volunteer. As a volunteer, she expresses the
possession of a quantity of the leisure and the economic and
cultural capital that defines a museum’s patron class. It is
only a small quantity – indicating rather than bridging the
class gap that compels her to volunteer her services in the
absence of capital; to give, perhaps, her body in the absence
of art objects.18
38
Fraser can consider Castleton to be the “the museum’s
exemplary viewer” because, in the form of Fraser/Castleton,
Castleton marks the internal difference that links Fraser to the
field of art and the field of institutional critique, providing her
with a readymade insider status. Castleton, who offers her
body, affect and services in the absence of a recognized
cultural contribution, functions as a moment of seduction, a
turning in on oneself that Jean Laplanche defines as “auto
time.”19 The paradigm of seduction facilitates Fraser’s
regression to the ideological fantasy space of the museum as
the cause of desire. Rather than produce a sublimated or
fetishized cultural product, Fraser enters into a transferential
relation with the museum through Castleton as a surrogate.
The result of this assymetry, of an impossible transformation
and passage from one site (institution) to another (subject) is
equivalent to the conversion of anxiety into libido. As the
situation is libidinized, cultural production overlaps with
sociological investigation; aesthetic autonomy now operates
directly in terms of the production of subjectivity.
The psychoanalytic concept of transference allows us to
perceive how it is that Fraser understands the museum in
relation to processes of social formation, incorporation and
intersubjectivity.20 In a psychoanalytic situation, the subject
enters into a relation of transference and resistance with the
analyst. Only the subject can articulate their subjective
relation to the unconscious, though this knowledge is
perpetually deferred. In transference, the subject presumes
that the analyst is the one who knows. This is not only a
concession to what Lacan called the big Other, but also a kind
of imminent demand imposed on the subject from without.
Transference implies a form of resistance, an attempt to
preserve one’s desire, to preserve ego, as a defense against the
39
analyst’s gaze and the obscene demands of the unconscious.21
In the psychoanalytic process, the analyst must resist the
subject’s displacement of subjectivity; the analyst must
simultaneously support and deny the subject’s cathected
affect.
While Fraser argues that museum visitors impose on the
docent the demand to know, the reality of a heterogeneous
public imposes on Castleton, who embodies the specific class
interests of the museum’s patron class, the demand to know
what she does not know, or what she chooses to ignore, that
is, “different, conflicting interests.”22 The subjective is
therefore a crucial moment of institutional critique. Fraser
writes,
In the context of paradigms of site-specificity, defined by its
physical, urban, architectural, geographical, or geological
spaces and places, the constitutive sites of feminist practice
were above all the body and the political, social, sexual, and
intersubjective relations in which that body exists: a kind of
“relational specificity” that I see as fundamentally feminist.23
However, and while the body makes its demands in terms of
habitus – a durable and transposable complex of tastes and
dispositions – the body’s relation to the psyche makes such
demands a matter of repression and fantasmatic projection.
The body that supports legitimate culture and good taste is,
according to Bourdieu, a member of the dominant group
whose criteria of selection remain tacit because considered
absolute, thereby masking the psychic processes that produce
identity and identification. As Castleton says many times
during the performance, she wants to be graceful. In order to
be graceful, she couches her judgements in the rhetoric of
40
legitimate culture and in the ethos of elective affinity, all the
while attempting to regulate these concepts through physical
presence, gestural flair and tailored clothing. Fraser has stated
that she has long felt a personal sense of illegitimacy with
regard to cultural institutions. Despite this, she says she
understands “how Jane feels.” She shares with her a
subjective relation to desire that simultaneously crosses and
consecrates social divisions. Castleton’s bodily hysteresis,
occasioned by the mere thought of working-class visitors, or
what she calls “lower lowers,” displays how she wishes she
could desire her own self, an idiomorphic identification with a
self that is misrecognized through the lens of legitimate
culture. In the unfolding of the performance, we become
aware of the impossibility of an ideal museum visitor as well
as an ideal self. Fraser makes an important observation that
we could take to be the authorial intention that structures
Castleton’s hysteresis: “I don’t ask people what they want.
Despite all the references that I’ve made to what people who
go to museums want, I’m finally not dealing with what could
only ever be my fantasy of a public.”24
The Field of Immaterial Labour
Contemporary approaches to cultural production in the age of
cognitive capitalism look to the immaterial aspects of cultural
goods within what is sometimes considered an affective
economy. This extension of the field of marketing and
promotion into the structure of the cultural commodity is
carried to the point of excess in Museum Highlights as
audience members do not know if they should identify with
Fraser/Castleton out of horror, fascination or collusion. This
short-circuiting of identification was later questioned by
41
Fraser as she sought means to allow audiences to participate
more directly in the critique of the institutional production of
subjectivity. Perhaps the most complex example of this is the
project Services, a collaborative performance that proposes
professional self-examination as artwork.
Given that the self-criticism of art cannot occur within the
current conditions of the capitalist depoliticization of
autonomy, or even that such a self-criticism is now essentially
pointless, Fraser’s work provides an exceptional analysis of
the conditions for a critical contextual art, a kind of
psychotherapy where the positions of artist and institution,
analyst and analysand inter-weave. Because Fraser adopts a
reflexive mode that addresses the conditions of artistic
production and the social relationships that artists must
acknowledge if they are to participate in the game of culture,
her emphasis on symbolic production and affect as part of the
global flows of capitalism challenges legitimate culture’s
pretense to the maintenance of existing asset structures.
Fraser can objectify the game of culture, however, only
inasmuch as she engages with the pretensions of artists and
art professionals who are witness to the transformation of the
legitimacy of bourgeois high culture into the legitimacy of an
international class that refuses all specificity of identity and
class determination. As a sociologist and an art theorist, and
in order to underscore the institutional administration of
culture, Fraser works to reconstruct the objectivity of the
lower-middle class, or what was once referred to as “white
collar” salaried professionals.25 The hegemony of this class
formation does not imply a domination of the entire social
field, especially as culture industries continue to exploit,
rather than impose, the fragments of the decaying dominant
culture.26 As a dynamic field, the field of culture gives rise to
42
levels of subjectivation that are mediated by belief in the
game and levels of affective engagement marked by social
difference. The conditions for a critical contextual art are
defined by Services as the possible transformation of
institutional critique on the basis of political decision and
collective action, a passage à l’acte that marks the limits of
the homology between culture and economy.27 Since she has
begun to receive critical exposure as a vanguard figure within
institutional critique, Fraser has concerned herself with the
relation between her own practice and the institutions that
choose to endorse her critical and often parasitic activity.
While my attention to her as an individual artist may seem to
replicate the charismatic conception of artistic individuality
and creative autonomy, it should be clear that the relations
that artists entertain with institutions are not only defined by
artists’ subjective dispositions but depend on changing
structures and contradictions within the spheres of cultural
activity themselves.
To discern the conditions of possibility for a critical art
practice means to consider the possible-impossible of social
formation as it is revealed in practice. Services is just such a
complex discussion-exhibition work. Devised by Andrea
Fraser and Helmut Draxler, it was subtitled The Conditions
and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project
Oriented Artistic Practice.28 In the following I argue that
Services is an exemplary work of critical art inasmuch as it
attempts to work through a number of contradictions and
implications for the transformation of site-specific art,
institutional critique and discourse-based institutional analysis
in the 1990s. Not only does it attempt to map out the
development of tendencies in the social space, understood in
terms of a global division of labour, but does so with acute
43
attention to the question of subjectivity, understood
reflexively in a situation whose outcome depends on
interaction with other cultural producers at a specific moment
in time.
Services is a performance and discourse-oriented piece in
which the relation between the artist and various fragments
culled from the institution’s administrative matrix is reduced
to the relation between Fraser, or Fraser/Draxler, and a group
of artistic peers. In the proposal for Services, Fraser and
Draxler outline a framework for an exhibition that would
bring together individuals who would discuss the relations
and conditions of project work, defined as “service
provision,” where artistic labour is spent without there being a
finished material product, and consequently, where there may
not be adequate remuneration or long-term recognition.29 The
two-day working-group discussion, which took place at the
Lüneburg University Gallery, brought together artists and
curators whose work is premised on an engagement with the
subject and specificity of Services. Documents relating to the
history of professional artists’ organizations and
collectivization, as well as contracts and documents relating
to the participants’ recent projects, were collected for display
in the exhibition space and were available to be photocopied
for the duration of the exhibition. The working-group
discussions were videotaped and screened during the
remainder of the exhibition. The project work in question
concerns various forms of materialist art practices including
conceptual art, institutional critique, post-studio, activist,
site-specific, and community public art. While these practices
have sought to transform the modes of production and
reception of cultural work, they have also tended to
participate in the transformation of professional artistic
44
activity into service provision. Fraser’s concern, as stated in a
number of articles published independently of Draxler, is that
the critical intentions of artists whose practices are based in
project work may be undermined by institutions, and by
artists themselves as a specific cultural constituency, when
institutions actively recruit artists – often artists with no
history of project work – to provide artistic services.30 Given
these working conditions, Services assembled artists to
discuss the manner in which institutions have usurped their
prerogatives, actively marketing critical tendencies and
limiting art’s non-economic determinations.
Before Services, Fraser participated in a number of informal
discussions with project artists Michael Clegg, Mark Dion
and Julia Scher. These artists were concerned with the fact
45
that numerous art exhibitions at that time included
requirements for site-specific project work. In the year that
these discussions took place, 1993, project work was
commissioned for exhibitions in Chicago, Antwerp, Vienna,
Graz, Firminy, as well as the Venice and Whitney
Biennials.31 Fraser later conceived Services as a differential
intervention, taking into account the interests and investments
of artists and institutions, and also recognizing the situation as
a critical moment where artists and curators had the
opportunity to act collectively to reformulate labour relations
with art organizations through professional self-regulation.
Fraser did not say to what ends Services should be used, but
rather, sought to produce an alternative to the competitive
organization of exhibitions, which guarantees mutual
relations of exploitation among practitioners. Through the
assessment of the situation by the practitioners involved and
the very enactment of the problems at hand in the exhibition
itself, the piece further explored the articulation of “the
subject of site specificity.”
Reading Services involves numerous strategies of
interpretation that are marked by different material forces and
regimes of truth. There is no singular interpretation of the
project and this fact is emphasized by Fraser’s efforts to
minimize her presence by functioning as curator and
organizer, by doing this in collaboration with Draxler, and
finally, by allowing the accumulation of documents to stand
in and outweigh any desire to represent the artist’s personal
interests. Minimizing the drama of orchestration, the
construction Draxler/Fraser operates as host for the
interventions of their invited guests, competitors,
co-conspirators and colleagues. Services enlists the
cooperation of artists and curators who appear to be trapped
46
within the terms and conditions of a competitive and
hierarchic power structure. The same institutions that
commission project work, and through the privatization of
their public functions, increasingly monitor the speech of
critical artists through sanctions or, inversely, demand that
artists provide concrete solutions to social, cultural and
economic problems.32 Paradoxically, it is the partial
liberalization of the field, its limited social function, which
allows for corporatization through corporate funding.33 In a
more restricted and restrictive cultural and political economy,
the efficiency of the market allows institutions to recuperate
any critical work that seriously challenges the technocratic
manipulation of common concerns, interests and investments.
Services brought to light documents pertaining to the history
of the struggle for collective organizing and added to this
existing stock the tracts and contracts of the participants.
While the overdeterminations of competition were meant to
be shifted toward an analysis of shared responsibilities, the
difficulties of social antagonism and misunderstanding were
allegorized in situ through the spectacle of who talked the
most, who talked the loudest, who didn’t need to talk, who
took responsibility, who assumed guilt, who acted innocent,
who didn’t know what was going on, and who was justifiably
annoyed.
Acting as mere functionaries, the artists Draxler and Fraser
express and betray the benign affirmation of petty-bourgeois
culture in the context of neoliberalism. As a space of
collective negotiation, Services allows for the restructuring of
institutionalized discourse and makes room for the
possible-impossible. The power of each participant amounts
to a power of potential or virtual collectivization and a power
to elaborate the institutional conditions of that power.
47
Services attempts the impossible by bringing together the site
of production and the site of consumption; it symbolizes and
materializes an exhibition dedicated to performing service
work as service to a service community and by the service
community with the unknown outcome of who or what this
service would ultimately serve.
Does the reflexivity of this project make it different from
other service-oriented projects? According to Fraser:
I would say that we are always already serving. Studio
practice conceals this condition by separating production
from the interests it meets and the demands it responds to at
its point of material or symbolic consumption. As a service
can be defined, in economic terms, as a value which is
consumed at the same time it is produced, the service element
of project based practice eliminates such separation. An
invitation to produce a specific work in response to a specific
situation is a very direct demand, the motivating interests of
which are often barely concealed and difficult to ignore. I
know that if I accept that invitation I will be serving those
interests – unless I work very hard to do otherwise.34
Services attempts to replace aesthetic disinterestedness with
reflexive interest, providing institutions with a model of
contemporary avant-garde production, and providing cultural
constituencies as well as interested audiences with a model
for transforming the art system into a real social force. The
object of critique in Services is not a foreign power, but the
way we ourselves are involved in maintaining the
reproduction of artistic autonomy as the basis of economic
investment and self-exploitation. This critique necessitates an
objectification of the demand for art that institutions
48
reproduce and the competitive struggles artists enter in order
to reproduce belief in the value of works, which then figures
as the objective basis for this demand. Services elaborates this
contradiction by objectifying the specificity of the relation
between demand and supply (commerce) as also a subjective
relation. The specificity of the work derives, paradoxically,
from its formal distance from the belief in a categorical
difference between the sphere of cultural production and the
sphere of economic value, a constitutive split that artists
perpetuate through their specialization. Services performs an
artistic service as an excess, an unassimilable remainder and a
point of failure (since belief guarantees distance) in the
edifice of the enlightened elitism of the new service art with a
human face.
Like Museum Highlights before it, Services proceeds by
dividing its audience, addressing the objective conditions of
competence with regard to cultural value. Making art
professionals and art students the primary audience for
Services created the potential for audience members to
become actors within the project; it underscored the lack of
opportunities for co-operative dialogue, without, however,
making dialogue and relationality the basis of a new aesthetic.
Fraser/Draxler thus perform the function of what Bourdieu
defined as heresiarchs and ascetics, disabused “new style
autodidacts” and taste-makers who, because they are alienated
from their own destinations, reveal the dangers of the field.
For this reason, the reconstruction of the field is provisional
since the participants must continue playing the game.
In a 1997 essay, Fraser outlines some of the assumptions of
public service provision on the part of institutions. She writes
that the demand for service and community-based projects in
49
the early-to-mid 1990s “appeared to be related to a need by
publicly funded organizations to satisfy the public service
requirements of their funding agencies.”35 This demand and
perceived need for project work marks the specificity of not
only the internal relations of the artwork (or intervention) and
the site (however broadly the site may be conceived), but also
the external relations between the artist and the sponsoring
organization. How then do the external limits condition the
internal limits? Public projects satisfy a need on the part of
the public to believe that public institutions will always exist
as they currently do and justify the growing control of
corporate and state agencies. Fraser/Draxler do not propose
that artists must accelerate the process of privatization so that
a genuine confrontation between forces can take place. Theirs
is the position of what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the role of the
femme fatale in film noir. In contrast to the view that the
femme fatale threatens the detective (the participants in
Services) with castration, Žižek argues that what is
threatening about her is the fact that, as symptom of the
detective, she is impossible to locate in the opposition
between master and slave. Her destiny is to become the
victim of her own game.36 We could say then that the femme
fatale figure of Fraser/Draxler assumes her own fate as a
nonpathological subject. She reveals that the institution is a
fantasy construction that does not know all. The transference
of guilt in Services to other cultural producers thus depends
on the institution as a network of intersubjective relations.
Fraser later drew the conclusion that the implications of
Services were not addressed by the participants and were
even humorously disavowed by the artists Renée Green and
Stephen Dillemuth.37 She argues that the institutionalization
of site specificity and project work has proceeded unchecked
50
and according to market logic. This is not merely imposed
from above, but must somehow be consistent with the needs
of artists and curators who see themselves as being in
competition with commercial entertainment. This situation
has allowed for a shift in the 1990s from public funding for
culture to corporate funding and business models for art. The
function of art as a public service and a social good
nevertheless transcends changes in the socio-economic
structure. Here we come to appreciate an important aspect of
the theory of autonomy. At the point of interstitiality, Fraser/
Draxler maintain the use of this residual rhetoric in order to
pursue a critical and emancipatory agenda. The success of
Services thus depends on the incorporation of other artists and
the public into a macro power bloc set against the increasing
privatization of the field. There is no question then of
declaring the end of aesthetic autonomy, but instead, what we
find in this work is a sounding out of social contradictions
within the new order of neoliberal cultural administration.
As with the device of Andrea Fraser/Jane Castleton in
Museum Highlights, Fraser’s relation to Services is both
performed and embodied, embodied at the level of the artist’s
scholastic habitus and performed as one participant among
others in a structure of impossibility. Fraser and Draxler’s
interlocutors understood that the goals of the exhibition were
written into the proposal. The performance of the
working-group therefore operated as a taste-making,
taste-destroying exercise. The participants also likely
understood that to reject professionalization was to reject the
system that exploits them and through which they exploit
themselves. To adopt professionalization amounted to the
same, but with the added burden of guilt. By linking the field
of cultural production to the field of power in general, and
51
through the agency of a subjective investment in its
conditions and relations of production, Services activated art
as a critical force against the real and illusory consequences
of autonomy.
52
Chapter 2
53
Community Subjects
Criticism of community art provides new ways to consider
the question of subjectivity from a non-essentialist
perspective that affords us the occasion to conceptualize the
relationship between subjective and social formations. In
relation to developments in political theory, the use of the two
terms community and subject implies a series of
displacements of liberal, nationalist and multi-culturalist
conceptions that function in terms of what Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, after Gilles Deleuze, refer to as “capture
devices,” systems of incorporation and differentiation that
alienate living, productive labour from autonomous
self-valorization outside the decision-making power of the
state and the coercive forms of capitalist integration.1 From a
Lacanian, psychoanalytic point of view, such capture devices
are the points de capitonnage (points of ideological suturing)
that are inherent to subjectivity and that operate through
processes of identification and disidentification. What do
today’s creative and culture industries want from community
subjects? How does identity relate to the voluntary class of
virtuous citizens that is today expected to empower the
traditional face-to-face community against the vagaries of the
neoliberal capitalization of markets, which includes
increasing poverty and economic disparity, crumbling
infrastructure, mass displacement of populations through
unemployment, neo-colonial war and famine? Finally, how
can we reimagine a community subject that is immune to the
forms of democratic contestation that seek a mere surface
reorganization of capitalist social relations?
54
These are some of the questions that are posed by today’s
socially engaged community art. In the following I consider
two competing paradigms of community art and propose a
third, alternative framework for critical cultural practice. The
first of these is Nicolas Bourriaud’s esthétique relationnelle,
first proposed in 1998.2 Bourriaud describes relational work,
for instance the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and
Liam Gillick, as unfinished, open-ended works that do not
provide collectible objects but that are oriented toward social
interaction. The creation of communal spaces like bars,
lounges, and libraries allows for connective possibilities,
participation and unexpected encounters. The low-fi,
in-between aesthetic of relational works is nevertheless
55
related to a somewhat deterministic criterion: the shift to a
post-Fordist experience and service economy. Bourriaud’s
idea of relational aesthetics has received the kind of approval
that comes from its association with the work of
internationally recognized artists. The criticism it has
received, however, is due precisely to its rather confused
approach to critique.3 Despite the idea that the participant
viewer is part of the work, the model of service provision that
Bourriaud has championed willfully ignores the divisions of
labour that structure the field of culture. While he attempts to
shift the question of value away from labour and toward
various other economies, or “powers,” his emphasis on
“freeness” and “open-endedness” results in a kind of inertia
that makes the experience of the work not unlike the
experience of the rest of everyday life in a world of exchange.
What is significant for our discussion, however, is the fact
that relational aesthetics seeks to shift art’s focus away not
only from modernist avant-gardism, but from the postmodern
preoccupation with identity. Fixed agendas are replaced by an
ambient transcultural mixing and the confusion of codes.
One critical example of relational work is the Swiss collective
Superflex‘s Free Beer campaign. Free Beer is an “open source
beer” that is modeled on file sharing. The recipe for the beer
is available to anyone through a Creative Commons license
that allows Superflex to bypass the conventional copyright
restrictions on intellectual property. Free Beer has been
shared on numerous occasions and in particular at the
inaugural gathering at the Copenhagen IT University in 2005.
Another example of relational work is Piotr Uklanski’s Dance
Floor of 1996, which is now part of the collection of the
Guggenheim Museum in New York. Uklanski has stated that
he set out to create a work that would be “all generosity and
56
no ideology.” In both cases we could offer the criticism that
while the artists seek to create convivial experiences, they
ignore the specific conditions in which their work is produced
and received, not to mention the fact that the freeing up of
copyright restrictions is one of the contradictions of the
liberalization of markets. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, the
dream of “frictionless capitalism” is shared not only among
marginal, anti-establishment hackers and anti-globalist
radicals, but also by big executives like Bill Gates and
conservatives who consider themselves opposed to
centralized bureaucracy, authority, routine and industrial
production.4 How then are patronage and the conditions that
structure the field of production reflected in the participatory
emancipation of spectators?
57
A second model for engaged community art is Grant Kester’s
idea of “dialogical aesthetics,” a theory of contemporary art
that is developed in his book Conversation Pieces.5 Kester
expanded his new theory as an offshoot of the “littoral art”
movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the
1990s. Littoral artists are concerned with politically
efficacious activist art. The major premise of dialogical
aesthetics is that twentieth-century avant-garde art is largely
mistrustful of the communicational model of dialogue and has
resorted to various non- or anti-discursive means to radicalize
art production: shock, defamiliarization, abstraction, etc.
Translated in simple political terms, Kester seems to be
suggesting that modern aesthetics can do more to contribute
58
to progressive social change if class struggle is replaced with
social collaboration. Rather than producing transgressive
works that merely contribute to art’s estrangement from the
public and that reify the exclusiveness of the field of cultural
production, dialogical artists make work that is participatory,
deliberative, democratic and pedagogical. Dialogical artists
are not interested in the celebrity status of the individual artist
and signature styles are substituted for whatever means suit
the needs of a project.
Perhaps the most notable example of communicative art
practice is the work of the Viennese collective
WochenKlausur (Weeks of Enclosure). In the past two
decades, WochenKlausur has created numerous projects that
propose creative solutions to social problems affecting the
unemployed, the homeless, drug addicts, immigrants and the
handicapped. The problems they address are endemic and are
not solved by existing divisions of administrative expertise
and legal jurisdiction. The artists use their status as
autonomous and creative agents to oversee discussions among
selected participants and to propose means to improve social
coexistence. The criteria for quality and success are not
aesthetic but are determined in advance by the deliberate
intentions of the intervention. In order to facilitate the public
acceptance of the work, the instruments of the bourgeois
public sphere, the mass media and the art system, are
strategically co-opted and politicized.
There are some problems related to groups like
WochenKlausur’s subordination of aesthetics to an
instrumentalized or operative notion of what is “good social
activism.” In One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon raises
the problems associated with the assumption that
59
communities are coherent and unified.6 She suggests instead
that communities are unstable and, in the words of Jean-Luc
Nancy, inoperative.7 Kwon also addresses the issue of
institutional pressure. As socially engaged community art is
increasingly promoted by institutions and granting agencies,
curators, critics and adminstrators take on a greater role in the
integration of independent social practices with management
critera of success. Kester states elsewhere that this results in
the ideological subsumption of community art within the
“moral economy of capitalism.”8 Artists work with
community subjects whose social disadvantages are
individualized and whose path to social improvement is
clearly marked out in relation to existing state institutions as
well as free market, entrepreneurial solutions.
60
Kester seeks to defend politically motivated activist art
against the depoliticizing attitudes of the institutionalized
artworld. The problem for me is not that he downplays
aesthetic criteria, but that he diaparages avant-garde practice.
This prevents him from considering how it is that the avant
gardes have traditionally associated both aesthetics and
communication with ideology. The subject that is represented
in avant-garde art is the subject in ideology. For Kester, as for
many critics who have been weaned on postmodern
difference politics, all reference to class politics and dialectics
(or the kind of dialogics proposed by the Russian formalists)
is associated with the fixing of identity and with masculinism.
What is at stake in the repeated pronouncements of the death
of the avant garde and the death of communism is the belief
that there are no alternatives to global economic
neoliberalism. In “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism,” Žižek analyzes the hidden logic of
contemporary micro-politics.9 For Žižek, the kinds of cultural
politics that are based on gender, race and sexual difference
typically work to preserve the category of the propertied
white male as the unstated superego point of exclusion,
thereby failing to properly politicize social reality. The result
is post-politics, a politics in which the social administration of
cultural tensions operates as a support for existing forms of
transnational capitalism. By design or by neglect, difference
politics fails to address the ideological processes that suture
subjectivity and social reality and willfully undermines any
effective politicization that would challenge the current state
of things.
Žižek argues that the proper response to the problem of
cooptation is not the way of the superego – the impossible
embrace of or the refusal of all identification with cultural
61
institutions, a catastrophic sacrificing of oneself – but rather
the authentic revolutionary activity that could change the
situation we find ourselves in. We could call this, after Lacan,
sinthomeopathic cultural praxis. The sinthome is the complex
that structures the subject’s libidinal attachments. As such, the
sinthome acts as a means to consider the division of labour
between reality and fantasy and the possibility of
repositioning the utopian drive in relation to social change. In
a sinthomeopathic practice there is no security in the
impossible exit from the institutionalized artworld. Instead,
one lends oneself to institutional arrangements, the symptoms
of contemporary cultural production, while maintaining the
fantasy of critical distance, which is not kept to oneself but
made public through symbolic means. Sinthomeopathic
solutions avoid the fetishism of singularity that theory has
recently turned to as a means to avoid class analysis. It does
so by considering the prohibitions and refusals that structure
the reconfiguration of postmodern attitudes toward traditional
regimes of art and spectatorship.
62
63
What I am proposing relates to a process of subjectivization
and not a programme for advanced art production. In contrast
to the previous models of community art, I am not proposing
a new aesthetic. If Kantian aesthetic philosophy has any
relevance today, it could serve to remind us that aesthetic
judgement is a human faculty and not a quality of objects.
Further, the faculty of judgement, as a socialized system of
taste, works to distinguish and classify social dispositions,
turning aesthetic criteria into matters of struggle. The
universal determinations of the aesthetic should therefore not
only be deconstructed in such as way as to reveal what they
exclude, but should be submitted to a radical materialization
of the processes of subjectivization. I would like to suggest as
an example of sinthomeopathy Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille
Monument of 2002, constructed for Documenta 11 in Kassel,
Germany. This work bears many resemblances to other
examples of community art and as such partakes in the
various manifestations of contemporary social and cultural
experimentation. The project was undertaken with the
collaboration of a Turkish immigrant community and the
various parts of the monument were built in their
neighbourhood. Hirschhorn lived “in residence” for several
weeks as well as for the 100 day duration of the exhibition.
The monument was made available seven days per week,
twenty-four hours per day and was accessible without charge.
This temporary monument was built with the help of
community members, including children, and functioned as a
poetic homage to the renegade avant-garde Surrealist,
Georges Bataille. Given that many of the participants would
not likely be familiar with the figure of Bataille, a
pedadogical component was devised and community
workshops were hosted by local philosophers. The purpose of
64
the Bataille Monument was therefore to publicly integrate
avant-garde ideas and practice.
While the liberal multiculturalist attitude towards “the public”
would likely dismiss Bataille as a suitable topic for public
discussion, Hirschhorn’s open pedagogy does not determine
in advance what is and what is not suitable for mass
consumption. He works with the space of autonomy as part of
a deeply subjective investment in the formalization of
oppositional energy. Whether this energy gets channeled in
the direction of the usual institutional designations or towards
some kind of socio-cultural transformation is not a
responsibility that Hirschhorn takes solely upon himself.
While highly capitalized forms of communication are
structured in terms of the commodification of experience,
affect and information, Hirschhorn’s “informalization” of
relationality and dialogue makes space for the reorientation of
content in the direction of a universally accessible collective
experience. Hirschhorn’s post-minimalist approach to
over-production signals the excess and the “accursed share”
that structures the contemporary economy of cultural
production. At the same time, by making use of everyday
materials, this excess is brought within reach of the popular
classes and made available as a tool for cultural education,
collective production and political emancipation.
65
Chapter 3
66
In a Way We Are All
Hokies: Polylogue on the
Socio-Symbolic Frameworks
of Community Art
The idea of community is without doubt the liberal equivalent
of the conservative notion of “family values.” Neither exists
in contemporary culture, and both are grounded in political
fantasy. A single shared social characteristic can in no way
constitute a community in any sociological sense.
– Critical Art Ensemble
Although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order,
fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that
enables us to ‘pull ourselves out,’ to preserve a kind of
distance from the socio-symbolic network.
– Slavoj Žižek
At a time when community art is sponsored by conservative
governments and private foundations, how is it possible for
socially engaged artistic practice to distinguish its procedures
and effects from the political restoration of class power?
While neoliberalism has in fact been responsible for a “trickle
down effect,” it has not been the kind that can be tied to
productive economic growth, as its proponents used to say,
nor have we seen any significant increases to social wealth.
67
What has trickled down has mostly been the anti-democratic
fallout of social policies that are designed to dismantle the
state provision of social services and to protect the capital
markets and investment options of the wealthiest among us.
The prevalence of the concept of community in contemporary
art practice promises a similar devolution of hierarchies, but it
too has not resulted in the dismantling of institutionalized
protocols.
The most direct function of community within
market-oriented neoliberal thinking is as an adjunct of the
devolution of responsibility for social welfare away from the
state towards the community, and further, from the
collectivity to the individual.1 While the rhetoric of reform
appeals to traditional notions of community, what is implicit
in neoliberal governmentality is a reorganization of the
relations between the state and civil society that seeks to
ensure, through relations of force, flexibilization, corporate
restructuring, risk management, hierarchy and competition,
the greatest amount of self-exploitation on the part of
individuals, defined as units of capital. Following the writings
of Pierre Bourdieu, we could say that these relations of force
appear to us as symbolic force, and consequently as symbolic
currency that is directly tied to cultural capital.2 Where
governments no longer oversee the provision of social goods
and the reinforcement of democratic politics, a new,
spontaneous and voluntary class of virtuous citizens is
expected to empower the traditionally defined face-to-face
community against the vagaries of poverty and exploitation,
to restrict diversity, and to provide the leadership of a
“shadow state” that is subject to neither democractic control
nor criticism.3 One paradox of the neoliberal vision of
private-public partnerships is that individuals and
68
communities come to function interchangeably. Where one
can be found, the other is presumed to exist. The new hybrid
form of subjectivity that corresponds to the neoliberal use of
the terms participation, partnership, consensus and
empowerment can provisionally be called the “community
subject.” This form of subjectivity brings with it what Jacques
Rancière calls “post-democracy,” the “paradoxical
identification of democracy with a consensual practice that
suppresses political subjectivization.”4
We Need to Talk
In many versions of the new community art, there are efforts
by activist artists and collectives to not only work at the level
of representation, but to actually provide services that operate
as social safety nets. On this topic, Nina Möntmann mentions
the project by HaHa that was part of Mary Jane Jacob’s 1993
exhibition of community art, Culture in Action.5 This
Chicago-based collective worked with a group of volunteers
to provide hydroponic greens for people who are
HIV-positive, as well as AIDS education to the local
community. The question I want to ask concerning this and
numerous other similar examples of social practice is the
extent to which the political and ideological relations that are
implicit in them function to challenge or reproduce the
socio-economic relations that work to create a new
community subject. While socially engaged community art
appears to provide the elements necessary for the
transgression of the rules against which we might imagine an
avant-garde supercession of the state of the art, it is precisely
the social aim and function of new practices, and not their
specifically artistic telos, that ostensibly shapes their
69
organizational and participatory attributes. This social
function shifted in the 1990s from a discussion of public
spheres and public spaces to that of an inclusive
operationalization of the concept community.6
To date, perhaps one of the most notable theorists of
community art is the American critic Grant Kester. Kester’s
2004 publication, Conversation Pieces, opens with a series of
qualifiers for socially engaged practice. The specific term that
he has coined to describe engaged community art activism is
“dialogical aesthetics.” Like other critics, Kester wishes to
provide a critical framework for what he perceives to be a
“new aesthetic paradigm.”7 Despite more than forty years of
the dematerialization of the work of art, and nearly one
hundred years after the anti-aesthetic provocations of the
Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, Kester makes the careful
assertion that the new art cannot be perceived or appreciated
if the viewer makes use of the conventional criteria of art
criticism: determinate objects rather than processes,
individual responses rather than social effects, formal
appearance rather than social content. Dialogical art, he
cautions, appears unaesthetic.
The main argument that Kester makes for dialogical
aesthetics is that it challenges the traditional avant-garde
emphasis on anti-discursive rupture, sometimes understood in
purely formal terms, as in the criticism of Clive Bell, Roger
Fry and Clement Greenberg, and sometimes associated with
the avant-garde challenge to the received forms of artistic
representation. We can imagine here almost all of the devices
that have informed aesthetic modernism: the focus on
medium and technique, anti-narrative, anti-perspectivalism,
collage, montage, alienation effects, automatic writing,
70
agit-prop, the emphasis on the unconscious, language,
ideology, dialectics, etc. In such avant-garde production, he
argues, the artist’s non-communicative or anti-discursive
strategy becomes inherently oppressive. Either the artist
mistrusts communication and associates it with
representational transparency or the artist fails to become
involved in a conversation that would leave open the
possibility for the acceptance of the viewer’s response.
Wishing to defend politically motivated activist art against the
depoliticizing structures of the institutionalized artworld,
Kester finds himself disparaging the canon of avant-garde
practice and, in the process, imposing rather strict criteria that
derive from seventies pluralism and eighties difference
politics. From the point of view of radical class politics, these
choices are not without consequence. Another problem in his
argument is the distinction he makes between the
anti-discursive discursivity of the artist and what appears to
me, as a consequence of this view, to be the ostensible
non-discursivity of the audience, unable to manage, interpret
and recuperate the shocks of modernist “anti-aesthetics.” This
distinction between dialogical aesthetics and the social
analytic of the avant garde, unfortunately, separates
contemporary practices from a long tradition of critical
thinking, from Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht, Lukács and
Artaud to Saussure, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, and
countless others.8 The avant gardes, however, do not
associate communication with fixity, as Kester argues, but
associate the fixing of meaning with the operations of
ideology. If there is a weakness in the theory of dialogical
aesthetics, it is the post-political assumption of a subject
outside of ideology. Because of this, the theory of dialogical
aesthetics, I would argue, is more easily recuperable by
71
liberal ideology and neoliberal institutions. This is perhaps
intentional as a pragmatic compromise.
For Kester, all reference to class politics and all materialist
philosophy is conveniently associated with the fixing of
identity and with masculinism. Such an unsubstantiated
critique of Marxism and dialectics should be recognized as
the only significant, constructive element in Kester’s theory.
Because of this, all of avant-garde production is consigned to
the ghetto of an “anti-discursive tradition” and associated
with a paradigm of the “naughty artist.” But who is being
naughty here? Kester’s somewhat popular use of the terms
“dialogics” and “everyday language” would benefit from
some acknowledgement of the critical use of those terms in
the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Paolo Freire and Henri
Lefebvre. Kester’s almost complete dispensation with
negation reduces sociology to the tasks of art criticism.
Negation makes its limited appearance in Conversation
Pieces, paradoxically, as part of an unstated, and indeed
vanguard critique of the canonization of avant-gardism and
autonomy.9
Kester’s association of avant-gardism and autonomy with
conservatism, understood in terms of the postmodern
shibboleth of a “universalizing discourse,” creates serious
problems in his work, in particular, as he attempts to defend it
from public debate. This can be noticed in his somewhat
aggressive response to the London-based art critic Claire
Bishop. Bishop emerged in the 2000s as a notable if
sometimes reviled critic of contemporary art. One of her first
significant contributions was an essay titled “Antagonism and
Relational Aesthetics,” which was published in the journal
October in 2004.10 In it she argues that critics should attempt
72
to define some of the criteria with which we might judge the
new community-based and collaborative art of the 1990s.
While Bishop’s criticism may in fact be dependent on a
formalist, pleasure-based methodology that Kester associates
with mainstream art criticism, it does not prevent her from
asking important questions about this new aesthetic paradigm.
Bishop contends that just because a work encourages dialogue
and participation, this alone does not make it democratic.
What types of relations are being produced, she asks, for
whom and why?11
Defending the work of Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago
Sierra agains the “relational aesthetics” of Liam Gillick and
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bishop counterposes an “avant-garde
rhetorics of opposition and transformation” against
post-structural “strategies of complicity.”12 In the work of
artists like Hirschhorn, there is the admission of a degree of
formal autonomy that is based in neither the contradictions of
Greenberg’s revolutionary art-at-a-standstill nor Adorno’s
negative dialectics and modernist refusal. In comparison with
such work, she calls for the analysis of “relational aesthetics”
at the level of criticism and not as a prescription for artistic
practice.
In a later piece, Bishop refers to the emphasis on
collaboration and participation in contemporary art as the
“social turn.”13 She argues that socially collaborative art
constitutes “what avant-garde we have today: artists using
social situations to produce dematerialized, anti-market,
politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to
blur art and life.”14 She contends that because the “politics of
inclusion” operate in tandem with state and corporate
interests, artworks need to be discussed as art and not only in
73
the context of their stated ethical intentions. The essay takes
issue with Kester’s position against avant-garde art that
attempts to maintain a critical distance from its audience and
that in some cases risks offence, shock, or didacticism.
Bishop argues that the “discursive criteria” of socially
engaged art should not be to renounce authorial control nor to
withdraw from the logic of aesthetic autonomy as the
condition of art’s instrumentalization.
Given the arguments put forward in Conversation Pieces,
Kester’s response to Bishop’s essay was not altogether
surprising. In a letter to Artforum he reiterated his critique of
the “quasi-detached perspective of the artist,” a tendency or
affective complex that I argue he should ascribe to the field of
cultural production itself, including consumer culture, rather
than to individuals.15 What was less predictable was the
hostility with which he sought to defend the grounds of
community art against Bishop’s idea of participation, a stance
that resulted in his accusation that she is part of a “paranoid
consensus” to protect the institutionalized art world.16 This
paradoxical accusation allows him to distance his position
from structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism and thereby
avoid all questions of relative and critical autonomy. I say
paradoxical because Kester’s attack on Bishop allows him to
privilege the autonomy of his position and the artists he
champions from the rest of the field – an impossible task. If
anything can account for Kester’s theoretical opportunism in
this incident, which he largely retreated from in later
interviews for Circa and Art Journal, it is what I perceive to
be his understanding of artist activists as morally exemplary.
Could it be that Kester’s identification with such
contemporary artist-activists allows him to participate in the
classic avant-gardist overturning of both phylogenetic and
74
ontogenetic peers? Is the privileged community of community
art not therefore the community of radical activist artists?
In his Art Journal interview with Mick Wilson, Kester
continues to lambast avant-gardism, representing it as a
hygienic discourse aimed against kitsch, activism, audiences
and the vagaries of social life.17 The avant garde, according
to him, leaves no room for a positive conception of
community. Community, he argues, and according to the
theories of writers like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, is
always thought be “an expression of the dominant power,” “a
symptom of the extreme fear of predication in the
poststructuralist tradition.” My main point of contention with
Kester is not that community is always an expression of the
dominant power, but that too often, within existing social
relations, this is precisely the case. Furthermore, I would
argue that the resources of post-structural thought are not
limited to members of the artworld. Kester is hardly the first
person to have announced the death of the avant garde.
However, what might help situate the advent of community
art in more historically salient terms is some discussion of the
purported death of communism. To begin to think through the
notion of the death of communism might not only allow us to
address this so-called post-structuralist approach to
community, but also the relation of neoliberalism to the
subject of community.
Death by Community
If a theory of community art is to have any universal
relevance, it must be able to grasp the problem of irresolvable
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differences and this is something that has been implicit in the
avant-garde emphasis on non-discursivity, especially if by
discursivity we also understand something like the integrating
function of capitalism. The immanence of difference within
any community formation is also the place from which
conflictual and traumatic relations draw their sense of
effective meaning. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben relates
the impossibility of community to Alain Badiou’s notion of
the state of exception:
Badiou’s thought is, from this perspective, a rigorous thought
of the exception. His central category of the event
corresponds to the structure of the exception. Badiou defines
the event as an element of a situation such that its
membership in the situation is undecidable from the
perspective of the situation. To the State, the event thus
necessarily appears as an excrescence. According to Badiou,
the relation between membership and inclusion is also marked
by a fundamental lack of correspondence, such that inclusion
always exceeds membership (theorem of the point of excess).
The exception expresses precisely this impossibility of a
system’s making inclusion coincide with membership, its
reducing all its parts to unity.18
I hope to show that the most radical exception in neoliberal
constructions of community is that of communism, and also,
that the absence of an emancipatory concept of community
can be directly tied to the purported death of communism. I
wish to do so not by privileging socially engaged art, but the
community discourse that was set to work in the aftermath of
the multiple shootings at Virginia Tech State University in
April of 2007. I focus on this event because here, in stark
contrast to dialogical aesthetics, what is repressed is precisely
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the kind of social criticism that could lead to an analysis of
the dominant forces that shape socio-economic
reproduction.19
Recent theoretical approaches to the question of community,
those that are based in deconstruction, phenomenology and
post-structural theory, are often less concerned with the
identity of a community – its basis in tradition and origins,
and the symbolic and cultural rituals that inhere in its
collective social practices – than with the management of
boundaries and differences through processes of inclusion and
exclusion. An early account of the sacrificial aspects of
community formation was proposed by the Surrealist Georges
Bataille and the radical Acéphale group that formed around
him and his courses at the Collège de Sociologie in Paris in
the 1930s. The goal of the anti-capitalist Acéphale was to
create a sacrificial community that is non-hierarchical – the
name itself refers to a headless body – and to ecstatic rites of
incorporation that do not compromise the sovereignty of
individual members. In the review of the same name,
published between the years 1936 and 1939, Bataille called
on radicals to separate themselves not only from fascism, but
from all social movements, including socialism.20
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In the spirit of Nietzsche, Bataille rejected all appeals to
instrumentalism, including the call for justice and freedom.
Giving oneself to the future, he wrote in the first issue, is set
against all occasions for political parties and the odour of
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death in patriotism. Democracy neutralizes all antagonisms
and excludes radical change. For Bataille, the universal
community is unlimited and without rest, it is eternal and
never achieved. In the postwar period, he would be more
explicit in relating this principle of the unachieved with
sacrifice and the cruelty of art.
Bataille’s ideas have held a certain interest for newer theories
of community. An early intervention in contemporary
discussions on the “discursive construction of community” is
Maurice Blanchot’s 1983 elaboration of Bataille’s idea of the
founding of a community of sacrifice through its undoing, or
what he calls désoeuvrement.21 The Acéphale represents not
only a dissolution of political involvement but also the fact
that absence, death and indeterminacy are immanent to
community. According to Blanchot, to posit the “absolute
immanence” of community is to subvert the experience of
absolute individuality. Individuality and community, then, are
the coordinate terms that ruin the possibility of one and the
other in contestation, in unworking and worklessness. Writing
about the ambiguous “being-together” that followed May 68,
Blanchot notes that “the people” was always ready to dissolve
itself:
The people... are there, then they are no longer there; they
ignore the structure that could stabilize them. Presence and
absence, if not merged, at least exchange themselves
virtually. That is what makes them formidable for the holders
of a power that does not acknowledge them: not letting
themselves be grasped, being as much the dissolution of the
social fact as the stubborn obstinacy to reinvent the latter in a
sovereignty the law cannot circumscribe, as it challenges it
while maintaining itself as its foundation.22
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For Blanchot, “the people” is an incompossibility, an
abandonment of the traditional notion of community, whether
that is thought of as the face-to-face community of people
who happen to know one another or the elective community
of friends. All totalizing forms of association are efforts to
make the traditional community an elective one, and the
destiny of these forms is written in practices of exclusion.
Following upon the notion of the negative community, of the
unworking of sacrifice, Blanchot proposes a community of
beings who are exposed to one another, “the community of
those who have no community.”23 The new idea of the
individual that emerges from this is equally unworked in the
sense that subjectivity cannot be revealed. Rather, subjectivity
is inclined. Jean-Luc Nancy uses the word clinamen, meaning
an inclination or a relation that undoes, that unbinds the ties
of the known community.24 He also describes this idea of
unworking as compearance; by appearing together, the
unworked community is the community that does not
establish itself.
In the liberal philosophical tradition, individual rights vie
with notions of civic incorporation. Nancy deconstructs this
opposition by focusing on the impossibility of an absolute
immanence of either pole. The individual is the result of, or
causes, the death of community, the impossibility of
communion.25 The community, on the other hand, is the
result of, or causes, the death of individuals; it exposes rather
than incorporate and subsume the finitude of individuals. “To
say that community has not yet been thought,” Nancy writes,
“is to say that it tries our thinking, and that it is not an object
for it.”26 Both death, dying for love of country, and love, the
exposure of being, are posited as forces that represent the
impossibility of immanence. Immanence of identity, my limit,
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is the absoluteness that dissolves the possibility of
community.
Nancy’s work is helpful for considering both the forms of
political incorporation and Bataille’s alternative. In the first
case, Nancy refers to the concepts of justice, freedom, and
equality that form the background of a “human
community.”27 In all communitarian undertakings, especially
those that subsume the individual to the regulatory functions
of a territory, a state, science, religion, identity, culture, or
tradition, “the individual can be the origin and the certainty of
nothing but its own death.”28 All of these, he states, can be
related to the Christian emphasis on communion, understood
as the loss of community. Death is not the example of this
loss, but rather its truth. He writes:
This is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a
will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of
death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic
than that of the suicide of the community that is governed by
it... The fully realized person of individualistic or
communistic humanism is the dead person. In other words,
death, in such a community, is not the unmasterable excess of
finitude, but the infinite fulfillment of an immanent life: it is
death that the Christian civilization, as though devouring its
own transcendence, has come to minister to itself in the guise
of a supreme work.29
According to Nancy, the kinds of “literary communism” that
were proposed by thinkers like Georges Bataille and Walter
Benjamin sought to extract themselves from all
pre-established forms of community. Their proposals went
unrecognized in all “real” communisms and so Nancy
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abandons the concept altogether for something that has no
name and no concept, something that takes into account the
modalities of solitude, rejection, admonition and helplessness.
Community is what happens to us in the wake of society;
community is what justifies death and suffering, and is
revealed in the death of others.30 The impossibility of
communion, of a communitarian being, means that it is
impossible to make a work that is not a work of death.31 If
community is therefore not a project of fusion, it also
represents the impossibility of absolute exclusion. All forms
of finitude co-appear with being-in-common.
One might ask of Nancy’s work, what is solitude and
admonition in comparison with solidarity, criticism and
learning? I would argue that the limitation of the fate of the
individual within communistic humanism to that of death is
rather appropriate for an age that is obsessed with the possible
disappearance of humanity. Somewhere along the way,
however, our environmental conditions have been confused
with our biological predispositions. As Freud observed with
regard to death drive, the meaning of life is in fact death. If
anything, communism recognizes this universal attribute and
seeks to make emancipatory change the mode of social
relations in the space between life and death, between human
needs and human relations of production. Regardless, what
avant-garde practice seeks to enact corresponds roughly with
what Nancy calls the “sharing of community,” even when it
does so through gestures of negation. Avant-garde shock
operates, precisely as Kester states, in the manner of the
“subject supposed to know.”32 What I propose as an example
for my elaboration of a social theory of the community
subject is not a collaborative and participatory, process-based
art project, but the collective response to the catastrophic
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destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on September 11,
2001, and the massacre of students and faculty at Virginia
Tech State University on April 16, 2007. In both cases, what
is significant is not the suicidal logic of the assassins, but the
consequent political and cultural construction of victim status
and how such a status is designed to evade the kinds of
knowledge that we traditionally would have received in such
situations from the avant gardes. In the months following
9/11, progressive intellectuals were hard pressed not to
remind the public of the statistics concerning the deaths that
are caused daily by war, poverty, famine, lack of resources
and lack of medical treatment, and especially those that can
be directly attributed to the policies of democratically elected
liberal governments and unelected trade bodies.
While the Virginia Tech massacre might not be a large
enough incident to incite a wholesale “war on disaffected
youth,” its reporting on CNN and the major news networks
allowed mourning and community to come into visibility as
terms of propaganda. The only social criticism that was
proposed in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings were
recriminations on the part of right-wing commentators that
security measures, including mental counseling for Cho
Seung-Hui, had not been adequately undertaken. Certainly,
after the shootings, a security theatre had surrounded the
Blacksburg campus. While the assassin’s written and
videotaped “manifesto” had the features of class conflict, with
wishes “to inspire the weak and defenseless people” against
the senseless wealth accumulation of “rich kids,” it was
treated in terms of a race-based crime. Fearful of a race-based
backlash against Koreans, various Asian groups
communicated special apologies.
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One day after the shootings, Laura and George W. Bush
attended a special “Convocation for the Victims of the
Virginia Tech Massacre.” Bush’s speech underscored the
importance of community, family and God as sources of
strength and renewal. The closing speech by Virginia Tech
poet and Professor of English, Nikki Giovanni, seemed less
doctrinaire. She associated the Blacksburg tragedy with the
plight of all innocent children who suffer needlessly. The
main thrust of her speech, however, was the assertion of the
doxa of identity: “We are Virginia Tech, We are the Hokies,
We are Virginia Tech.” After her speech, the thousands who
filled the auditorium broke into the Hokie chant: “Let’s Go
Hokies!” To further underscore the usefulness of the
shootings as a means to build a politically coherent sense of
unity, a Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund was established in
memory of the victims and was administered by Kenneth
Feinberg, “special master” of the Federal September 11th
Victim Compensation Fund. Bush’s central role in the
convocation was to depoliticize this confused and formless
mass through an evangelical message of spiritual salvation
that is unrelated to questions of class power.
In what way, then, is there an overlap between community art
and the expression of the Hokie community? If the
community artist has the function of the analyst who is
“supposed to know,” as Kester suggests wryly, then this artist
should also have the ability to steal our enjoyment of the
fantasy of community. Our access to knowledge and loss of
enjoyment would come through our awareness of the
objectivity of belief. However, the stupidity of the ritual
expression of community is not just superficial. As Žižek
explains, our sense of being outside the social game defines
out true position inside the game, maintaining the fantasy of a
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distance. This is what Lacanian psychoanalysis considers the
radical externality of the big Other, the superego injunction of
enjoyme(a)nt as the place where truth is articulated.33
Community in both cases is a fantasy object. The lack of
community is repressed and imagined as one’s own desire,
made conscious and objectified in terms of a normal form of
intersubjectivity, or a rational (relational) instrumentalization
of the self. Symbolic identification, a kind of symbolic
castration, thus takes a recognizable shape in terms of
something or someone that makes it obvious that society does
not work. In this something Other, we recognize the truth
about ourselves.
In a way we are all Hokies. The question is: where might this
knowledge come from and how do we use it? In Welcome to
the Desert of the Real, Žižek proposes that there are two ways
of reacting to traumatic events.34 The first, the way of the
superego, reasserts the violence of the obscene social law “in
order to fill in the gap of the failing symbolic law.” We could
say that the Virginia Tech convocation was more a validation
of Cho SeungHui’s crimes, presented in an inverted form,
than an effective counterpoint. The second way of reacting is
the way of the authentic act. With this latter option, we could
hope to demonstrate the falsity of the post-politics of liberal
multiculturalism, which would make Virginia Tech a mere
matter of ethnic tension and local administration. Allow me to
provide another example.
On the day after September 11, 2001, I met with a class of
undergraduate students at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, where I was hired as an adjunct instructor.
Instead of lecturing, I proposed a class discussion about what
this catastrophe might mean to us at that time. The two
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responses that I remember most were diametrically opposed.
The first, by a young conservative student, was a warning to
the class against taking orders from men in little red suits who
like to sit in circles like Smurfs. The second came from an
anarchist student, who, less enthused, reminded his
classmates that the U.S. government is involved in many
activities around the world that most Americans do not know
about. The two could be brought together in order to create a
picture of the political unconscious of American youth.
Somewhere in a distant land, a community of cartoon
characters is trying to maintain a social democratic society,
but the corporate-led U.S. military simply won’t let them live
in peace. Do we not have here the necessary ingredients to
understand Cho Seng-Hui’s sad performance as a videogame
avenger? An authentic response requires that we resist the
pressure to meet fire with fire, to reassert harmful ideological
commitments as a way of avoiding subjectivized
responsibility.
We Communists
What I would like to suggest by comparing the neoliberal
vision of community with that of advanced criticism of
community art is something that could tell us more than the
simple idea that community is socially constructed.
Community is a privileged signifier at this moment in history,
one that authorizes discussions of participation, collectivity,
collaboration, reciprocity, consensus formation as well as
cultural difference, cultural critique, agonism and activism.
Identification with community, however, eventually
encounters the problem of situation and conditionality.
Perhaps we could reconfigure the current historical situation
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by considering Alain Badiou’s concept of event, and in
particular, his discussion of the death of communism.
Badiou opens his essay on “Philosophy and the ‘Death of
Communism’” with a question: “Will the invocation of death
allow us to find an appropriate way of naming what we have
witnessed?”35 Badiou argues that long before the collapse of
the Soviet Party-State in 1989, what disappeared was an
operative use of “we” that could function as a referent for we
communists, we revolutionaries, we engaged in class struggle.
This we, like the human community described by Nancy, has
been dragged in blood and effectively abolished. By order of
the state, it is not so much communism that has been killed,
but “political thought conditioned [by] a philosophy of the
community.”36 What we communists once referred to was the
universal community. The death of communism, in the
limited form of the breakup of the Soviet empire, is therefore
not on the order of what Badiou calls an event, since death
itself is not an event, but a “return of the multiple to the void
from which it is woven.”37
The paradoxical status of the convocation at Virginia Tech is
that of a celebration of the nullity of state power where the
victim is transformed into the subject of community ideology,
the subject of a spiritualized community where each subject is
supplemented by the mediation of an identification. In
contrast to such stagings of community, an event is the
transformation of a situation in which everything remains
unredeemed. One of the ways that we can understand the
quest by contemporary constituent practices to produce sites
of resistance that are non-institutionalized is by considering
Badiou’s alternative to the popular French slogan, tout ce qui
bouge n’est pas rouge. This slogan asserts that not all good
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ideas are leftist (red). Badiou counters this with the statement
tout ce qui bouge n’est pas évènement: not everything that
happens is on the order of an event. Badiou’s idea of an event
as the promise of truth delivers all notions of universal
emancipation from the coups de grace that fix revolutionary
movement in battles that were waged and lost long ago, or at
specific moments in time. Communism for Badiou is the
“trans-temporal subjectivity of emancipation.”38 The current
instrumentalization of community is an attempt to reduce and
eliminate this subjective form of communist movement
through frameworks like 1968, 1989 and 9/11. The aesthetic
instrumentalization of community is an attempt to reduce this
subjective form of communist movement through temporal
frameworks like connective, relational and dialogical
aesthetics.
Badiou considers the task of philosophy to be the extraction
of words like communism from the historical frameworks that
relativize them. Communism, he writes, is the “philosophical
and eternal concept of rebellious subjectivity”; it is a term that
allows us to think the “ontological concept of democracy.”39
Communism is thus a term that resists the salutary notion of
the death of art in the form of its articulation as social
movement. If the truth of art also has the dimension of an
event, what is it that art exposes us to and in what ways will
the truth of community art be thought to have been
subjectivized? What new situations will emerge as a result of
what exists and what supports action?
It may be that socially engaged community art will not be the
final stage of the eradication of the difference between art and
life, but a practice that will bring aesthetics one step closer to
communism and the idea of justice. How can it do this? Here
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we might wish to consider Jacques Rancière’s notion of the
artist as a double being.40 The artist is expulsed from Plato’s
community not only because of the falsity of images, but
because the artist causes a split between the usual distribution
of the sensible, the common universe of work where people
occupy a delimited space of possibility, a particular private
space-time within the division of labour. What is common to
all is this polemical distribution of modes of being, or what
Rancière terms an “incorporated conception of community.”
This commonality of community is effectively a particular
way of excluding people from participation by reducing them
to ascribed occupational tasks.
What the artist introduces is a disruption and a re-distribution
of the sensible through the public staging of what is common
to all and thus an exemplary possibility of participation
inasmuch as the artisan has separated himself or herself from
their occupation. This is no doubt why today’s community
artist is so polyvalent, not only because flexibility is the
watchword of a post-Fordist mode of production, but because
the mimetic function of art is today widely distributed across
the entire social formation. And this is perhaps why Kester
should not be so weary of the “anti-discursive” hubris of the
avant-garde artist or the incorporated role of the creative
worker in the alternative arts sector, since the powers of
redistribution that are at play in the representative regimes of
art, those that separate art from moral and social criteria, are
precisely those that work to stabilize what is common in
modern art. The very specificity of the space of autonomous
practice is what allows it to abolish the hierarchical
distribution of the sensible, and thus, to abolish itself.41
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Inasmuch as dialogical aesthetics becomes another form of
stabilization, it ceases to effect a redistribution of the sensible
and enters a newly reproduced institutional space. Here,
Rancière’s critique of the division of labour meets Badiou’s
“we” of thought and rebellious subjectivity. The
becoming-sensible of thought approaches the artistic
representation of work as a production, that is, a new
distribution of the sensible that unites the activity of
production with its visibility. This transformation of the
sensible, Rancière asserts, has led to the avant-garde abolition
of art as a separate activity.42 What we have here is the true
basis of dialogics as the bringing of human activity into
speech, and also, Rancière adds, as “the struggles of the
proletariat to bring labour out of the night surrounding it.”43
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Chapter 4
91
A Brief Excursus on Avant
Garde and Community Art
We had escaped the unbearable weight of being artists, and
within the specialization of art we could separate ourselves
from site-specific artists, community artists, public artists,
new genre artists, and the other categories with which we had
little or no sympathy.
– Critical Art Ensemble
In 1984 Krzysztof Wodiczko wrote a broadside against the
Canadian cultural state bureaucracy titled “For the
DeIncapacitation of the Avant-Garde.”1 The article addressed
the contradictions of incorporating “left” and “libertarian”
ideas into a centralized state bureacratic system. Having come
from Poland, where artists at that time feared assimilation into
the technocratic rationality of the state apparatus, the
“parallel” institutions supported by government grants
appeared to him to pose a similar danger. In both cases, he
considered the function of the state to be the appropriation of
those critiques it could use to reinforce its legitimizing
functions. Ostensibly, this could be achieved by financing
radical cultural magazines, film and video.
The problem with avant-garde artists in the West, Wodiczko
argued, was that they had begun to accept their own
productions as ideology and had conflated political ideology
with artistic utopia. In this context, artists who mistrusted
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their avant-garde forebears were caught in an endless
rehearsal of the critique of formalist modernism, forging new
idioms that could ostensibly escape a linear account of art’s
immanent unfolding. With the advent of postmodernism, art’s
privileged position within the division of labour became a
bulwark against further radicalization of the sphere of cultural
production. Rather than radicalize culture as a product of
capitalist social relations, postmodern pluralism concluded
that the avant garde is dead and withdrew to what Hal Foster
calls a relativistic “arrière-avant-gardism” that considers itself
liberated from the teleological framework of history and the
determinations of ideology.2
Wodiczko also recognized that artistic and political avant
gardes did not share the same attitudes toward the degradation
of art. Where one called for art’s destruction, the other wished
to salvage its compensatory effects. In the absence of a
revolutionary situation, the embattled artistic left could not
distinguish itself from the liberal state bureaucracy that
supported it. It appeared serious and militant, but did not dare
unmask itself. The solution to this impasse, he argued, could
be found in a critical public discourse on the aims of an
avant-garde programme that would lead to the
de-ideologization of its processes and a confrontation with the
“enemy,” which included the culturally conservative political
left. In this sense, the left could liberate itself from itself. It
could do so if it was involved in cultural action that
challenged the system of culture as planned bureaucratic
administration.3
What might Wodiczko’s ideas mean for us today in the
context of the neoliberal administration of creative labour and
the growth of what the radical collective BAVO refers to as
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“embedded” forms of cultural activism?4 As Nina Möntmann
has also argued, recent models of community-based art need
to be considered against the background of the dismantling of
state-organized social infrastructure in the Western world.5
Within some circles of advanced cultural theory and practice,
there is often little tolerance for the idea of an avant garde and
cultural authority itself is mistrusted. In the context of a late
capitalist post-politics, the political vanguard is often
subsumed under the pluralism of liberal multiculturalism.
Because of this, a multitude of decentralized practices appears
to be both the promise of a post-identity politics as well as the
grounds of a self-regulating biocapitalism, which works to
produce as well as manage cultural conflict. At the same time,
however, the counter-globalization movement, referred to in
Europe as “the movement of movements,” provides a clear
message that there are alternatives to capitalist hegemony.6
What forms of socially engaged cultural practice can we
envision that refuse complicity with the current ruling order?
Dictatorship of the Precariat
The project of a contemporary avant-garde cultural practice
entails an anti-essentialist re-examination of the question of
universality as the level at which political emancipation is
subject to hegemonic operations. Within the state apparatus, a
great deal of attention is now being given to the
administration of art in terms of “creative industries” that
rationalize “immaterial” cultural and intellectual production
according to flexible production strategies that benefit capital
accumulation. Post-Fordist or post-industrial capitalist
production are the terms used to describe the development of
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markets that involve cultural, intellectual and biogenetic
property. In this context, the left’s emphasis on social and
economic precarity within a flexible labour market has
become an important point of collective resistance to
neoliberal governance. However, the critique of the state
disciplinary apparatus has been obviated by Michel
Foucault’s influential description of the way that human
beings become subjects through forms of self-government
that are based on how people perceive what is desirable and
what is possible. Socioeconomic precarity can thus be
explained as part of a self-precarization that is entrenched
through new conditions of productivity, discipline and
security. State power is thus dematerialized and is replaced
with self-interest and the management of open markets. A
concomitant entrepreneurial view of the self complements the
management of economic liberties, producing what Foucault
refers to as biopolitical subjectivity.7 The power of labour is
thereby subsumed within a flexible market logic that almost
completely determines the relations of production. With
regard to creative labour, the autonomy of the market replaces
the avant-garde notion of the critical autonomy of the work of
art as part of a critique of social inequality. Consequently, the
position of the precariously employed artist figures not only
as the product of hegemonic market relations, but as what
Slavoj Žižek describes as the universal exception, the
particularistic example that embodies the truth of the
contemporary art world as a whole. On this score, artists are
hardly alone in their struggles.8 The level of competitiveness
and inequality that structures the field of immaterial, creative
and cognitive labour is similar to the unevenness that is
maintained by neoliberal governments in almost all spheres of
biopolitical production.
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One immediate solution to post-Fordist economic
precarization has therefore been to name it. Demonstrators at
the 2004 MayDay Parades in Milan and Barcelona, for
instance, referred to themselves as, variously, the precariously
employed, precariats, cognitive workers, cognitariat,
autonomous activists, affectariat, and so on, and proposed
flexicurity – rights and protections for the precariously
employed.9 As Angela Mitropoulos has remarked, the
demonstrators are alert to the fact that the quality of precarity
belongs to both labour and to capitalism. Whereas Fordism
seeks to cretinize the worker, she writes, post-Fordist
decentralization and flexible accumulation harness the
productive capacities of desire, knowledge and sociality
itself.10
The problem of the artworld precariat might be summarized
with Gregory Sholette’s concept of “dark matter.”11 Dark
matter describes the work of autonomous and participatory
cultural production by amateur, informal, unofficial,
autonomous, activist and non-institutional workers. This dark
matter is largely invisible to those cultural administrators –
curators, directors, collectors, critics, historians and artists –
who are the gatekeepers of large cultural institutions.
However, the same institutional art world is dependent on this
dark matter as well as the resources of its members who
purchase magazines and books and who attend exhibitions
and conferences. What, he asks, “would become of the
economic and ideological foundations of the elite art world if
this mass of excluded practices was to be given equal
consideration as art?” The situation we are confronted with is
one in which, as Sholette argues, dark matter is no longer
invisible but is gradually being recovered by private and
institutional interests. Politicized micro-practices are given
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specific designations, meanings, and use-values as they are
directly integrated into the globalized commercial art matrix.
Sholette argues that the capitalist valorization of creative
labour is a problem for culture because it “forces into view its
own arbitrary value structure.”12 The affective energies of
those who are excluded from the inner circles of the
transnational culture industries, he concludes, need to be
linked to actual resistance to capital, patriarchy and racism,
and block the art world’s mediocracy from appropriating their
histories.
This situation, as I see it, can benefit from a reconsideration
of the traditions of avant-gardism, which many cultural
producers and theorists dismiss or distinguish sharply from
activist and community-based practice. Because of their own
resistance to avant-gardism, radical artists submit themselves
to forms of liberal cultural blackmail. Artists today are
expected to provide constructive critiques of the system but
not threaten public institutions, class hierarchies and other
legacies of bourgeois liberalism; to intervene in culture but
not appear aggressive or be seriously prepared to fight for
political equality – which would result in being dismissed as
intolerant of people’s differences; to understand the complex
history of aesthetic and cultural radicalism and to incorporate
this into intelligent forms of collaborative practice, but to
stand back or compromise when the situation requires that
you assume a dominant position of authorial integrity.13 It is
not surprising that the withdrawal from avant-gardism and
from a radical criticism of disciplinary societies is
accompanied by what, on the surface of things, is its opposite:
sociability, collaboration, dialogue, participation, community
consultation, etc. These modalities and methods, according to
Hal Foster, “risk a weird formalism of discursivity and
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sociability pursued for their own sakes.”14 However, this is
perhaps where the potential radicality of formalism should be
acknowledged and the assymetry of form and content be
considered. Why, we should ask, is socially engaged
community art considered to be among the most vanguard
forms of contemporary art and, if so, in what ways does it
renounce formalism? The blackmail situation provides two
obvious solutions: either one defends the socially maligned
space of autonomy, but, if successful, risks having one’s work
recuperated as capitalist investment, or, one plays the
disciplinary culture industries at their own game, sublating
the opposition between art and life, art and society, and
thereby producing complex forms of critical activity and
risking, if successful, being ignored or even becoming
invisible as an artist or an art collective. Many of the most
challenging artists of the last two decades have chosen the
latter path. However, we can see here how the path of
self-precarization is not only overdetermined – least of all by
the kinds of capital that are associated with criticality – but
full of contradictions. Many of the most vanguard directions
in today’s late capitalist world of post-structural post-politics
demand a withdrawal from avant-gardism as passé,
modernist, masculinist, totalizing, utopian, and so on.
This kind of liberal cultural blackmail, inasmuch as it comes
from progressive artists, theorists and historians, is especially
harmful given the economic pressures that come from and
that are also imposed on cultural institutions. Current trends
within the creative industries have contributed to a wholesale
devaluation of avant-garde aesthetic autonomy, moving in the
direction of cultural brokering and corporatization. The
market indicators that drive so much cultural production
today would merely be incidental if artists, curators and
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critics themselves had not conceded so much cultural and
intellectual ground to the logic of the “end of history.” At a
recent conference, a prominent Canadian cultural theorist
challenged my ability to speak of global capitalism without
considering that cultural differences introduce gaps in what
might otherwise appear as a total world system. The point
here, however, is not to deny the links between difference and
system but to consider how the workings of capital cannot be
dissociated from notions of particularity. In the following I
take this manifestation of the prohibition against
avant-gardism as symptomatic of contemporary cultural
theory and practice, a kind of belated postmodernism, and
further, as a probable explanation for the growing salience of
the discourse on precarity.
The Elephant in the Room
One of the abiding characteristics of the avant garde, and this
is partly what helped create the sphere of modernist
autonomy, was its distrust and dislike of market relations.
Having been created by those same market relations, the
avant garde wished to subvert them from within, both through
strategies of formal reflexivity and medium specificity as well
as through infusions of socially and politically radical
content. Believing in the ability of art to change life, the avant
garde sometimes ignored the ways that aesthetic practice
serves to reproduce power relations and class antagonism.15
Whereas modernist artists sought to challenge and transcend
the given standards of cultural production, thereby
reproducing the field, the historical avant gardes did this with
the goal of politicizing the sphere of cultural production itself.
The avant-garde artist, in Peter Bürger’s well-known
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formulation, sought to contest and transform the institution of
modernist aesthetic autonomy, and in the process, to
transform social relations.16 For an avant-garde work to be
successful, it had to function in terms of what Bourdieu calls
“dual-action” devices, both reproducing and not reproducing
the field of culture. One of the means by which this could be
achieved was the radical separation of art from taste and
habituated sense perception. This strategy also contributed to
avant-garde art’s estrangement from audiences, eventually
leading to a game of agonism and provocation, and, on the
part of liberal culture, anticipation and commodification.
Contemporary art resorts to milder versions of this story,
working with concepts of critical collaboration or complicity
as alternatives to the stormy weather called forth by the
concepts of alienation and class struggle. The sociological
determinants of cultural appreciation and the distribution of
cultural wealth, however, are misconstrued when
contemporary socially engaged community artists presume to
perform non-contradictory acts of benevolence.17 Neither can
art escape its conditions of determination, nor can it be
reduced to them. Beholden to a liberal model of the needy
public or a multicultural model of diversity, much
contemporary art refuses to challenge audiences in ways that
are associated with avant-garde resistance. In two of its most
recent manifestations, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational
aesthetics” and Grant Kester’s “dialogical aesthetics,”
political claims and social protest are to be renounced in
favour of dialogical interaction, and the artist is expected to
renounce claims to authority and authorship.18 These critics
not only seek to transform the way that artists interact with
audiences, but decry the sort of activism that takes the form of
militant struggle, whether in the form of agitational work or
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utopian projection. What is proposed instead is ambient
conviviality, reformism, and interaction. Consequently, many
forms of socially engaged community art lack an adequate
theory of social politicization. While contemporary
community art practices are obviously concerned with some
kind of conscientization, many artists hold that this should not
come about as the result of a confrontation with the public.
Artists may seek to solve particular social problems, but the
singularity of these problems is separated from their universal
determinations. As a result, a kind of therapeutic pragmatism
calls for artists to collaborate with institutions, avoiding the
kinds of risk that would be required to challenge the ruling
bourgeois order. And yet, the overcoming of the distinction
between art and life perseveres as the leitmotif of advanced
practice. What is it then that contemporary community artists
seek to overcome?
The following considers the symptomatic nature of the
prohibition against avant-gardism and even the prohibition of
the prohibition itself as a serious topic of discussion. The
example I wish to provide is Komar & Melamid’s Asian
Elephant Art and Conservation Project (1995-2000), which I
take to be a serious satire of contemporary community art.
The type of community art I have in mind is best represented
by Mary Jane Jacob’s well-known curatorial venture Culture
in Action, the 1993 instalment of the annual Sculpture
Chicago summer festival.19 Culture in Action was dedicated
almost entirely to community-based projects for which the
artists created pieces that emphasized dialogue, participation
and interaction. Notwithstanding the merit of many of the
individual projects, what concerns me here is the manner in
which the curatorial framing was decidedly anti-avant-garde.
The rhetoric of Culture in Action was that art provides a
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redemptive, therapeutic healing of social divisions. In
contrast, what Komar & Melamid are interested in with
Elephant Project is precisely the problem of the integration of
living labour within a global capitalist mode of flexible
accumulation.
Briefly stated, Komar & Melamid’s Asian Elephant Art and
Conservation Project is a complex work that enlists the
participation of Thai elephants and their “mahout” trainers.20
After the ban on rainforest timber in 1989, the elephants and
the timber workers became unemployed, forced to engage in
tricks for tourists, panhandling and illegal work.
Malnourishment led to the decimation of the mostly
domesticated elephant population. By training some elephants
to paint “abstract expressionist” canvases and then selling
their paintings, Komar & Melamid raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars for their care and that of their trainers.
Paintings were auctioned off at Christie’s and bulk sales were
organized with hotel chains, thus raising awareness of the
elephants’ circumstances.
Elephant Project provides a clear indication of what Slavoj
Žižek has explained as the truth of community, the fact that
the deepest identification that holds a community together is
not an identification with the written laws that regulate
normal, everyday routine, but an identification with the
transgression or suspension of the Law, an identification with
an obscene secret code.21 For our purposes, we could say that
the deepest identification that structures the field of
contemporary art production is not the particularistic political
transgression of the new art of community, relationality and
dialogue, the official art of our times, but an identification
with the prohibition of avant-garde radicality. On this score,
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Komar & Melamid’s elephant project is not an avant-garde
work because it defies or parodies the politically immaterial
mandates of relational aesthetics and the new community art,
but because it exposes the obscene underside of so-called
dialogical collaboration. How so?
Like the post-Fordist precariat, the elephants/artists are out of
work. And what is the secret code, the unwritten law that
gives artistic transgression its specific form if not the
momentary political suspension of art for the sake of art’s
renewal? Is this renewal not also the admission of the pure
symbolic meaningless of the aesthetic as a measure of value,
in particular in the face of abjection, poverty and
unemployment? This same fact is what constitutes the truly
obscene side of this unwritten law; obscene because ever
since Kant necessity has been ruled out as a hindrance to
aesthetic judgement, and ever since Marx, enjoyment itself
was transmuted into ideology. This is why in contemporary
liberal multiculturalist discourse the term avant-garde remains
unspoken – not because its logic has been exhausted, but
because avant-gardism continues to structure modes of
enjoyment. And why not understand this in its full Lacanian
sense as surplus enjoyment, the plus de jouir that signals the
moment of flight from the analyst’s couch?
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What Elephant Project showcases is a realist art that is fully
reflective of and integrated with the ideological apparatus of
community art as the official art of neoliberal capitalism,
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where political rule is not exercised directly through police
control but through the manipulation of popular opinion,
which is represented here by paintings tailored to
accommodate the taste for the generation of reality. Elephant
Project unashamedly reveals how its very modes of procedure
are drawn from the kinds of pre-existing practices that are
commercially successful, in this case, from the success of
“Ruby,” the painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo. For
artworld audiences, however, the key referent is not elephant
paintings but community art. On a basic level, and in an
avant-garde sense, the artists attempt to make the form (the
conceptual contours of the work) the specific characteristic of
the work within the more general and overarching category of
content (the organization of means of subsistence for
unemployed elephants in the context of both ecologically
sensitive de-industrialization and the permutations of
contemporary art within the culture industries). This critical
use of realism allows the obscene prohibition against
avant-gardism to come to our consideration. It does so by
associating relationality, dialogue and collaboration with
relations of class power. This point is brought home by the
way that Elephant Project involves not only the representation
of disenfranchised communities, not only the avid
participation of artworld insiders, but also the determining
power of collectors, including Thai royalty.
As with their previous poll-based projects, Komar & Melamid
manipulate the range of responses that one can anticipate in
reaction to the work. These sociologically typical responses
are treated like readymade components of the work,
engineered in advance as means to engage viewers in an
extended reflection. The photograph of the two artists
teaching a baby elephant and its trainer about the work of
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Marcel Duchamp provides a glimpse of this intentional,
authorial approach. The elephants are not so much producing
abstract expressionist canvases but are part of an extended
materialist strategy to re-conceptualize community art. The
ideational and psychological aspect is crucial here. Among
the readymade structures of feeling that Komar & Melamid
activate are the responses that viewers may have about the
project: “Do Komar & Melamid think that people will
actually be moved by the paintings, or the project as a
whole?”; “Does the public appreciate all of the ironic
references to Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, etc.?”;
“Aren’t they merely creating another investment opportunity
for the art market?”; “Aren’t they merely reproducing the
structures of neocolonialism?” What happens, then, when
people take their antics seriously?
The critical aspect of this project is not only that Komar &
Melamid take their work seriously as community public art,
but also that they simultaneously engage in an
over-identification with the ideological structure of
community art that is capable of exposing the links between
cultural activism and the economic function of cultural
production within the new neoliberal “creative” economy.
The project does so in part because it makes use of the lessons
about ideology developed by the two artists in response to
Socialist Realism. The name I give this kind of practice,
following Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan, is a
sinthomeopathic practice in which subjects hold on to their
deepest libidinal attachments. By both learning from the
public what it wants and making this the subject of the work
(the symptomatic aspect of public opinion), Elephant Project
reveals the meta-rules of community art as part of the
neoliberal art market. This aspect of over-identification is
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what Žižek refers to as the “manipulation of transference,” a
situation that begins with the “subject supposed to know.“
The artists put in place the function of “the subject supposed
to know” through a strategy of interpassivity. By listening to
what the public wants, they are relieved of the superego
injunction to be amused by the spectacle of elephants
painting. Their role as mediators resembles what television
provides in the form of canned laughter. However, in this
case, the canned laughter is made reflexive by the plight of
the elephants and as such provides a Brechtian lesson. This
allows for a shift from belief to knowledge. For Lacan, the
function of the symbolic order, an impersonal set of social
regulations, refers to belief rather than knowledge. The
assymetry between the subject supposed to know and the
subject supposed to believe reveals the reliance of belief on a
big Other (a sort of impersonal superego) that relieves us of
responsibility for what we desire. In terms of psychoanalytic
transference, the unconscious desire of the patient can be
perceived inasmuch as the analyst is considered the subject
supposed to know (to know the unconscious desire of the
patient). As viewers of the work, then, we are caught in a
transferential confusion of belief and knowledge. With whom
are we expected to identify: with the members of the public
who are confounded by the full panoply of Komar &
Melamid’s avant-garde exposé, or with those of us whose
libidinal investments are most fully constituted by fantasmatic
identification with contemporary art? With what are we
expected to identify: with art’s exceptional power to
transcend and heal social divisions within actually existing
global capitalism, or with the possibility of a critical
autonomy that can reconstruct and alter the field of cultural
production?
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Before we seek answers to these questions, however,
psychoanalytic ethics requires that we attend to the
transferential reversal that defines the psychoanalytic cure.
Because the function of the subject supposed to know is here
occupied by elephants and not human beings (if one was to
ignore the role of their trainers), it is easier for us to see how
our ideological obsession with the desire of the Other locates
the truth in something or someone that exists as such and that
is to be brought into political representation by the poetic
subtleties of the public artist, or, the not so subtle
philanthropy of state and corporate granting agencies, and a
few collectors. If what takes place at the end of
psychoanalytic transference is the shift from desire to drive,
then what an effective sinthomeopathic practice like Komar &
Melamid’s can do is shift the coordinates of both art
producers and the public towards the understanding that
desire (defined by Lacan as the unconscious rules that
regulate social interaction) has no absolute support in the
symbolic law that separates art from politics, pleasure from
necessity. In other words, psychoanalytic ethics requires that
we subjectivize the field of social relations, that we think for
ourselves rather than follow the dictates of the obscene
unwritten law. This law, as I have argued, includes the
injunction against avant-gardism that informs the current
manifestations of much socially engaged community art. The
injunction itself, as a symptom of our cultural condition,
needs to be brought into relation with the official art of our
times. Elephant Project does this by identifying with
community art as one of the most advanced forms of cultural
and biopolitical production within neoliberal societies.
Komar & Melamid’s strategy of learning from what the
people want should inform and not constrain our relation to a
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critical community art. It underscores the role of collaboration
as a symptom of today’s ideologization of social relations.
The problem then for the avant garde of public art in the age
of neoliberal globalization is not that of collaboration versus
antagonism, of contingency versus universality, but the
enabling of a radical subjectivization of art and politics. The
incorporation of various community contexts into the frame
of art and thus within the flexible production strategies of the
creative industries is not, strictly speaking, a form of mass
deception, but also a self-deception. We are and we are not
that community.
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Chapter 5
110
Welcome to the Cultural
Goodwill Revolution: On
Class Composition in the
Age of Classless Struggle
The widespread abandonment of critical dialectical realism on
the left has occasioned a number of theoretical common
points among anti-capitalist artists and activists. Whereas one
often hears that this is an outcome of historical experience
and therefore progress in matters of praxis, the widening gap
between theory and practice demands of us that we work
through the aporias of this dilemma. As Theodor Adorno once
argued in his essay on commitment: “the controversy over
commitment remains urgent, so far as anything that merely
concerns the mind can be today, as opposed to sheer human
survival.”1 Following the success of Foucault and Deleuze in
academic circles, and the importance of Hardt and Negri’s
Empire in the wake of Seattle and subsequent
anti-globalization protests, North American activists have in
the last decade turned to the theoretical work of the Italian
autonomists and in particular the writings of Antonio Negri,
Maurizio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno. The latter have argued
that the conditions of production in post-Fordist societies
require new thinking in matters of social and political
organization, changes that are facilitated by networked
resistance and new forms of cooperation and worker
self-management. Mixed in with protest activity and critical
111
writing are the ongoing debates between anarchism,
communism, and social democratic trade unionism. Beyond
the many examples of grassroots and institutionalized
“anti-capitalist” organizing, the current view among activists
is that the “movement of the movements” needs to go beyond
counter-summit protest and shift toward popular front
mobilizations.
In these same years, the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj
Žižek in particular has provided a lively counterpoint to the
theoretical shortcomings of the anti-globalization movement,
in particular on philosophical matters having to do with
revolutionary theory, the subject’s implication in ideology
and the relation of radical democratic politics to class
struggle. These writers have excoriated both liberal leftists
and postmodernists for their lack of inventiveness concerning
the relevance of the historical past to contemporary action.
The notoriety of their ideas, somewhat in contrast to the direct
influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-anarchism on the
counter-globalization left, has yet to fully take root, at least, at
the level of practice. What I wish to provide in this essay are
some reflections on the relation of social class to cultural
production that could potentially bridge some of the aporias
that separate anarchist from communist tendencies. By
crossing Pierre Bourdieu’s work on culture and class
distinction with Peter Bürger’s historical model of the
development of the “institution art,” I hope to provide a
working model with which to think through the contradictory
situation in which today’s international petty bourgeois class
deliberates the possibility of enabling ever more authoritarian
forms of transnational capitalism.
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On many levels, the potential for critical discussion and
action today is seriously circumscribed by institutional
conservatism. In his four-volume theory of the state, Henri
Lefebvre argues that official humanism has accomplished
very little for human beings and much more in terms of the
consolidation of the state. From this, humanism passes to
individualism, sustained by libertarian ideals but nevertheless
abandoned by the state in economic and political terms. Only
bourgeois anarchism affirms individualism in its reductive
dimensions, where it cannot even be named as such and
instead passes over into struggles for identity – without, it
should be added, altering the mode of statist production and
emerging as petty bourgeois initiatives.2 Here the role of elite
intellectuals is circumscribed by their connection to the
middles classes and the relation of this class to the state. The
key characteristic the bourgeois elite is that it believes itself
cosmopolitan, open to strangers and foreignness and to
innovation. From this group leftist intellectuals have difficulty
distinguishing themselves and consequently come to believe
in their marginality. Focused on culture, they offer new
models of consumption as a form of revolution. Investments
of affect and romantic individualism, Lefebvre writes,
flounder against the harsh reality of global markets and
capital investment.3 Whereas the left’s intellectual
contribution to thinking through the limits of neoliberal
economics, both socially and politically, gained respectability
in the wake of the economic bank bailouts of 2008, the
ideological reaction was equally noticeable. Meanwhile,
cadres in the culture and knowledge industries might agree
with the critiques of global capitalism but they consider
radical solutions to be too idealistic. They are more likely to
talk about a left imaginary than a left party. In the artworld,
the crises of capitalism are to be overcome with theoretical
113
deconstructions of modernist legacies that do more to indicate
the decline of symbolic efficiency than the will to engage in
radical change.
None of this comes as a surprise when we consider the
prohibition on class politics that has structured so much social
thinking in the decades since Reagan, Thatcher and
Mulroney. However, because neoliberalism has remained the
privileged formula for both state policy as well as
international forms of governance, class polarization – a
process of actual polarization between the rich and the poor
combined with an entrenched “middle” class phenomenon of
petty bourgeois identification with the liberal ideology of
classlessness – has taken place on an increasingly global
scale. This transformation has occurred primarily in relation
to the growth of a distinctly international petty bourgeois
class formation. Its optimism concerning the public virtues of
democracy masks the latter’s basis in market capitalism and
altogether ignores the imperialist relations on which industrial
and post-industrial capitalism have been built.
What are the political characteristics of this tertiary “middle”
class and what can an “orthodox” class analysis contribute to
thinking through the perils of anti-capitalism in a world
commandeered by forms of neoliberal governance? If we
could adequately address this question, I argue, we could
better understand the relentless capitalization of culture
through the mediating role of political, cultural and
educational institutions. What do the current institutional
forms of cultural production reveal about the ideological
function of class? What kinds of cultural criticism are
appropriate to a renewed engagement in social and political
contestation that takes class analysis into consideration?
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Autonomy, Institution, State
Among the key Marxist concepts that allow for an
appreciation of the ideological function of culture is the
concept of autonomy, understood superstructurally as the
relative autonomy of art from its economic conditions of
production. Modern art, a product of the division of labour, is
structured unevenly in relation to class distribution.
Understood in terms of ideological relations, autonomous art
is a relatively independent aspect of the social space. While
some seek to find here a space of utopian possibility and
projection, they typically ignore what Lefebvre referred to as
the state mode of production, a reality of modern technocratic
production that since Stalinism has effectively overcome the
cultural and nationalist trappings of the state form. No wonder
then that so much writing has currently focused on the place
of culture in economic growth, from concerns with the
precarious working conditions of artists to the culture
industries boosterism of urban governments and the cost
accounting of federal agencies. Notwithstanding the lingering
confusions about the sublation of art and life that finds
perhaps better solutions in cultural studies work on
representation, it is this new discourse of the neoliberal
engineering of culture that has led many on the left to do
away with autonomy. However, no amount of theorization
will alter the fact that art, as a form of capital, acts in concert
with the concrete universal that structures the chain of
signifiers in the hegemonic production of social relations.
In his landmark text on the sociology of culture, Pierre
Bourdieu described modernist aesthetic autonomy as a
function of the reproduction of class society.4 Cultural
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practice, he argued, and in order to reproduce itself, avoids
the objectification of culture through the very transgression of
the conventions of cultural production. Because artistic
transgression further distances the cultivated dispositions of
the dominant classes from the ethical dispositions of the
dominated, cultural transgression works to reproduce class
inequality. The contradictory aim of transgression, Bourdieu
argued, is “contained within the limits assigned to it a
contrario by the aesthetic conventions it denounces and the
need to secure the aesthetic nature of the transgression of the
limits.”5 The “historical” avant gardes attempted to counter
this process through a politically motivated suspension of
aesthetic priorities, a strategy of sublation that is sometimes
mistaken as “political art.”6 Bourdieu’s sociological and
anthropological approach toward the sense of taste and
questions of cultural disposition is one of the means whereby
critical theory has followed a path that is distinct from the
modernist emphasis on a priori assumptions concerning
cultural authority. In contrast to Adorno, for whom the
inexorable precariousness of culture was to be attributed to its
resistance to the exchange values of liberal capitalism,
Bourdieu identified the eradication of the sacred boundary
that separates art from everyday life as a necessary stage in
the resistance to the logic of accumulation.
In the same decade, a second major criticism of the concept of
autonomy was put forward by Peter Bürger in his Theory of
the Avant Garde. Bürger defined the goal of avant-garde
aesthetics as a subordination of the specific formal
characteristics of the work of art to the general characteristics
of the work’s social and political content. In this sense, the
historical avant gardes were not so much anti-aesthetic as
dialectical in the proper Hegelian sense: art was to be
116
mediated according to its social conditions of production, a
notion that was best expressed by Walter Benjamin in his
essay on “The Author as Producer.”7 The institutionalization
of this critical or realist approach to autonomy by the
capitalist culture industries, Bürger argued, had led in the
postwar period to the separation of art from praxis and from
the radical confrontation with class society. According to
Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s introduction to the English translation
of Bürger’s book, it was Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s
notion of the consciousness industry that led beyond
Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic view of negative
dialectics – autonomy’s withdrawal and compensatory
function in a world of instrumentalized integration – towards
a recognition of proletarian experience as a “historically
concrete production of meaning.”8 While few have accepted
Bürger’s critique of the postwar neo-avant gardes, his theory
of the development of bourgeois culture has more or less
become a canonical text in the sociology of art.9
While postmodernism and cultural studies have made
significant claims for the heterogeneity of language games
and the diversity of modes of reception, Bourdieu and Bürger
have effectively demonstrated that the reception of art
coincides primarily with changes to its institutionalization.
Bürger’s thesis concerning the discursive institutionalization
of art/autonomy, however, might mask some significant
changes related to the eclipse of the theory and practice of
avant-gardism. Few commentators today would deny the fact
that cultural institutions are the object of constant criticism on
the part of its own constituencies. If anything, this vanguard
posture is enacted today through its “post-political” reversal:
complicity, compliance, identification and relationality as
critical strategies. This cool, affirmative set of strategies,
117
pressured by the logic of networking and careerism, is little
more than a survival strategy within conditions of neoliberal
governance.
It is in the 1960s and 70s, in the paradigm shift from the old
left to the new left that the critique of alienation and
reification was replaced by the critique of institutions, a
consequence of the view that class struggle had been
abolished, or neutralized, by parliamentary democracy and
the welfare state, on the hand, and by bureaucratic socialism
on the other. According to Gerald Raunig, the student
rebellions of the late 60s were considered irresponsible by
traditional leftist organizations because they disabled
institutions: “They refused to channel their rage into the
available political parties or labor unions and instead used
Situationist and other artistic-cum-political methods to call
for a thoroughly political objective: L’imagination au
pouvoir.“10 While the new left, informed by post-colonial
struggles and the American civil rights movement, challenged
sexism, militarism, imperialism, environmental degradation
and commercialism, it tended to conflate class struggle with
the struggle to create alternative institutions.11 Today, as a
consequence, a hegemonic view of classless society has come
to operate as the groundless ground of democratic struggles
for social justice. Class struggle has disappeared, however,
only to the extent that wealth creation in industrial societies
has led to the disappearance of boundaries between classes
and the rise of a tertiary “middle” or petty bourgeois class that
is neither bourgeois nor proletarian. Despite its position as a
working class, the petty bourgeois class of managers and
service workers has witnessed a class polarization that plays a
determining structural role vis-à-vis class praxis. As Nicos
Poulantzas long ago argued, the petty bourgeois social
118
formation reproduces itself through polarization. In the
postwar period, its distinct class practice has been to abandon
class struggle in favour of identity struggles and the struggle
against institutions.12
While the critique of institutions has allowed numerous forms
of oppression to become the object of analysis and research, it
also contributes to class inequality. What is missing from
many of the new models of politicized cultural practice is a
distinction between the kind of criticism that accepts the
concept of social formation as an expression of the mode of
production, and a Marxist sociology that explains social
formation as the mode of reproduction of the modes of
production. Institutions are key in this regard as they create a
space of mediation that allows for the separation of modes of
production from social relations. The prodominant ideological
tendency is thus towards forms of “liberal communism” and
the urge to create “alternative” institutions as complements to
the new imperative towards networked sociality.13
Non-alienated models of subjectivization are consequently
proposed as ways of coping with and resisting today’s
“societies of control.”
The search for a post-avant-garde aesthetic in contemporary
art can be largely attributed to the dismantling of a
nineteenth-century notion of the historical subject, including
that of the proletariat as the historical class that is best able to
overcome the contradictions of capitalist class relations. The
main trends in contemporary culture remain thoroughly
aesthetic, however, and because of this, the polarization of
class factions as a feature of the dominant mode of capitalist
production goes unrecognized. What Siegfried Kracauer once
termed “the salaried masses” and what C. Wright Mills later
119
referred to as the “white collar” world of the new middle class
defines the situation of the majority of people in the West
today who are in the position of traditional labour inasmuch
as they do not control the means of production. However,
because of their class situation, education and lifestyle
ambitions, they identify with capital.14 Class polarization,
rather than cultural difference, is the open secret, the obscene
supplement of contemporary post-politics and its cultural
manifestations. Contemporary aesthetic practices are thus not
moves away from the emphasis on economic determination,
but function more precisely as adjuncts to an impossible
non-relational, and indeed, despotic class politics inasmuch as
they make no claims to universality and abandon hegemonic
struggle. The proper orientation for critical practice is not to
find in the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere a free space for
the figuring of utopian social possibilities, but to recognize in
aesthetic autonomy an already compromised class practice, a
self-relating that takes its own denial into account and that is
constructed around its own constitutive void.15 Cultural
formations do not exist in themselves but through various
rule-bound and antagonistic social structures that question the
self-evidence of modes of production and normalization. If
contemporary critical art practices pretend to dispense with
autonomy, they do so in the same way that the rationalized
capitalist economy dispenses with the language of class: in
both cases, social classes are presumed to precede the
structures and institutions through which they are reproduced.
What is truly tragic for us today is not the loss of autonomy
per se, but the sense of what this autonomy was and the kinds
of resistance it might still provide.
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Il n’y a pas de relation idéologique
One of the most succinct expressions of the links between
globalization and social reproduction through culture has
been Bill Readings’ book, The University in Ruins.16
Readings argues that in a world of transnational globalization,
the language of economic management replaces that of
cultural and class conflict. He cites Giorgio Agamben, whose
book, The Coming Community, proposes that a new planetary
petty bourgeoisie has replaced social classes and has “freed
itself from the Fascist positioning of the [prewar] petty
bourgeoisie.”17 According to Agamben,
The planetary petty bourgeoisie has instead freed itself from
these dreams [of false popular identity] and has taken over the
aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social
identity... They know only the improper and the inauthentic
and even refuse the idea of a discourse that could be proper to
them. That which constituted the truth and falsity of the
peoples and generations that have followed one another on
the earth – differences of language, of dialect, of ways of life,
of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities
of each person – has lost any meaning for them and any
capacity for expression and communication. In the petty
bourgeoisie, the diversities that have marked the tragi-comedy
of universal history are brought together and exposed in a
phantasmagorical vacuousness.18
According to Readings, this global petty bourgeoisie refuses a
specifically political dimension in favour of a purely
economic and post-historical logic of administration.19 In this
121
sense, the liberal belief that North America represents a
classless society has paved the way for the economic
dominance of a global class that refuses all recognizable or
fixed forms of social identity. This class considers both
traditional bourgeois and socialist society to have nothing to
do with its technical expertise and vision of the good life.20
For the global petty bourgeoisie, one could say, there is no
ideological relation.
The paradoxical class position of the petty bourgeoisie is that
it is neither working class nor middle class but both. Its social
effect is, on the one hand, class polarization, and on the other,
a certain invisibility inasmuch as it privileges the thesis of
class-lessness. Technocratic powers have learned to exploit
this contradiction to great effect and could do so because
neoliberalism seems to them not only the engine of trade and
deregulation, as the most advanced form of “turbo”
capitalism, but also as a protective reaction to the vagaries of
uncontrolled markets – noticed in particular in the creation of
international trade blocks, in religious fundamentalisms and
xenophobic nationalisms.21 In ways that Agamben could not
have foreseen in the early 1990s, the militarization of the state
in the capitalist democracies has been deepened through the
biocapitalist manipulation of fear and delegitimation
measures that have been normalized through the reactionary
transformation of social institutions.22
These contradictions are visible, however, in both the
recuperation and disciplining of cultural criticism. One
example of the latter is the 2007 arrest, interrogation and
detainment of sociology professor Andrej Holm by the
German federal police. Holm was detained because his
publications contained words like inequality, precarization
122
and gentrification, words that were construed by authorities as
the kind of language used by militant terrorist
organizations.23 Softer forms of censorship can take place
through economic sanctions. For example, among the $45
million in cuts to arts funding announced by the Conservative
Party of Canada in August 2008, Prime Minister Stephen
Harper singled out small grants that had gone to “radicals,”
“left-wing and anti-globalization think tanks,” “ideological
activists or fringe and alternative groups” and “highly
ideological individuals exposing their agendas.”24 If the civil
liberties
of
artists
and
intellectuals
producing
politically-motivated work can be so easily revoked through
repressive state action, it is partly because political power is
distributed anonymously across all social institutions.25 One
should be careful not to overstate the control exerted by
disciplinary state apparatuses, however, since the purpose of
neoliberal governmentality is largely to produce
self-interested subjects who can act autonomously within
market relations of inequality.
According to Readings, the standards of excellence and
evaluation criteria that now operate in universities, museums,
the publishing industry and similar culture industry sectors,
are subject to a constant evaluation vis-à-vis performance
indicators, opinion polls, cost-benefit analysis, economic
development statistics and marketing objectives. The
integrative functionalization of culture requires that artists
and institutions be allowed to experiment so that they can be
better controlled by the power of bureaucracies and so that
research can be synergistically tied to economic development.
Following Readings’ analysis, contemporary cultural
production can benefit from a re-contextualization of
123
Bourdieu’s theory of the “cultural goodwill” of the lower
middle class as a key political sector of the social space. The
general mode of production and consumption, or class
habitus, that Bourdieu defined as the petty bourgeois mode
was that of allodoxia: an empty form of goodwill and
reverence towards high culture that is based in mistaken
identifications combined with anxiety about one’s social
status.26 While allodoxia owes its sense of distinction to the
mode of consumption that is proper to legitimate culture, it
confuses aesthetic disinterestedness with popular culture and
prefers accessible versions of avant-garde experimentation.
Here, as with avant-garde intervention, the political content of
the artwork functions at the social level above that of its
formal specificity, but the content is the impossible one of an
unspecified form of the political.
The petty bourgeois mode of production and consumption
attempts to operate as a disengaged and neutral index of the
power of institutions to impose cultural capital.27 By adapting
Bürger’s model of the sociological development of aesthetic
autonomy to Bourdieu’s study of the social space of positions,
I would like to propose the formation of a new field of
relations. Such a re-mapping of the universe of possibles
allows us to perceive some of the ways in which the
imposition of news forms of cultural legitimacy, including
progressive models of practice, avoids what Bourdieu
described as a discernment of reality in terms of class
composition. Furthermore, the ascendancy of a global petty
bourgeois mode of cultural production helps to explain the
current status of radicalism and its submerged conditions of
efficacy.
124
Within a petty bourgeois framework, the kind of avant-garde
arrogance and insolence that is derived from the “heroic”
certainty of possessing culture through serious engagement is
replaced by the permanent anxiety of those who pretentiously
overidentify with culture.28 They are, we could say,
“possessed” by culture in the same way that bourgeois
ideology is “possessed” by class. According to Bourdieu, the
pretense of identification is objectively based in the petty
bourgeois desire to escape from proletarianization and to
subsume culture under the sign of class mobility. Because of
this race against the order of time, a process that installs class
identification in terms of surplus enjoyment, and because the
order of time is marked by the growing gap between the
working poor and the wealth of a small number of individuals
and mega corporations, the petty bourgeois mode of
appropriating culture dominates the so-called creative
industries.29
125
Among the modalities of petty bourgeois allodoxia, Bourdieu
proposed the following processes: structural indeterminacy
visà-vis the social field; countercultural resentment that
verges on nihilism; a taste for the new and a willingness to
submit to lifestyle changes (especially among the rising,
executant petty bourgeoisie); the creation and selling of new
products; new occupations that allow symbolic rehabilitation
strategies; occupations that emphasize symbolic production,
especially in the areas of communications and new media; the
euphemization of seriousness; the fun ethic; relaxation
strategies and conviviality; affectation in simplicity; flair
combined with bluff; sympathy with discourses that challenge
the cultural order; the denunciation of hierarchy; an emphasis
on personal health and psychological therapy; an imperative
126
of sexual relation; the offering of one’s art of living as an
example to others; pragmatic utopianism; a measure of
psychic distance from the direct impact of market forces. All
of these liberated manners and lifestyle choices, Bourdieu
argued, betray an effort to defy the gravity of the social
field.30 The challenge to authority is a particularly telling
feature of class structure and is one that figures prominently
in relation to the charismatic conception of the artist, a fact
that facilitated challenges to bourgeois power as a general
condition for the constitution of the field of aesthetic
autonomy. Authority boundaries, however, are the most
permeable of class boundaries, in comparison with the more
static boundaries of skill, knowledge, and property.31
One of the features of neoliberalism has been the weakening
of the value of skill and knowledge, and with this the
corresponding mechanisms of professionalism, in favour of
property relations. This was an overt feature of the
“neoconservative” years of Thatcher and the downsizing
mentality that witnessed the wholesale restructuring of
institutions and corporations. In this, petty bourgeois
allodoxia plays a crucial role, setting cultural criteria of affect
and connectivity above all considerations of necessity. As
Thomas Frank argues in his book The Conquest of Cool,
capitalist values become part and parcel of what appears to be
their opposite: counter-cultural resistance to what is construed
in idealist terms as traditional and outdated forms of authority
and morality. This slight of hand allows for the perpetuation
of relations of misrecognition or what Žižek refers as the
decline in symbolic efficiency. Notice that today’s cultural
and educational institutions cavalierly address their
constituencies as consumers, as though the real relation
inheres in the unquestioned value of culture and knowledge
127
itself, often tacitly held to be homologous to the field of
boureois power. However, the field of power is not static, a
fact that becomes more visible in times of crisis and
discordance. As Mina Möntmann has argued, the “twilight of
the welfare state” has resulted in the eclipse of the
bourgeoisie as the legitimate peer group for cultural
institutions.32 Because middle-class liberalism by and large
continues to function as the stated and unstated ideology of
capitalist institutions, the actual sociological entrenchment of
the petty bourgeois habitus remains largely invisible.33 As
Poulantzas recognized, the ideological and political
articulation of the social position of the new petty bourgeoisie
is very narrowly defined by the high level of competition and
hierarchy in creative fields.34 While the economic profile of
the cultural worker may effectively be middle class, their
relationship to culture is, sociologically speaking, petty
bourgeois. According to Möntmann, the ideal trait of the
flexible person within the new capitalism is the ability to look
for the new, to detach oneself from all ties and to abandon
habitual behaviour.35 One of the structuring problems here is
the fact that the erosion of the welfare state in the so-called
“developed” countries is due to the declining base of
full-time, industrial or “Fordist” workers, a result of
neoliberal globalization and a basis to the proliferation of
nonproductive creative, cognitive and immaterial labour.36
This tendency, when thought of in terms that ignore class
analysis, the intermediary role of the state and the labour
theory of value, contributes to the proliferation of petty
bourgeois polarization.
This perception is not entirely new. In the late 1970s,
Bourdieu demonstrated how the new petty bourgeois habitus
was in the process of supplying the economy with the perfect
128
consumer.37 His conclusions were supported by the
postmodern withdrawal from the meta-discourse of class
struggle. By the mid-1980s, Hal Foster could refer to the
administrative mediation of legitimate forms of art as
“arrière-avant-gardism,” a fashionable, cyclical mechanism
obsessed with marginal forms of art as well as the popular
past.38 Against critical complicity as well as the allegorical
concept of redemptive criticism (the return of the old), Foster
proposed that the “liberation” from history that was
celebrated as postmodern pluralism was irredeemably tied to
late capitalism. Almost twenty years later, Foster’s position is
largely the same: “This ‘end of art’ is presented as benignly
liberal – art is pluralistic, its practice pragmatic, and its field
is multicultural – but this position is also not so benignly
neoliberal, in the sense that its relativism is what the rule of
the market requires.”39 Caught between the promise of a
cosmopolitan identity and the pressures of an increasingly
administered social context, most postmodernists simply
abandoned the language of class analysis as well as its
cultural counterpart, critical autonomy.40 What is the avant
garde to do?
From Politics to Fantasy
Rainer Rochlitz has argued that the avant-garde emphasis on
political consciousness in twentieth-century art may have
been part of an effort to maintain criteria of quality in the
absence of a transformation to a singularly aesthetic logic.41
My argument is that such a transformation of the bourgeois
criteria of aesthetic autonomy has not taken place and that
petty bourgeois allodoxia plays an uneven and contradictory
role. Because of class polarization, however, the major shifts
129
to cultural production that have marked the late twentieth
century often go unrecognized. In the developed countries of
the West, the liberal concept of aesthetics has not entirely
been displaced. Instead, the cultural features of polarization
have gained in symptomatic ascendancy. Inasmuch as the
field of culture continues to exploit the reserves of
“legitimate” culture, new subjectivities are compelled to
engage in the schizoid performativity of individual
competition, sometimes translated into activist engagement,
subsuming interestedness to the contradictions of bourgeois
culture, including academia’s rarefied post-humanist
discourses. As a matter of theory, however, we should not
think of aesthetics in positive terms. There is no properly
bourgeois, petty bourgeois or proletarian aesthetic; there are
only works, gestures and images that substitute for a
fundamental social antagonism.
In the context of neoliberalism, the reduction of the cultural
sphere to a positive signifying economy functions as an
attempt to politically and economically manage class
differences. Radical practice, instead, strives to create culture
that is unconstrained by a privileged social mediation. Thus,
whatever operates today as an avant garde, we could say,
functions as the supernumerary of aesthetic autonomy; its
activity corresponds to the failure of culture to produce social
coherence. The goal of avant-garde practitioners is to find a
way to enable critical dissatisfaction and to subvert
established forms of (dis)identification through a radical
subjectivation of politics. In terms of criticism, this implies
the diversification of art’s audience through the practice of
being, as Baudelaire once declared, partial, passionate, and
political.
130
From the outset, what the analysis of class composition
suggests for cultural praxis is something along the lines of
what Žižek refers to as revolution, the dialectical action of
participating and not participating with those institutional
arrangements that we cannot do without. This
sinthomeopathic activity is set against three decades or more
of complicit reconciliation with consumer capitalism that has
by and large ignored the practical reality and consequences of
capital accumulation on a global scale. Lacan’s concept of the
sinthome is defined as a stage beyond the fundamental
fantasy (ideological misrecognition), and which allows for a
nonpathological (political) subjectivization (organization) of
the symptom (cultural practice). In his Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan presented the dilemma of
justified paranoia. In our case, this would mean that to oppose
the symbolic order of institutionalized art practice is to risk
exclusion; to negotiate with it is to allow one’s actions to be
determined by it.42 Since artistic freedom can no longer be
thought of in terms of sacrificing oneself to the competitive
struggle of aesthetic transgression, one must construct what
after Lacan we could call sinthomeopathic solutions: lending
oneself to institutional arrangements, the symptoms of
contemporary cultural production, while still maintaining the
fantasy of critical distance.
131
Chapter 6
132
The Subject Supposed to
Over-Identify: BAVO and
the Fundamental Fantasy of
a Cultural Avant Garde
What are the critical issues that inform today’s radical
anti-capitalist contestation if not those that have caused the
most confusion in relation to Marx and Engels’ unfinished
theory of the socialist transition to communism: the historical
role of capitalism in the revolutionization of the forces of
production, the democratic potential of state institutions, the
role of universal suffrage and education in the coming to
consciousness of the working masses, and the appearance of
the proletariat as an immanent contradiction of the system
that could eventually seize state power. The forces of
capitalist accumulation lead inevitably, as Rosa Luxemburg
explained, to imperialism and expansionism, turning
capitalism into a veritable world system. According to the
French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Luxemburg partly
resolved the problem of accumulation by focusing on
economic questions, a passage in revolutionary theory that
allows us to see that the emphasis on the economic does not
solve the problems of capital, but functions as a surrogate for
politics.1
Far removed from these questions, today’s progressive art
movements typically avoid issues that are believed to be
133
outdated. A series of taboos crowd the political imaginary:
class analysis, dialectics, teleology, the avant garde, the state
and the political party organization. Such prohibitions clear
the way for neoliberal politics, which justifies itself according
to economic growth. Marxism, which upholds class struggle
as the answer to the abstract principle of equality, does not
justify itself according to economic growth. Marxist theory
thus conceives the state as a bureaucratized system that
upholds inequality through the reproduction of existing social
relations and modes of production. The problem of the
modern state, as Lefebvre argued, is represented by the shift
in the twentieth century from questions of social progress to
that of econmic growth. The most we can say about Marx is
that he never proposed an outline of the ideal state. Against
pure politics, Marxism-Leninism responded to this absence
through the development of the revolutionary party, thereby
breaking with any notion of evolutionary historicism – an
important lesson to all of those who continue to interpret
modernism in terms of a soi-disant linear teleology. Slavoj
Žižek, following a Freudian line of analysis, suggests that the
party should not be encountered as a detested symbol to be
destroyed, but as a fetish, a feature of the necessary
self-alienation of the people from itself. The fetishism of the
market, in contrast, covers the contradictions of rationality –
which we could view as the state of international law and
trade agreements – and nationality, a metaphysical postulate
that allows for the mystification of social processes on a
global scale. Consider for example the current economic
crisis in Greece in which the state, the EU and the IMF are
unable to offer any solutions to intractable broblems other
than the extortion of the working class. It is not surprising
then that most conceptualizations of radical practice today
vary according to postulates concerning the state, from
134
workerist schizo-anarchism to civil society movements, social
democracy and communism.
In the context of a renewed anti-capitalist militancy, we can
begin to reconceive the role of radical cultural practice and
with this make some proposals for a contemporary project of
avant-garde contestation.2 One of the rare voices in this arena
is the Brussles and Rotterdam-based collective BAVO.
BAVO’s members, Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels, have
produced a significant body of essays and publications
dedicated to the radical cultural criticism of neoliberal
politics. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s
psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and
social practice, BAVO has presented an incisive critique of
the ways that contemporary cultural practices work to
depoliticize the social space by maintaining the privileges of
art. The concept of over-identification that they have
developed in recent writings draws on the widely discredited
concept of totality as a path to understanding how it is that the
production of surplus value is the necessary condition for
efforts on the part of engaged cultural actors to bring about
radical social change. The goal of over-identification, as a
form of class struggle, serves to render visible the ideological
supports of social relations.
Following Žižek’s analysis of the cultural strategies that have
been used by Neue Slowenische Kunst and the musical group
Laibach, BAVO has refined and described practices of social
subversion through over-identification as a specific mode of
cultural contestation. Over-identification can be conceived as
a dialectical mediation of political and cultural practice; it is
neither singularly aesthetic nor singularly political. The
ultimate failure of the effectiveness of any particular work of
135
over-identification – say the work of the Yes Men, Janez
Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, NSK, Andrea Fraser,
Thomas Hirschhorn, Christoph Schlingensief, Komar &
Melamid, Jakob Boeskov, or the television show The Colbert
Report – is not equivalent to the failure of a political option.
Practice need not lead to immediately recognizable changes to
have been effective. Unlike some forms of socially
ameliorative art activism, the function of over-identification is
not based on the postulate of direct action. It is rather a
subversion of the predominant symbolic order, an
undermining of the symbolic authority of existing social
structures and institutional arrangements. To be clear, in order
to be considered avant-garde, a work of over-identification
must nevertheless presuppose certain regulatory schema
concerning the opposition to dominat relations. In this, it is
different in conception from micro-political practices that
presuppose an endless constellation of “uncoded” and
pre-subjective positions, as argued by Gilles Deleuze.3
Against the “communicational stupidities” of Deleuze’s
“machinic assemblages,” we uphold the Lacanian view
according to which it is possible to break eggs, but it is not
possible to make an homelette; one is born a pre-symbolic
being, but one does not remain one for an entire lifetime. This
emphasis on split subjectivity allows for the minimum of
distance necessary to break with the ideological seamlessnes
of the capitalist social formation, as well as the moral
economy of petty-bourgeois counter-cultural reformism.
136
A fundamental presupposition of over-identification as an
avant-garde tendency is the view that the artistic transgression
of conventional cultural codes works to reproduce social
137
relations rather than change them. In this sense, BAVO’s
rejection of the superego injunction to obey social codes
resembles the position that Peter Bürger ascribed to the
historical avant gardes. The main difference between Bürger’s
theory and the Žižekian paradigm, however, is the loosening
of the laws of historical materialism in terms of the Lacanian
paradox of surplus enjoyment, the problem that the desire of
avant-garde contestation confronts dissidents as an external
demand, mediated by various institutional determinations,
including contemporary political injunctions to abandon class
struggle in favour of a politics of equivalence or a
post-operaist multitude where all of producing labour is by
and large equated with the workings of capitalism. In contrast
to Bürger’s pessimistic view of the position of the postwar
neo-avant gardes, Žižek’s reading of the revolutionary
situation emphasizes the radical contingency of practice and
of the historical present.4
Žižek’s Lacanian understanding of Law, language and norms
helps us to understand the crucial difference between the kind
of radical practice that BAVO advocates and the proliferation
of socially engaged cultural practices that we find in the
forms of connective, dialogical, and relational aesthetics, or in
Deleuzian forms of transversal activism.5 One of the primary
distinctions, we might say, is Žižek’s view that Law is
constitutively split between the official public letter and its
obscene superego supplement. Žižek’s work advocates a shift
from the obscene supplement – that which binds social
formations by repressing social antagonism – to that of
universal norms – which alone recognize exception (the
identity of opposites) as the basis for the emergence of a
universal form of politicization. Following Žižek’s work,
BAVO proposes an over-identification with the unstated,
138
obscene demands of capitalist universality as a means of
marking the specific ways that liberal democracy organizes
the link between the public law (affirmations of the formal
space of culture) and its perverse underside (class struggle).
In contrast to the Foucauldian view that law produces its
self-sustaining forms of transgression, the Lacanian split law
points to the possibility of social disjuncture, revealing the
autonomy of law as a traumatic disturbance.
Through an analysis of Lacan’s “four discourses” as well as
his concept of the sinthome, it is possible to elaborate
BAVO’s theory of over-identification as a contemporary
avant-garde strategy. In putting forward a theory of
avant-garde over-identification, BAVO proposes that we exit
the loop of the capitalist demand for activist artworks and
enter the space of exception: the objective positing of class
struggle as the basis for an ethical critique of consumer
capitalism and its management of identity-based conflicts.
The psychoanalytic concept of the sinthome is crucial here as
the supplement that provides practice with a synthetic sense
of consistency and that is able to link subjectivity to a
collective socio-historical project. Rather than deny the desire
of the Other in the form of the integrative force of the culture
industries, we instead take into account drive as an
endosomatic internal force, the measure of demand made
upon the mind for work and its always inhibited, partial
satisfaction.
Culture as Symptom
According to Žižek, “desire thrives in the gaps of a demand –
in what is in a demand more than a demand.”6 The Lacanian
139
insight into the desire of the big Other as superego demand,
the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic
order, offers a path to a radical political understanding of
national-to-transnational cultural politics. Explicit in Žižek’s
reading of Lacan is the idea than any authentic act that seeks
to bring about social change involves, at the subjective level,
a shift from desire to drive that subjectively assumes
responsibility for a world that does not rely on another’s
supposed difference from oneself. To give an example, one
does not expect foreigners and immigrants to share the same
values and social habits as oneself just because they wish to
occupy the same territorial region. To do so is to hold the
foreigner to a false presupposition of sameness. Whatever
social laws all members of society are expected to conform to
must be the outcome of explicit rules that reflect all members’
aspirations to equality. The level of subjectivity is the level at
which these terms of difference are overdetermined. Desire,
Žižek argues, is always sustained by some pathological
object-cause of desire, by some obscene demand to enjoy that
is productive of subjectivity, but that is denied at the level of
the unconscious as an impossible contingency. As he argues
in The Puppet and the Dwarf, the form of surplus value that
structures social relations is today the dominant form of
enjoyment.7
Here we encounter the enigma at the heart of contemporary
cultural practice. Inasmuch as jouissance, in the form of
surplus value, confronts the creative subject with the
traumatic core of their being, it becomes impossible for him
to separate the network of signifiers that structure his social
existence from the fantasmatic enjoyment of its operations.
Whereas the free construction of culture requires that we be
non-believers, that we assume our own enjoyment of activity
140
without further mediation, the capitalist relations of
production reinscribe the subject into his or her own image in
the guise of a consumer. The paradox of the artist’s relation to
what he produces is the commodity (or, to extend the
analysis, the cultural service as product), the supplement to
the subject’s relation to reality. The commodity is the means
by which I, the artist, am included in my own production; it is
that which bears witness to my social existence, the Thing
whose “metaphysical subtlety” lies precisely in my social
interactions with others but which nevertheless leads me to
believe in its magical powers. The key point here is that the
subject is not the absolute correlate of the commodity. In the
context of the depoliticization of cultural production, the first
task of the artist is to debunk the symbolic innocence of the
globalized culture industry and to reassert the state of
alienation. Such a sinthomeopathic act of social antagonism
works to reveal the deep solidarity that links the bureaucratic
class of arts managers with the creative class and its
“underground” reserve army of surplus labour.
Against the tendency of today’s art activists and networked
relational artists to realize the means of their exploitation by
buying back what they produce in a free play of exploitation
and resistance, we should attempt to conceive, as Fredric
Jameson did in his essay on postmodernism, the dominant
cultural logic against which genuine difference can be
assessed, and to project, as he wrote, “some conception of a
new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to
reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any
radical cultural politics today.”8 Rather than naturalize the
concept of ideology in terms of social constructionism, we
should think of ideology in terms of exception, which, in our
age of the progressive disintegration of any unambiguous
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moral order represents the fantasmatic construction of
ideological jouissance through critique, tending toward and
necessitating anti-capitalist political organization.
The Pervert’s Guide to Avant Garde
While we might wish, along with those who continue to
proclaim the disappearance of the distinction between art and
life, that the post-politics of actually existing capitalism will
eventually undermine its own exploitative workings, the
situation as we find it today increasingly recognizes the
function of artistic practice as an exception, “an element
which, although part of the system, does not have a proper
place within it” and cannot be accounted for on the system’s
terms.9 What happens, as Žižek asks, when the system no
longer excludes this “part with no part,” but directly posits it
as a driving force? The most immediate answer is the
persistence of wage labour, maintained at poverty levels
through unemployment, privatization, enormous wealth
differentials and social competition. Perhaps the ultimate aim
of art activism should not be to ask what happens when the
state comes to realize its murderous function on a global
scale, but rather, what happens when democracy itself is
shown to be responsible for these conditions. Fantasy of
course is what affords the subject a modicum of distance from
the obscene reality and the demand for forms of social
cooperation and integration on which the ruling order
depends.
Gregory Sholette has posed the problem of cultural labour in
terms of the proletarianization of artists and the production of
what he calls “dark matter.” In the context of the deregulation
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of markets and the encouragement of “creative,” flexible
work, the productivity of today’s engaged artists leads to a
détente between artists and neoliberalism. The conditions of
competition, however, depend to a great extent on successful
artists sharing the same fate as the surplus army of “failed”
artists, reproducing the next generation of artists for the
market.10 Adam Arvidsson suggests that the class of urban
professionals who work in various sectors of cognitive and
cultural production depends for its existence on the
appropriation of the work of a relatively autonomous but
unsalaried creative proletariat.11 This “underground” of artists
who contribute to arts, design, fashion and music scenes
cooperate, he says, in the value added productivity of the
creative industries. Underground entrepreneurs typically
measure success by negotiating with the business world but
without “selling out,” preserving one’s goodwill toward
biopolitical circulation and communication and mobilizing
one’s name and reputation through altruistic provisions of
parties, free beer, electronic files and contacts. The autonomy
of underground producers, he says, is nevertheless challenged
by the precarious economic situation they live in and the
privatization of culture. This contradictory situation, where
artistic work is praised as a source of value in the new
economy and simultaneously subject to redundancy and
pauperization, requires the construction of new relations
between the specific economy of the sphere of culture and its
artistic model of transgression.12 The “symptomal torsion” in
this compromise situation is the link between
self-transformation, the delivery one’s self and one’s social,
cultural and political preferences in new cultural forms,
submitting oneself to domination, and the suspension of the
very artistic, creative or aesthetic priorities that are the
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specific demand of capitalist institutions, the motor of
capitalist self-revolutionizing.
Along these lines, Sholette suggests that dissident collectives
and informal cultural cells offer the best potential for using
artistic methods to project “an image of power well beyond
their actual size” and to “turn institutional power back on
itself.”13 What if, however, resistance through small-scale
autonomous cells and collectives turns out to be a perverse
fantasy, sustaining the notion that we are the instruments of
the system, merely projecting the subordinate predicament of
the left and its emancipatory struggle? Is this struggle, then,
fought within the realm of culture, not the fundamental
fantasy or mistaken presupposition of all artists, who, perhaps
better than most, know how to derive pleasure from pain?14 If
this were the case, the “biopolitical” aspect of capitalism
would render what we produce in all its uncanniness as
pathological part-objects, the place where control is
relinquished and is supplemented by its regulatory
presuppositions. The artist’s solitude becomes the cornerstone
of the tribe, the source of new ideas.
This solitary activity, however, should not be underestimated.
It should be supplemented with nonpathological
subjectivization, allowing for a shift from dis-identification
(ignoring the exploitative aspects of the capitalist
restructuring and transformation of the arts sector) to
over-identification (deciding for ourselves what are the
determinant political choices). Art in capitalist society arises
as a displacement of class struggle, covered over by non- and
anti-institutional practices that tend to refuse the thought of
the artwork as a commodity and cultural participation as
capitalist social relations.15 This disavowal of critical thought
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is combined with the perverted pleasure of resistance, which,
paradoxically, creates a self-sabotaging behaviour, a
minimum of freedom that is the object of institutional
regulation. The assertion of a conditional autonomy, of
autonomization, is the gesture of art, representing, since the
nineteenth century at least, the formal subsumption of cultural
production under capital. Autonomization is the elementary
form of symbolization that allows reality to be supplied with
meaning but whose ultimate function is the circulation of
commodities and the reproduction of relations of exploitation.
Reflecting on the contradictions of autonomization at this
moment after the “end of history,” after the supposed end of
alternatives to liberal capitalism, BAVO suggests that cultural
producers who remain ambivalent towards the legacy of the
avant gardes either accept that there are no alternatives to
liberal democracy, or, have a relaxed, fetishistic belief that
their progressive cultural work, especially at the level of the
representation of social differences, actually counters
neoliberal hegemony. In their essay on the “Spectre of the
Avant Garde,” BAVO rejects the Foucauldian view that
resistance is produced strictly by the system, for the system.16
They draw on the law of uneven development to demonstrate
that art is not a direct reflection of social struggle but that,
because art is a human product, and not a product of nature, it
betrays the belief we may have in the naturalness of existing
social relations and in the determining aspects of economics
and technocratic planning. They argue that, as part of
hegemonic social regulation, late capitalism commands artists
to compulsively engage in forms of cultural and social
resistance that then become obstacles to real subversion and
means to come to terms with commodification.17 Only by
endorsing a masochistic position inside the system, they
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argue, can artists represent the kind of critique that cannot be
assigned a proper place, and that, as avant-garde work, can
lead to cultural change. The official message to the avant
garde, they add, is “keep up the perversion, please!”18 What
is valorized in socially engaged art practice, however, is not
necessarily what is instituted. This is not due to bad faith on
the part of audiences, but to the fact that the art system as we
know it, and the way it links up with other aspects of social
life – cities, governments, highways, airports, television,
music, web sites, cafés – has become second nature and
autonomous. Inasmuch as artists are treated as avatars of
cultural transgression, as “subjects supposed to subvert,”
BAVO proposes that the project of the avant garde can be
renewed by becoming aware of this administration of
transgression (the failure to offer an alternative to dominant
forms of production) and by subverting the position of art in
the chain of signifiers.
BAVO recommends to today’s artists what we could
otherwise call a practice of dialectical negation, a renewal of
the realist mediation of naturalism and rationality. The first
thing artists should do is make artistic transgression
autonomous (internal) by emphasizing the link between
perverse subversion and the demands of the cultural market.
The next step is to ignore the mechanism of transgression and
try to affirm the official line by dirtying one’s hands and
doing what the left typically doesn’t do – even if, they say, it
becomes idiotic entertainment. Much radicalism, in this
instance, may at first pass for conservatism. Lastly, negate the
first stage, the awareness of art’s link in the chain of
equivalence, by abstaining from the demand to enjoy: remain
indifferent to the properly cultural demands of your work. In
this way, the demand of the capitalist market for avant-garde
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subversion encounters the emptiness of its rule, its
nothingness, and the link between subversion and demand is
momentarily undermined.19
BAVO’s strategy thus corresponds to Lacan’s view that the
discourse of psychoanalysis can contribute to social change
by revealing the fantasy structure that sustains identification
with a given set of master signifiers. The particular set that we
are concerned with here is the economy of culture and its
interpellation of the aspiring, activist wing of the so-called
creative class. The change that BAVO proposes takes into
consideration not only the function of jouissance in modes of
identification but also the specific laws and policies that
anchor jouissance in ideological terms. While radical
democrats dispute the historical necessity and the very
possibility of imposing new master signifiers, the “end of
history” ideology that BAVO is committed to dissolving
imposes the need to recognize that forms of ideology and
alienation, however these may come about, will be part of any
collective effort to alter the existing conditions that structure
the desire for social change. From the position of analyst, I
argue, BAVO asks artists to reconsider the ideal ego image of
themselves as socially disruptive and to consider the
coordinates of the ego ideal (the capitalist mode of
production), the obvious symbolic reality that either confirms
or undermines their fantasies. By working through the
fundamental fantasy that cultural activism will contribute to
meaningful social change, the activist becomes aware of their
means of jouissance.
In a more recent publication, titled Cultural Activism Today:
The Art of Over-Identification, BAVO elaborates its strategy
of over-identification in relation to cultural work designed to
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propose creative solutions to social problems.20 In an age in
which the idealism of art activism substitutes for radical
change at the level of state power and international law,
over-identification begins by rejecting “positive” symbolic
experiences and by directly conceding to capitalism’s
merciless reduction of the social world to economic markets
and humans to units of measure. To do otherwise is to play
the game of neoliberalism as a “free” subject. In this, BAVO
has produced one of the most trenchant critiques of the new
paradigm of the artist as community activist. Rather than
operate as supplements to the ruling order, BAVO calls on
artists to reproduce the contradictions and attack the idea of
the artist as the ideal troubleshooter through a positive
over-identification that, again, reveals the sadomasochistic
contract between Law and its obscene underside.
BAVO’s model of over-identification confronts the
fundamental fantasy of one’s own desire, the fetishistic
disavowal of reality in the belief that a happier life is possible.
The discourse of immaterial labour, of the creative activity
that drives a substantial sector of the economy and that also
relies on the surplus value of productive labour, retains its
symbolic effectiveness inasmuch as one sustains oneself in a
fantasy of resistance. Unlike micro-political practices that
resist forms of constituted power (the kind of power that is
believed to circulate through inherently corrupt institutional
links, media spectacles, vanguard forms of organization and
party leadership), over-identification operates through the
risky traversal of the Law, exposing the unwritten social
codes that double the official identifications of the Law as,
today, post-ideological and post-enlightenment enjoyme(a)nt.
What’s at stake, then, is what Žižek calls the paradox of truth,
the obedience to Law as a symbolic prohibition that accepts
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the excess of political identification as a consequence of the
path to social progress.21 The revolutionary act,
supplemented by cultural devices as the mediated form of
subjective destitution, seeks to overcome this mediation and
its logic of transgression, to lift the prohibition on the
prohibition against avant-gardism by articulating its objective
structures. More concretely, this implies according a place to
the party-state as a stage in the movement towards a form of
governance able to counter the destructive action that free
markets impose on working conditions and the public
interest.22 The lifting of bans on prohibitions should never be
made the responsibility of an individual, though heroic acts
are indeed possible and necessary. In broader terms, leftist
solidarity must make room for the political inconsistency of
practice in comparison with the lucidity of theory and
critique.
The question of over-identification, then, posed by BAVO as
a form of cultural activism, is appropriately defined as a
strategy of over-identification with the worst features of late
capitalism, in contrast with the idealistic styles of “NGO art”
and “embedded” cultural activisms that propose constructive
solutions – precisely what is demanded of the field of art as
adjunct to representative democracy.23 No wonder then that
so many artists, caught as they are in a relation of desire with
the system, release their aggressivity by devising socially
elaborated situations in which social differences are staged
symbolically and ideologized as part of a postmodern
discourse of pluralistic tolerance.24 The way in which
consciousness disguises itself in the form of a reflection of the
other was defined by Hegel as the doctrine of the Beautiful
Soul, a complacent sensibility and an attitude towards
communion and love that, according to Lefebvre, finds its end
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in morose delectation. In this regard, much contemporary
engaged art naively reproduces the common tropes of the
eighteenth-century picturesque. It is, nevertheless, important
to recognize the elements of this process – reason, the
mimetic faculty, the structure of subjectivity, the world
historical situation – and recover realist forms of alienation.
In the introduction and the first chapter of Cultural Activism
Today, “Always Choose the Worst Option: Artistic
Resistance and the Strategy of Over-Identification,” BAVO
defines today’s “blackmail of constructive critique” as the
symptom of the impossibility of real critique.25 The paradox
for artists concerned with change is the fact that today’s
politically correct tendency art, diplomatic cultural
consultancy designed to engage local actors in social
empowerment, in the affective production of sociability and
the recognition of difference, is viewed primarily from the
place of neoliberalism. Capital, as Žižek insists, is the
concrete universal of our historical epoch.26 If engaged art’s
circulation functions as little more than a means to reproduce
the economy of art, BAVO argues, it is because effective
social criticism is either not wanted or impossible within
existing conditions. Mainstream culture accommodates the
activist art sector as a palliative but only inasmuch as it does
not dramatically politicize the contexts in which it operates.
BAVO suggests that artists should work to expose the
demand to offer practical solutions to social problems as
symptomatic, as a “pragmatic blinding” to the deep
systematic aspects of exploitation. This demand should be
refused as a sign of the impotence or unwillingness of the
ruling order to do what it can and must do to impose
pragmatic solutions to systemic problems.
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BAVO proceeds by momentarily suspending Bourdieu’s
insight that the field of art functions as an inversion of the
capitalist economy. Bourdieu, for his part, sought to explain
the specific way that cultural capital functions in the
reproduction of class distinctions. In asking rhetorically why
art should be an exception to the rule, why cultural capital
should behave differently from other forms of capital, BAVO
suggests that art could instead act as nakedly self-interested.
While we might respond that the capitalization of art markets
makes this insight somewhat redundant, we should also
consider the specific historical situation and institutional
constraints in which BAVO calls on artists to “refuse the role
of the ‘last of the idealists’.”27 Over-identification is not a
strategy of critical complicity, the major conceit of
institutionalized actors, but a form of dissidence. Needless to
say, not all acts of over-identification per se are successful or
progressive. It is only to the extent that institutions do not
accept artists’ revolutionary enthusiasm, to the extent that
effective criticism is foreclosed, that BAVO calls upon artists
to sabotage art’s role of political resistance. In this way,
BAVO elaborates Bourdieu’s program of demystification by
attenuating art’s elective distance from necessity, by refusing
to act as the dominated activist sector of the dominant
transnational class.
Aspects of the art of over-identification can be noticed in the
guerrilla performances of the Yes Men, for example, one of
the groups mentioned in Cultural Activism Today, which also
discusses the work of Michael Moore, Christopher
Schlingensief, Neue Slowenische Kunst (along with Irwin and
Laibach) and Atelier van Lieshout. In their various
performances, the Yes Men (fronted by Andy Bichlbaum and
Mike Bonanno) stage interactions with audiences in which
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they ruthlessly apply neoliberal free market ideology more
scrupulously than neoliberals do, creating situations in which
it becomes difficult to make excuses for the dominant order
inasmuch as its repressed ideals are identified and taken
seriously. For instance, in May of 2002, and with the
assistance of various arts organizations, the Yes Men flew to
Sydney in order to make a presentation to the Certified
Practicing Accountants Association of Australia. In the guise
of WTO representative Kinnithrung Sprat, Bichlbaum
announced to the assembled audience that the WTO, having
understood how its globalization policies hurt people, would
change course by first shutting down its operations and
subsequently reorganizing in the form of a new Trade
Regulation Organization dedicated to corporate responsibility.
The performance included a presentation of shocking
statistics concerning the links between social inequality and
trade liberalization, an informational surplus designed to
relieve the assembled of the burden of having to believe in the
system, since, the statistics can believe for them. The
contradictory structure of belief was revealed to the extent
that the accountants greeted the announcement with approval,
recognizing the need for change and making further
suggestions on how to alleviate poverty. As the Yes Men ask
on their website,
Could it be that the violent and irrational consensus gripping
the world, what we call corporate globalization, is maintained
only through a sustained and strenuous effort of faith? Could
it be that almost everyone – even those, like accountants that
we are usually inclined to think of as conservative – would
immediately embrace a more humane consensus if one were
presented by those in positions of authority?28
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The simple Žižekian answer to this is question, which
obviously has not escaped the Yes Men, is yes.29 However, as
Marx emphasized in Capital, the conditions of exploitation
that inhere in capitalist relations of exchange cannot be
accounted for in terms of the moral failings of greedy
individuals.
The Yes Men’s End of the WTO action masks the criteria
according to which social practice can be considered the
object of a distinctly cultural consumption.30 It exposes the
impotence of the ruling order not by objecting to the hidden,
obscene side to the official letter of the Law, and by charging
capitalism with hypocrisy, but by directly identifying with
this obscene underside, as do today’s systems of cynical
power. The limitation of the Yes Men’s work is that it tends
to dwell in the ambiguities of parody. Consequently, what we
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have come to expect from the Yes Men is not a challenge to
our beliefs but the thrill of culture jamming which maintains
subjects within interpassive relations of belief. Criticism is
reduced to catching people with their guards down. Inasmuch
as this and similar forms of political activism is oriented
towards social justice, it is impossible to identify with its
interested, politico-aesthetic worldliness without also being
made to over-identify with the capitalist class relations
through which it is produced. One could therefore respond to
the Yes Men’s work with the Leninist criticism that what is
missing in their aesthetico-political project is the actuality of
a revolutionary organization that could lead the capitalist
democracies to a new world situation. Class struggle takes
place only to the extent that the ruling ideological coordinates
are effectively and materially challenged.
Towards a Radical
Cultural Dissidence
Program
of
As a structural factor in over-identificatory practices, we
should specify how struggle relates to one of the most
enduring aspects of aesthetic discourse: pleasure. How does
the creative subject sustain itself in the consistency of an
imaginary identification with the institutions of cultural
production and what does psychoanalysis offer to the practice
of political intervention? How does culture sustain the subject
in a condition of non-knowledge?
In an essay that we could relate to the paradox of creativity,
Žižek elaborates the subjectivism that can be associated with
aesthetic autonomy.31 If the artist in today’s neoliberal market
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economy can be defined as the “part with no part,” it is
because cultural production involves a perversion of
synchrony over diachrony, with the genus “art” divided by the
species of objective disinterestedness (drive) and subjective
interest (desire). And if interest serves as a synonym for
dispossession, the paradox is the fact that objective
disinterestedness is in some way constitutive of this struggle.
The political parallax – the impossible dialectical synthesis,
the symptomal torsion – of the economy of avant-garde
cultural production is the political situation, divided by an
exhaustive disjunction between the agency of consciousness/
knowledge, the “what is to be done” of our moment, and the
masses themselves, subjectively constituted in everyday
experience.
$ = subject, analysand, audience
a = objet petit a, analyst, artist
S1 = master signifier, discourse of psychoanalysis, art
discourse
S2 = chain of signifiers (understanding), artworks, screen
images
155
The missing link in the theory of over-identification can be
discovered in Lacan’s theorization of the “four discourses,” a
model that we could translate into art language with the
following codifications: $, the split subject, occupies the
position of the analysand as well as the audience; a, the objet
petit a, the Real that is cathected by knowledge, occupies the
position of the analyst and the artist; S1, the master signifier,
stands in for psychoanalytic discourse and art theory; S2, the
system of knowledge, the chain of signifiers that structure
understanding, stands in for screen images and artworks.32
We should recall as well the moving parts of the quadrature
of Lacan’s algebraic formula for social structure and his
insistence that the subject can never be fully or permanently
fixed by a particular system or situation. The top half of the
quadrant contains the “overt” exchanges between the
addresser (left) and the addressee (right). The relations
between them include belief and the impossible, traumatic
relations of circulation and reproduction. The place of the
addressee involves the network of signifiers. The latent left
bottom section is the place of the hidden symptom as the
function of truth. This latent truth is a symptom of the
addressee. On the bottom right is the place of origin, of
jouissance or surplus, the place of the split subject as the
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place of production and the function of loss. The overall link
between the left and right sides is language structured like the
unconscious, with desire as the overdetermining element in
the structure of fantasy, or the symptom as the
overdetermining framework of the sinthome. The Discourse
of the Master, which subordinates the laws of subjectivity,
suppresses the truth of these fundamental principles. It is, as
BAVO argues, a necessary stage in the movement toward the
Discourse of the Analyst, which I equate here with the art of
over-identification.
Žižek refers to the objective short-circuit that defines the
situation of liberal capitalist democracy in Lacanian terms as
the Discourse of the University.33 This short-circuit describes
the fetishism of ideological investment and identification as a
necessary passage from subjectivity to the authoritarian
dimension of political organization. The neutral knowledge of
a just ideological organization has the status of the master
signifier (S1), the performative exception that incarnates its
universality, a paradoxical point of intersection between the
genus and the species that is crucial to understanding the
castrative aspect of subjective determination (S2 as the
neutral constative of “what is to be done” or “history happens
behind the backs of men”) and that is disavowed through
identification with the political organization (or the artwork)
as fetish. As a signifier without a signified, the organization
only exists in its movement of sublation, as a consciousness
that resists its own ideologization: S2/S1. The bridge between
the neutral agency of organization and the possibility of an
avant-garde practice is afforded by Lacan in his development
of the concept of the sinthome, as decribed in the mid-1970s
in his twenty-third seminar. The sinthome describes a
nonpathological identification with the symptom, here
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defined as the political movement. Although BAVO does not
directly discuss Lacan’s four discourses in their essays, their
approach to “the spectre of the avant garde” supports my
analysis inasmuch as the Discourse of the Analyst aims at a
deliberate subversion of the prevailing Master Discourse.
What characterizes the situation of today’s avant garde is the
fact that the absence of a privileged place for the working
class in the ideological edifice is filled in, by and large, with
the lifestyle concerns of consumption, on the one hand, and
the politics of difference, especially in academic discourse, on
the other. The minimum distance from this particular field of
ideological captation is the subject’s attachment to the
jouissance of autonomy, which for our purposes could be
considered the trajectory of creative desire (a). Fascination
with one’s creative work allows for a fantasmatic distance
from determination, identification and desire. Lacan relates
this kind of surplus enjoyment to surplus value, an excess that
sustains the divided subject ($) in a relation of desire.
Identification with the capitalist conditions of production, we
could say, sustains the subject in a desire for economic and
cultural consecration. The predominant discourse of art
activism therefore has the structure of the Discourse of the
Hysteric: $/a [b2right] S1/S2. In this form, mass culture is
posited as the institutional deadlock, the arbitrary social
relation that addresses cultural production in terms of profit,
and which denies the productive power of creative labour and
affect. The activist addresses populism as the privileged form
of political resistance within late capitalism in the position of
Hysteric.34
Lacan’s Four Discourses:
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The purpose of avant-garde practice, in contrast, is to
transform the currently existing relations of production (S2)
by performatively subjectivizing the “part with no part,”
which Marx defined as living labour (a) – the creative
proletariat that figures as the condition of impossibility of
class society (S1). Over-identification attempts to traverse the
Discourse of the University, understood as a “hallucinatory
mise-en-scène of ideology” in which the commodity itself
speaks and represses the truth of the desire for consecration
understood in terms of ideological jouissance, and which,
according to the Lacanian matheme is described as S2/S1
[b2right] a/$. The artist in this scenario is the addressee of the
division of labour, with its new conditions of post-Fordist
immaterial production. Inasmuch as art discourse functions as
the repressed underside of commodification, the subject
appears bereft of agency. The paradoxical procedure through
which this operation occurs is the fetishistic construal of
everyone as creative, thereby subjugating the “part with no
part” and denying the subjects of late capitalism the
knowledge of historical agency by attributing this power to
market relations – as in the work of Richard Florida and
Charles Leadbeater, for instance. Here, the expert managers
of the creative economy provide us with facts and statistics,
with positivist knowledge about wealth distribution and
market indicators, but do not tell us what those facts mean or
how we should evaluate them. Artists are treated as objects of
technocratic control; their productions are subjugated to
arbitrary criteria of economic value that are bereft of higher
purpose. These relations of production deny their dependence
159
on the superstructural aspects of the field – the relative
autonomy of culture and knowledge, the efficiency of
meaning making and symbolic production – and present
themselves as neutral, as though the political decisions that
affect the artwork’s performance in the market has no further
bearing on social relations. The community subjects of the
creative industries discourse are thus construed, perversely, as
the “invisible hand of the market,” the laws of supply and
demand. In order to hide to themselves their own political
performance, technocrats offer “socially relevant” cultural
entertainments and charity functions. Moreover, they offer
audiences the enjoyment of themselves in terms of identity
and identification. Rather than provide for conditions of
change, this objectifying process fixes subjects through
endless diversification, virtualized through the digitalization
and financialization of the social field. However, becoming
aware of oneself as the “invisible” “part with no part” opens
up possibilities for critical activity.
Avant-garde practice intervenes in the field of cultural
production inasmuch as production tends towards a
depoliticization of discourse and towards hierarchical forms
of social control that do nothing to allow workers a measure
of control over the means of production. Practice intervenes,
as in the Yes Men example mentioned previously, by
confronting the commodification process and by subjecting
the autonomy of art to some form of transformation. Through
the invocation of struggle, the avant garde speaks from the
position of political organization. By rejecting the desire for
consecration, the avant garde artist is the first to submit to a
perverse subjective destitution that we can associate with the
Discourse of the Analyst: a/S2 [b2right] $/S1. Against the
meritocracy of true believers who deny the determining
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aspects of cultural production, the avant-garde ‘analyst’
demonstrates that the art system is unable to totalize itself and
instead fulfills the demands of the market as a vehicle for
enjoyment. Avant-garde production is therefore directly
concerned with enjoyment; however, it fulfills expectations
perversely by surrendering to the requirements of social
change. Through a contradictory over-identification with the
Discourse of the Master, the artist performatively posits the
presuppositon of perversion, and makes him/herself over into
the “part with no part.” Perversion, understood in terms of the
Lacanian père version, is the presupposition of the Father who
fully enjoys. The authority of the artist, in this case, is an
outcome of the subject’s presupposition that the artist’s
speech is based in knowledge. Alternately, the subject, in the
position of addressee, cannot be sure of this since the speech
of the artist, here in the position of master, is ambivalent and
contradictory, emerging as it does from the surplus of
identification with both art discourse and political
organization.
The avant-garde artist responds to the obscene demands of the
capitalist market with the dissolution of the mystery of
creativity, pleasure and socialized labour itself. This
sinthomeopathic language of objective necessity clears a path
for the dissolution of capitalist expropriation. In this the
audience members of avant-garde productions are compelled
to give up their fantasmatic identifications as self-positing
subjects. The avant garde does not wait for the dissolution of
the separation between art and life to be effectuated through
capitalist processes. And for this reason too, its strategies and
tactics may seem irrational, authoritarian or egalitarian,
confronting antagonism with harsh measures, the point of
overlap between revolution and political organization. The
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struggle becomes all the more violent to the extent that
previous (historical) avant gardes have been integrated within
official art discourse, and, since the postmodern pluralism of
the 1970s at least, have taken on the semblance of
productivity proper, signaling an end to class conflict and the
formation of new struggles based on the politics of
recognition. In the polarized field of this petty bourgeois stage
of creative production, the rule of genuinely engaged artists is
replaced by the rule of the community artist who construes
avant garde artists as the enemies of society.
In this new interregnum, what is the interplay between the
Discourse of the Hysteric, the Analyst and the University if
not the late capitalist version of the End of History, the belief
that the meta-discourse of class struggle is outmoded and that
we have reached the post-political stage for which there can
be no alternatives to the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism,
that, to put it in other words, there is no Master? To return to
BAVO’s critique of “embedded cultural activism,”
over-identification is the exhaustive disjunction that
distinguishes between the kind of cultural production that
represses truth and the kind that suspends, in its own
movement of jouissance, the repressed truth of the situation.
Whereas artists are perceived as “neutral mediators” whose
sublime quality allows them to, according to BAVO, “soften
the blow of neoliberal destruction,” artists can equally divert
attention back to the conflicts that structure not only the
divisions of labour of which they are a part as class subjects,
but the privileged division that seeks to deny them their social
role. In this way, artists can act, effectively, as an avant garde,
grasping their inner distance (the fundamental fantasy of art
as an inversion of the capitalist economy) from the capitalist
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game. This involves, as I have argued, a passage through the
desire for consecration to that of the objectification of labour.
The counterparts to petty bourgeois expressions of cultural
goodwill towards capitalist hegemony are the reactions to
social inequality that we find in all manner of non-politicized
discontent. Such outbursts are of course the basis for calls to
increase security measures, on the one hand, and politically
correct sensitivity training, on the other. The “negative
behaviour of the masses” thus forms the background of the
liberal politics of tolerance that ignores the class problematic
and the fantasmatic jouissance that compels people to act
against their own best interests.35 In relation to these
problems and countless other side-effects of privatization,
business and governments now call on artists to engage
community constituencies in a therapeutic process that
disarms populist protest and converts subjects through the
“moral economy of capitalism.”36 Against the various forms
of cultural programming that help to stimulate dissatisfaction
through the delivery of politically compromising output,
artists are called upon by BAVO to organize planned
responses to cultural production that sustain the perversity of
revolutionary negativity.
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Chapter 7
164
The Revolution Will (Not)
Be Aestheticized
On October 9 and 10, 2010, the New York City-based public
art foundation Creative Time hosted the second Creative
Time Summit, titled “Revolutions in Public Practice.”
Founded in 1974, Creative Time commissions and produces
artworks in the public realm. It has presented works in vacant
storefronts and landmark buildings, through skywriting, on
billboards, buses, deli cups, and on the Internet.
Self-described as a “vanguard and veteran art presenter,” it
has partnered with such institutions as the DIA Art
Foundation, The Kitchen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and the Whitney Museum of American Art to present works
that have addressed issues like AIDS, domestic violence and
racial inequality. The 2010 Summit was the second in a series
of conferences that included more than fifty presenters –
artists, art collectives, educators, critics and historians – and
was organized into six main clusters on the themes of
Markets, Food, Schools, Governments, Institutions and
Plausible Art Worlds.1 As the title indicates, the conference
was not only concerned with definitions of contemporaneity
in art, but the social and political aspects of today’s activist
forms of art practice.
In his “Curatorial Statement” for the Summit, the Chief
Curator of Creative Time, Nato Thompson, addressed the
question of art’s political efficacy.2 The idea that the
expanded forms of art can have a social effectiveness
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remains, Thompson suggests, both a truism and a task to be
accomplished. He argues that “what constitutes socially
engaged art practice remains a mystery that either invokes
strong feelings or, strangely enough, a determined
ambivalence.”3 At the 2009 Summit it was suggested by
someone that political art preaches to the choir. Who is this
choir, Thompson asked one year later, when there is no
consensus? As Bret Schnieder has pointed out, when the artist
J. Morgan Puett declared at the 2010 Summit that “capitalism
is here to stay,” the audience booed her outright.4 The choir,
it turned out, was there to be summoned. In comparison,
many of the presenters, even if their work constitutes
examples of the more politicized practices in the international
art circuit, put forward rather timid political views. The
overall tenor seemed to confirm Slavoj Žižek‘s often repeated
claim that many progressives, democrats and leftists more or
less subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal
democratic capitalism is the least worst of the political
systems available to us. The fact that the Summit made use of
the word revolution in the title (not to mention the word
summit) seemed indeed somewhat ambiguous: social reform,
“off the grid alternatives,” and activism are not the same as
revolution, understood in contemporary terms as
anti-capitalist and anti-state class struggle. And so the
question of art’s efficacy was easily circumscribed to that of
alter-capitalist productivity, a problem that was addressed on
numerous occasions. On the whole I am in agreement with
Schneider’s conclusion that the bad politics that were often
demonstrated at the conference doomed the aesthetics,
however far afield these projects have taken the artists.
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In the following I wish to make some general observations
about this moment in contemporary artistic practice. There is
no question that the post-structural approaches that
predominated in the 1990s, and their accompanying language
of simulationism, social constructionism and cultural
representation, have shifted decidedly in the direction of a
politicization of culture. One is more likely in today’s context
to frame a discussion in terms of art and politics than in terms
of cultural representation. Yet, for all of this newly
determined clarity of purpose, there remain some significant
differences and contradictions, rough overlaps and
incommensurabilities between those informed by postmodern
micro-politics and those who have never abandoned
materialist dialectics, those working with Proudhonist politics
of redistribution and Maussian ideas of gift exchange, and
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those communists who take Marx and Engels’ economic
analysis as necessary starting points for a conception of
revolutionary praxis, those rhizomatic anarchists who wish to
destabilize all constituted forms of centralized power, and
those socialists who consider that the state must first be
occupied before any communist transition is possible. Despite
these differences, we more or less exist within the same social
universe of neoliberal market capitalism. In this context, Jodi
Dean offers the notion of the “communist horizon” as a way
to schematize the importance of an unambiguous political
alternative. In the wake of the post-9/11 war on terror, the
imperial wars against Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, the 2008
bank bailouts, the economic crises in countries like Ireland,
Iceland, Spain and Greece, the revolutionary upheavals in
India, Honduras, Iran, Haiti, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and
the failed Copenhagen Accord, neoliberal governments
continue to press ahead with economic and social models that
lead only to greater economic polarization and repressive uses
of military and police power. This is the global social context
in which culture operates and in relation to which it is
possible to articulate an avant-garde model of aesthetic
practice. A materialist view of culture does not, from the
outset, predict what forms culture will take, or even for that
matter, how a correct understanding of political realities
should inform aesthetics. It does, on the other hand, require
that cultural interpretation take into account as many aspects
of life as possible, from art theory to social practices,
economics, psychology, technology, popular culture, gender,
race and sexuality, geography, urbanism, and historical
research. We can, with the collective intellectual means at our
disposal, address the ways in which the changing historical
contexts of capitalist nation-states inform social and cultural
formations. For all of the emphasis on language, mediation,
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and discourse that post-structuralism has brought to bear on
humanism, as well as on the idea of culture as economic
epiphenomenon, and for all of the emphasis on art’s active
role in constructing social relations, the qualifier
revolutionary requires that art theory take into account the
ways in which dominant cultural forms are constrained by
hegemonic relations.5 In response, Alain Badiou asks us to
consider whether a militant avant-garde art is possible today.
If so, what are its criteria? These he refers to as ground rules
for activist art. We should note the distinction here between
the rules for academic art theorists, whose degrees of subtlety
have no end, and those for students, cultural workers and
activists who today are increasingly thinking in terms of
cultural revolution, and who demand that knowledge be made
accountable for the world in which we live and not merely the
preserve of tenured interests or economic blue chip. And so,
fittingly, the Creative Time Summit was concerned with
revolutions in practice rather than revolutions in theory. The
consequence of this, however, is that cultural practice is once
again called upon to consider the productive contradictions of
revolutionary theory.
Form Becoming Content Becoming
Form Again
The Creative Time Summit is an important index of a
significant shift in the artworld and in the culture at large
from postmodern, micro-political difference politics to
macro-political anti-capitalist politics. For reasons that are
systemic to the function of the field of cultural production, as
Bourdieu defined it, this shift is slow to unfold in the art
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world in particular. Today’s art tends to operate in a way that
is analogous to politics, either ignoring the dialectical
mediation through social relations, or collapsing culture and
politics with the dominant modes of production.6 Steve Kurtz
has recently stated that art can have causal effects in
determining how we live and on the structure of society, that
struggles in representation are as significant as struggles in
factories. In his view, resistant cultural practices “parallel
direct actions against the corporate-military state.”7 What I
wish to signal here is not so much, as Konrad Becker puts it,
that “boutique activism is on the rise,” as the manner in which
it emerges.8 As Pierre Bourdieu argued, the development of
the sphere of aesthetic autonomy in the nineteenth century
was largely due to the development of the commodity status
of art. The contemporary neoliberalization of the culture
industries could be said to generate engaged political
practices in a similar way. Bourdieu did not reduce art to
economics, nor did he reduce economics to aesthetics, but
suggested that economic class relations help us to understand
aesthetics. Today’s art in some ways either collapses art into
economic social relations and new productive powers, or,
avoiding this, attempts to make art analogous to an equally
indecipherable politics. Cultural experimentation reveals class
struggle to be the form of the social but in ways that, as
Bourdieu explained, function in terms of misrecognition.
Culture, however, ceases to be mystifying when it acts in a
partisan way. We should therefore not hesitate to comprehend
the ways that cultural experiments open up new ways to
perceive past avant-garde movements and new ways of
understanding the dialectic between contingency and
necessity, the contingency of necessity, which retroactively
opens up and denaturalizes the circular movement of history.9
The contingency of the present constitutes artists’ actual
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experience of diminishing access to resources as various
national political formations take stock of not only the
diminishing prospects of socialism and communism, but of
welfare-state democracy. In this context, we are not surprised
to discover that the predominant form of contemporary art is
that of self-organization. The overwhelming theme of the new
public practices, however, is not that of self-organizing as a
political principle, but rather, is inscribed in the reflex of
survival. In order to survive in a world of double digit
unemployment and underemployment, and in which welfare
payments hardly make it possible to live an independent
existence, one must today extend oneself, make friends,
network, collaborate, preferably communally, and with all of
the conviction that capitalism has sundered the traditional
institutional ties that link us to nature and to one another.
Microcredit, alternative currencies, free schools, free
software, neighbourhood programmes and soup kitchens,
potlucks, consumer participation, market environments,
alternative economies, data maps, local skills, platforms of
exchange, farmer’s markets, victory gardens, Sunday soup
dinners – these are many of the frameworks for contemporary
art that were presented at the Summit. This is ostensibly what
we are expected to understand by the phrase “revolutions in
public practice.” If we look at the development of materialist
art practices since the 1980s, from site-specificity to art in the
public sphere, and from community art to socially engaged
art, today’s self-organized art forms are in fact, relatively
novel forms, and this, even if alternative economies and
potluck dinners are hardly new ideas. As collaborative and
collective art practices, these forms of art move away from
the methods of the studio-based modernist artist dedicated to
the transformation of the aesthetic logic of specific media.
Instead, these post-institutional practices continue with the
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dematerialized practices of the 1960s and 70s by infusing
everyday life values into art, and in the process, make the
practice of living and surviving, communing and networking,
itself into an art form. Rather than a relational artwork that
offers refreshments in a lounge space built inside a gallery
space, the new practices take this model of living and subtract
it from the concerns of both aesthetics and politics. In short,
this new way of making a living is presented as a means to
reconnect with various social practices that are both generated
and undermined by post-Fordist capitalism. In many
instances, they refer to antediluvian means of survival and
communal living and as such hardly represent a serious
challenge to state capitalism.10
One is here at a great remove from the question of political
organizing and varieties of socialism. There is no discussion
of the relation of the workers’ parties to that of the state, let
alone of being involved with such a party. Art workers,
however politicized, are as fragmented and disorganized as
workers in general. For this reason, the virtuality of the
avant-garde past is only hesitatingly acknowledged by the
new practices. They are to a large extent, and despite their
political orientation, in thrall to what Raoul Vaneigem
referred to as a certain “mal de vivre,” a “state of survival”
that is caught up with hierarchical power and oppressive
techniques. A will to power that Gerald Raunig associates
with the fictive sovereignty of vandals and teenage gangs,
fleeing, he says, “but while fleeing looking for a weapon,”
substitutes for a federation of such gangs (Vaneigem).11 Still,
they are making history.
The overarching difficulty of the new practices, as I see it, is
that for the most part they dispense with serious political
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analysis, on the one hand, and aesthetic analysis, on the other.
Instead, social relations are associated with the new
conditions of (cultural) production: networked sociality, the
Internet, affective commons and risk society – bypassing
what in older terminology was referred to as the ideological
superstructures. In this manner, art reflects rather than
challenges the dominant social relations; politics reflects
rather than challenges the predominant relations of
production. While this is not the case in every instance, and
while many of the participants do in fact work toward a
critical articulation of political and aesthetic autonomy, what
one finds on the whole is a reformist biopolitics in which
subjects are incited to move away from isolation and
individuality toward collectivity and collaboration. The social
function of art within class society is altogether eclipsed by
the novelty of the forms of art that proclaim art’s irrelevance,
“ego-less” artforms, as Agnes Denes put it, that attest to
selflessness. Rather than a critique of the ideology of
sustainability, one finds the sustainability of ideology, the
conviction that aesthetic forms and political forms coincide.
Art’s effectiveness no longer depends on art just as politics is
related to a free-floating idea of power. The artist seems
concerned with both and neither at the same time. Although
they share an ambient progressivism, these practices do not
share a common political language that would allow them to
make common cause and form, when needed, a radical bloc
for which people would willingly put their bodies on the line
in a manner that we could associate with the experiences of
the Paris Commune, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, May
68, or the ongoing struggles referred to as the Arab Spring.
Thompson’s curatorial statement reflects this when he cites
Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of “inoperative community.” Today’s
artists would be “a community that is ‘ever becoming’ as
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opposed to a community formed out of a nostalgia for a
mythic past.” Instead, we have the mythic present: free trade,
privatization, deregulation, structural adjustment, austerity
measures, imperialist wars, bank bailouts, cap ‘n trade.
One of the discrepancies among the participants of the
Creative Time Summit was that between developed and
developing nations. In his review of the conference, New
York-based art critic Gregory Sholette mentions that
presentations from Taiwan, Vietnam, Argentina and
Guatamala, among others, provided evidence that
contemporary artists around the world are engaged in “social
and political practices that are seemingly without concern for
the lines separating activism from aesthetics.”12 The
“centrist” aspect of this realization, however, is apparent
when one thinks that the international brokering of
contemporary art requires that the new unconventional forms
of art become a way to market artists and art collectives,
acknowledging the transformations in the geopolitical
landscape that are occasioned by globalization, yet smoothing
over what Bisi Silva identified as the simple desire of
Nigerians to build an art world that profiles high quality
respected artists, an impossibility in a society in which
military dictatorships target intellectual and cultural
communities. One is left with no doubt that extra-institutional
socially engaged art has become, for good and bad, the order
of the day. Sholette reiterates Thompson’s question of
whether artists are preaching to the choir and asks: “who is
we?” He provides a rather succinct answer. We is those artists
who are creating “our own, self-supporting arts organizations,
using our own micro-economies, and thus declar[ing] a
degree of autonomy from the art world, including both its
profit and notfor-profit facets alike.” Sholette continues:
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Chicago’s InCUBATE, and New York’s F.E.A.S.T.,
answered this by describing regional soup and discussion
nights in which participants pool pocket cash and later voted
to send it back (in bigger chunks of course) to select local
artists. Essentially, their sustainable model is an informal,
DIY funding mechanism that sidesteps established
art-institutional agencies. The online digital platform
Kickstarter does much the same thing, though without soup.
Or we could use time dollars suggests Anton Vidokle to
produce more autonomous space. He is doing just that
through e-Flux by setting up an online exchange amongst
different owners of cultural capital. I offer this, and take this
in return. No grant writing, no administrators, and no taxes.
Sholette asks a few incisive questions about these
micro-financing efforts, wondering what organizers plan to do
so as to not become micro-financing digital sharks. He closes
with a somewhat equivocal note on the politics of social
engagement, citing both Chto Delat’s suggestion that the
spectre of Marx haunts Europe and Claire Pentecost’s more
anarchistic view that a multitude of worms will chew away at
the capitalist bloc like a large-scale, grassroots
vermi-composting experiment: “Yo you neoliberals beware.”
Art and Political Ideology
Two detailed observations could be related to the new forms
of public practice that were showcased at the second Creative
Time Summit. One has to do with political theory and the
other with artistic practice. The first of these refers to Jodi
Dean’s talk, “The Communist Horizon,” delivered on
November 5, 2010, at the Second FORMER WEST Research
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Congress on Horizons.13 Dean begins her discussion with the
notion of the communist horizon as the “necessary and
unavoidable” horizon of our political landscape. Despite its
ostensible demise in 1989 and its association with everything
that is evil in political terms, American liberals and
conservatives are obsessed, she argues, with the threat of
communism. For the American right, communism should be a
dead political language, yet it persists in various forms: the
prospect of national health care, environmentalism, feminism,
public education, progressive taxation, paid vacations, gun
control, web 2.0, protests against military aggression,
Democratic political leaders, even Barack Obama. While it is
obvious enough that Democratic Party politicians are not
communists, the right resorts to the language of the Cold War
to evoke the spectre of an encroaching communist threat.
Dean takes issue with Žižek’s notion of the invisibility of the
antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies – an
invisibility that makes challenges to the ruling ideology
nearly impossible – and argues instead that this antagonism is
now visible, undeniable and global. In newspapers, on radio,
on television, on blogs, the right wing names this challenge
communism. Its point of visibility is gross inequality, which
identifies the U.S. among the top three nations with the
greatest economic disparity, alongside Mexico and Turkey.
The right argues that inequality is the best means to guarantee
social benefits for the working poor. If capitalists are certain
that they can deliver on its promise, why then are they so
concerned with a supposedly inefficient and stagnant social
model? Neoliberals and neoconservatives warn against the
threat of communism, she argues, because it is a real and
possible alternative to neoliberal globalization. Communism
is “the name of the end and the alternative to capitalism.”
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Dean goes on to argue that the left has been unduly mournful
of the idea of the collapse of communism. Consequently, the
left has betrayed the communist ideal and its language of
class struggle. The rejection of communism shapes the
fragmentation and splintering of progressive branches into
networks of single issue causes. The name for this network of
struggles is the struggle for democracy. Dean thus echoes
Žižek’s argument that the master signifier of today’s global
capitalist universe is democracy.14 What does it mean, she
asks, for leftists within parliamentary democracies to refer to
their goals as struggles for democracy? They have the right to
vote and to organize politically, yet they keep their language
tuned to democracy as their “ambient milieu.” The reason for
this, Dean argues, is that today’s left avoids the fundamental
antagonism between the top one per cent and the rest. The
main imperative is democratic participation, bringing the right
and the left closer together in the defense of what Badiou
calls capitalo-parliamentarism. We do not see our complicity
in despotic financialization. We imagine instead that socialist
utopias and primitive forms of capitalist exchange will
disabuse us, or at least the purity of our souls, of hegemonic
politics. Labour politics is replaced, she says, by flexible
work patterns, temporary work, subcontracting and
outsourcing. Precarious employment practices, multitasking
and contingent personal networks are indeed the reality for
what the Dutch collective BAVO refers to as “embedded,”
NGO-style art activists.15 The displacement of the class and
the collective dimension of work has freed capital from the
constraints it once had to contend with. The political
consequence, Dean argues, is that the left supports the form of
democracy rather than communism. We talk, we complain,
we protest, we make Facebook groups, we sign petitions, she
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says, yet our activity becomes passivity. As BAVO puts it, we
become too active to act.16
In these terms, one was hard-pressed to hear participants at
the Creative Time Summit who used the language of
oppositionality or anti-capitalism in the same breath as calls
for socialism or communism. Instead, what was heard was
largely the outcome of postmodernist and post-operaist
exhortations to abandon this language. Denes, for example,
stated that her work has nothing to do with the bourgeoisie,
but has to do with using art in the service of humanity.
InCUBATE asserted: “we’re pragmatists; we need to start
somewhere... to create incremental change.” Claire Pentecost
complained: “all we do is acupuncture.” Vidokle, strangely
enough, stated that the bourgeois public has vanished and
needs to be recreated. Stephen Wright spoke of going beyond
objects, authorship and spectatorship but without suggesting
why or how these frameworks are altogether outmoded.
Eating in Public spoke of challenging the system of private
property, but mostly through anarchist recycling systems and
free food practices. Various other modalities were conjured
up as tactical tools: chaos and unpredictability (Eyal
Weizman), erotics and the grammar of affect and desire (Phil
Collins), producing experiences (Surasi Kusolwong), being
and sociality as practice (J. Morgan Puett), making things
happen and reshaping the world (Pasternak citing Jeremy
Deller), amateurism (Claire Pentecost), wonder (Bruce High
Quality Foundation), process learning, or “learning learning”
(Learning Site), pollination (Amy Franceschini), and of
course, participation (InCUBATE, Superflex, Puett). To top
off this list, the general amorphousness and democratic
capitulation that Dean speaks of can perhaps also be gleaned
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from Creative Time’s self-description. According to their
website:
We are guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to
create inspiring personal experiences as well as foster social
progress. We are thrilled when art breaks into the public
realm in surprising ways, reaching people beyond traditional
limitations of class, age, race and education. Above all, we
privilege artists’ ideas. We get excited about their dreams and
respond to them by providing big opportunities to expand
their practices and take bold new risks that value process,
content and possibilities. We like to make the impossible
possible, pushing artists beyond their comfort levels, just as
they push us beyond ours. In the process, artists engage in a
dynamic conversation between site, audience, and context,
offering up new ideas about who an artist is and what can be,
pushing culture into fresh new directions. In the process, our
artists’ temporary interventions into public life promote the
democratic use of public space for free and creative
expression.17
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180
One exemplary exception to the political ambivalence to be
found among many of the participants was Jakob Jakobsen’s
presentation of his work with the Copenhagen Free
University. Co-founder of the UKK, the Youth Art Workers
in Denmark that led protests on migrant workers’ rights,
Jakobsen described how the self-organized CFU, which was
run in an apartment, had as its purpose the production of
subjectivity in the context of anti-globalization. The CFU was
not a playful, funny alternative art project, Jakobsen insisted,
since capital is constantly teaching us how to live our lives
and how to shape our innermost emotions, to be skilled in
areas in which there is a market. The Free University was
dedicated to such themes as art and the economy, radical
history, media activism, feminist organizing and refugee
subjectivity. Jakobsen eventually dissolved the University
insofar as it threatened to become “a nice, interesting theme.”
He argued that self-organizing need not abandon the task of
taking power away from capital. In relation to the attacks on
access to education in the U.K., he concluded his talk with the
salvo: “All power to the protesting students!”
Jakobsen’s work comes closest to my second observation,
which has to do with artistic practice. I refer in this case to
Alain Badiou’s talk, “Does the Notion of Activist Art Still
Have a Meaning?,” delivered at the Miguel Abreu Gallery on
October 13, 2010.18 In his presentation Badiou takes up the
challenge of establishing some rules for a contemporary
militant art, which he distinguishes from official art. We
could say that insofar as engaged art practices pose no threat
to dominant capitalist powers, they have become a kind of
official art. Badiou says the same for radical artists in the
past, like Brecht and Aragon, cases in which it is difficult to
distinguish between an official art and a non-statist militant
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art since ideology is common to both. Badiou’s Maoist
politics are evident in this way of framing militant art. With
official art, he argues, “ideology is realized in an objective
form: the inscription of the work of art in the space of that
sort of objectivity.” Objectivity is understood here as an
objective apparatus – the party, the state or the party-state. In
militant art, in contrast, ideology is a subjective
determination; it is an art that has not been completely
decided in terms of a victory by power; it is an art of the
presentation and not of the representation. Whereas official
art uses all means to glorify the result, militant art must create
new means to formalize the novelty because the result is not
here. It glorifies what does not yet exist. In militant art,
Badiou says, we have form and not the glorification of form.
The crux of my interest in Badiou’s talk is his next point.
Ideology, he says, is the space of the dialectic in which
official and militant art interact:
The difference between the two and the point of exchange
between the two is the condition of all art. The condition of
art is the existence of a strong ideology. What I mean by
strong ideology is an ideology that presents or proposes a
completely different vision of history of human beings as
such. A strong ideology is something that creates the global
idea of an other possibility.
Badiou argues that there is no strong ideology today, no
global vision of another possibility for the world. Democracy,
he says, is “the clear example of a weak ideology.” With
democracy there is consensus and equivocation between the
revolutionary camp and the reactionary camp. Everyone is a
democrat. It is far less possible to affirm that either fifty years
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ago or even now, everyone is a communist. It is difficult to
know what an activist art might be in the context of a weak
ideology since the subjective conviction is unclear and there
is too much overlap with official art. In such conditions,
militant art appears as experimental art and formal novelty.
Novelty is not, Badiou asserts, by itself political. The
temptation, he says, “is that in every field in which we create
something, we decide that the field is by itself a political
one.” Artistic autonomy can exist in these conditions without
there being a corresponding social and political outcome.
Badiou proposes four provisional rules for a militant art
today. The first is that there be a concrete relationship with
local political experiences, a concrete or real proximity. It is
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necessary, he says, to create common spaces. On this score,
many of the practices discussed at the Summit are working in
the right direction and represent a sea-change from what was
and is predominant in terms of professionalized art practice.
The second point is to accept the weakness of the ideology of
democracy and attempt to organize progressively the return to
a strong ideology, to have a strong intellectuality. On this
point the Summit presentations and panels often seemed weak
and the audience (the choir) very often took the opportunity to
point out the lack of a strong ideological content. The third
point is to substitute forms of presentation for those of
re-presentation. It is a paradox of the Summit that those artists
who have a strong ideological content in their work are often
engaged with representation (Ressler, W.A.G.E., Paglen,
Galindo, Collins, Reynolds, Kurgan), whereas those with a
weak ideological content were often directly involved with
local experiences (Puett, Superflex, Pentecost, Franceschini,
Lowe, F.E.A.S.T., PLATFORM). The fourth point is to
propose the possibility of a concrete synthesis of the first
three points: “a work of art which is really in relation to
action – the first point – local transformation, which is
intellectually ambitious and which is formally avant-garde in
the classical sense of the substitution of presentation for an
ornamental vision of representation.” Groups like Otabenga
Jones & Associates, Chto Delat and The International Errorist
provide examples of militant art by weaving a strong
praxio-logical content to their practices, by mounting a
composition of these three rules and presaging a new global
possibility, which Badiou elsewhere refers to as “the idea of
communism.”
184
Politics and Aesthetic Ideology
Dean and Badiou argue against democracy as the only
possible form of association and seek to replace it with the
idea of communism, an idea that, as Badiou asserts, does not
limit itself to state socialism, but links to all emancipatory
social events, including those bourgeois revolutions in which
the name of the people is upheld as the measure of universal
change. In his theory of militant art, however, Badiou in some
ways subordinates art to politics, downplaying the fact that
both aesthetics and politics have a level of effectivity and
independence from one another. I wish therefore to review
Badiou’s idea of political experience by giving some attention
to aesthetic experience. I do so by recalling the writings of
Henri Lefebvre, a long-time member of French Communist
Party who also struggled within and outside of the PCF for a
non-reductionist view of culture. If critical theory does not
attend to matters of aesthetics, it risks ignoring the ways that
artists sometimes attempt to resolve social conflicts through
the use of artistic representations. In Lefebvre’s terms,
aesthetic representations are not purely ideological
representations.19 In his autobiography, Lefebvre lamented
that fact that Socialist Realism had reduced culture to simple
theoretical programmes and neglected individual psychic
complexity. What it delivered, he argued in 1959, was
An extraordinary number of folk ensembles, peasant dancers
and singers. A few spectacles and traditional ballets. No plays
for the theatre. Some films, some uneven and often mediocre
novels, because these people associate themselves with the
modern conditions of production. They have spoken to us a
185
great deal about ‘socialist realism’ and they have force-fed us
folklore.20
In his understanding of historical materialism, Lefebvre
considered that the Marxian reversal of Hegel spread to all of
the so-called superstructures, including politics. What this
meant was that the understanding of the proletariat as the
negation of the existing conditions of capitalism was not an
empirically fixed guarantee of revolutionary progress. In the
1940s and 50s, at a time of Communist Party control over
intellectual production, Lefebvre sought to disseminate this
view through the subterfuge of aesthetic theory as well as the
materialist conception of everyday life. In his Critique of
Everyday Life (1947) he excoriated Surrealism and praised
instead Brecht’s work for its clarification of contradictions, a
task that could be carried out from within conditions of
alienation. Art, like knowledge, engages with living thought
and with the concrete world and can be helpful in orienting
practice. Echoing Marx’s critique of tendenzkunst, Lefebvre
argued that there can be no Marxist art as such, only a
Marxist theory of art. It is therefore wrong to judge art strictly
in terms of its ideological content. Political ideas have acted
on artists and writers and “folded themselves in with the
ideological content of their works of art.” “And this,” he adds,
“without allowing us to define art as the incarnation of
ideology, as the conception of the world of a social class,
which confuses art with ideology and its history with the
history of knowledge.”21 There is no division that can be
made therefore between a philosophy of aesthetics and a
theory of aesthetic practice, however comforting or
motivating that may seem.
186
These few reflections will suffice to merely suggest that the
sites in which artists work should not be held in conformity
with the ideological content of artworks, nor their aesthetic or
poetic form. In this regard, there is a great deal to be
understood about the paradoxical movement of autonomous
practices away from official art institutions at the same time
that aesthetic discourse attempts to recuperate such an
exodus. The Creative Time Summit is just such an example of
the means by which critical experiments are transformed into
the new forms of experimentation. Practices with a strong
ideological content, however, have a social and political
effectivity that does not necessarily require the abandonment
of the hallowed sites of the culture industry. Their conditions
of speech, to use the language of Roland Barthes, correspond
to that of “myth on the left.” By way of contrast, Barthes
defines “myth on the right”:
The bourgeoisie wants to keep reality without keeping the
appearances: it is therefore the very negativity of bourgeois
appearances, infinite like every negativity, which solicits
myth infinitely. The oppressed is nothing, he has only one
language, that of his emancipation; the oppressor is
everything, his language is rich, multiform, supple, with all
the possible degrees of dignity at its disposal: he has an
exclusive right to meta-language. The oppressed makes the
world, he has only an active, transitive (political) language;
the oppressor conserves it, his language is plenary,
instransitive, gestural, theatrical: it is Myth. The language of
the former aims at transforming, of the latter eternalizing.22
Consider in this regard the words spoken at the Summit by
Elizabeth Kabler, patron of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for
Art and Social Change, as she presented a $25,000 money
187
award to Rick Lowe, an artist who works with low-income
African-American communities in Houston, Texas:
Today I feel like we are supporting an authentic and
meaningful artistic practice, an art movement that does not
conform itself [sic] to grand gestures or artworld politics,
becoming mired in lots of praise but little actual positive
outcome... Rick, your work is real. It is authentic and your
solutions to very painful and contemporary problems run
deep, embedded in the bricks of buildings, roots of trees and
veins of people. Your belief that art and the community that it
creates can revitalize repressed inner-city neighbourhoods,
has continually come to fruition in the fabric of life for people
living in Houston’s Third Ward... My grandmother, Leonore
Annenberg, would have understood your work completely. I
feel humbled and quite moved to be able to uphold her vision
and honor her memory.23 [my emphasis]
Barthes states that myth on the left is a political language. It is
operational and transitively linked to its object. The
distinction is that between activating the things and activating
their names, transforming reality and generating speech that is
fully political.
Whereas the revolution announces itself openly, the
bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie.
Revolution becomes myth when one begins to speak of
oneself as “the left,” generating an innocent meta-language.
Barthes says that this self-nomination may or may not be
tactically necessary but that sooner or later it becomes
contrary to revolution, defining its deviations.24 Myth exists
on the left, Barthes concludes, but it is not the same as that of
myth on the right. Myth on the left does not reach the entire
188
field of human relationships since everyday life is
inaccessible to it – it is alienated. Myth on the left is
poverty-stricken, a temporally limited prospect, invented with
difficulty. What it lacks, he says, is that of fabulizing.
In Public Sphere and Experience, Oskar Negt and Alexander
Kluge made a similar observation that the bourgeois public
sphere represents a false totality.25 In contrast to many of
their Frankfurt School predecessors, Negt and Kluge did not
discount the role of mass culture in the restructuring of
subjectivity. What they noticed, rather, was that the idea of
the public sphere was exploited by the various institutions of
what they defined as the industrialized production public
spheres: the press, television, interest groups, political parties,
the army, the schools, the universities, the legal system and
cultural institutions. Such production spheres aim for a
maximum of inclusion, taking people’s everyday experiences
as the raw material for capitalist profit. Such exploitation does
not offer an alternative but is based on “reality,” on a vision
of society as it exists. Actually existing cultural institutions
make use of socially engaged art practices in order to
transform the need for meaningful experience into finished
products. Negt and Kluge argue that proletarian publicity
develops instead in contexts of crisis, war and revolution.
Proletarian publicity negates the existing world as a partial
power. Short of a revolution, proletarian experience takes
place in industrially overlaid contexts of living which require
a great deal of imagination and which feed into fantasy as a
protective reaction formation. The experiences that are bound
up in fantasy, they argue, can be transformed into collective
emancipation. As a libidinal counterweight to alienation,
fantasy is mere survival. Fantasy, however, corresponds to a
mode of production and to the generation of living labour.
189
What I have sought to argue in this review of the Creative
Time Summit is the fact that the motivation of an aesthetic of
survival in today’s socially engaged art does not so much lead
to the problem of not being able to recognize this kind of
work as aesthetic but that we may not yet be able to recognize
it as politics.
190
Chapter 8
191
From Artistic Activism to
Geocritique:
A
Few
Questions for Brian Holmes
In his last two publications, Unleashing the Collective
Phantoms (2008) and Escape the Overcode (2009), the
Chicago-based cultural theorist Brian Holmes has argued
persuasively for forms of confrontational art practice and
constructive critique that would challenge contemporary
cultural institutions – the museum-gallery-magazine nexus –
to move away from their function as economic engines within
a neoliberal market and post-welfare state system and towards
a decidedly leftist cultural politics that is able to provide
solutions to the threats posed by economic instability, social
inequality, evironmental catastrophe, and militarism.1 As a
preamble to this interview in which the author is invited to
reflect on his work, I would start by asserting my deep
affinity with Holmes’ radical political commitments and his
view that a phase change has occurred in and around the
artworld and that this shift in radical cultural practice is linked
to the resistance of social movements to the forms of
governmental biopower. As a summary of Holmes’ position
on the latter, I cite a radio interview from March 19, 2010, in
which he outlines the following four-point doctrine: 1)
transnational corporations have outstripped the capacity of
nation states to control them; 2) the financialization of
capitalism allows speculators to disrupt economies and
enforce market prices; 3) the essence of neoliberal
192
governance is that people govern themselves based on
calculations of profit and loss – each is his or her own
entrepreneur seeking self-empowerment by nurturing their
potential as creative beings; 4) critical spaces within this form
of “risk society” and “security state” can be opened up
through creative interventions, especially those that are
guided by doctrine against the excesses of resistance.2
Marc James Léger: To begin with, I would like to address one
of the essays in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms:
“Signals, Statistics & Social Experiments.” This essay is
particularly interesting to me because it addresses a work of
over-identification – Jakob Boeskov’s 2004 project The ID
Sniper, a proposal for a rifle that would allow security forces
to tag protesters with electronic tracking devices that are in
actuality marketed as “Veri Chips” and that are commonly
used to tag pet animals. What interests me in your discussion
is that although you are familiar with Žižek’s analysis of
over-identification in the work of Neue Slowenenische Kunst,
which you discuss in a previous chapter, you relate
over-identification in this case to Gilles Deleuze’s idea that
“resistance is primary” – as opposed to the Lacanian idea of
the subject “castrated” by language – and that social control is
managed through “apparatuses of capture” which you also
describe as the feedback process of governmentality, a
concept derived from the work of Michel Foucault. So, if I
may start with a very theoretical question, how is it that you
propose that the “collective phantoms” can perform a
conscious withdrawal from today’s institutions by “playing
the governance game”? In contrast, I would ask a fairly
unambiguous question. President Hugo Chavez has recently
called on radical political parties and social movements
around the world to form a fifth international, a global
193
solidarity project to oppose imperialism and capitalism
simultaneously. Do you think that an artist could or should
contribute to this latter kind of radical cause?
Brian Holmes: The theory of over-identification claims that
certain artistic performances can make the spectator
uncomfortably conscious of the ob-scene (literally: offstage,
unrepresented) pleasure they take in their unconscious
identification with social norms. There‘s something to that,
for sure, but as an activist I’m more interested in taking the
viewpoint of people who actually do such interventions, in
which I engage myself from time to time. From that
viewpoint, the main thing is the confrontation with members
of the transnational capitalist class and the cognitive gains
that come with trying to understand how they think and what
kind of habitus they have – how it feels to be in their skin.
In the case of Jakob Boeskov’s intervention it was first of all
a matter of going to this insane sort of arms fair, “China
Police 2002,” a massive display of so-called less-lethal
weapons, and some more lethal ones. This, of course, is just
everyday business under the conditions of really existing
neoliberal globalization. The artistic fiction that Boeskov was
promoting at the fair had to do with a rifle called the “ID
Sniper,” which would shoot a GPS tracking chip under a
protester’s skin and allow him or her to be followed
anywhere, from a distance. So he was asking us to imagine
what happens when the police get under your skin, in very
pragmatic and invasive ways. Consider such a performance,
identify with it. What would it be like to try to sell such a
thing? How would the legitimate participants react to such an
extreme proposal? Most pressingly, what would happen if
they bought it and if you got hit with that dart some day down
194
the line? The last question isn’t in vain, because since that
time, we have seen the widespread use of GPS-equipped
mobile phones to track pretty much whoever the police are
interested in. And the subcutaneous chips, alas, are on the
way. What I was trying to ask was who’s going to govern this
kind of society, with this sort of technology. How are the rest
of us going to react to the imposition of new procedures for
the production of the truth, about your location, your
citizenship status, your intentions, etc?
This kind of work has to do with government and also with
governmentality, both of which are relations that we are
involved in, serious “games” that we can and do play. Now,
you ask about Chavez’s call for artists to join the revolution.
Out of curiosity, I went to Venezuela twice. One of the things
I learned was that the Bolivarian process could only get
seriously underway after several waves of strikes in the
national oil company, in the course of which they gradually
pushed out some of the people who had been running that
vital industry. Yet they still depend on expertise from the
American oil majors. If the left would like to see a change in
the way the developed countries are run, we would have to
confront the members of the transnational capitalist class and
push some of them out of their positions. Most crucially, we
would have to replace them at their jobs, which, of course,
would also have to be gradually and deeply transformed.
Frankly I would like to see that happen. I think that the kind
of critical work I am doing is a small but real contribution to a
social process that could head in that direction, if only more
people decided that they would like to come to grips with the
way that society functions, and work on the ways that it could
be different.
195
MJL: The transitions from pre-socialist societies to state
socialism and now to neoliberal capitalism with a resurgence
of extreme right-wing politics should at least alert us the need
for some emphasis on ideology. This is something that the
workers’ communes in Venezuela and the experiments of
factory self-management fully recognize. Of course this is
one of the difficulties of the Autonomist Marxist framework,
which is to emphasize the tension between modes and
relations of production without an adequate emphasis on the
relation to superstructures or to the problem of political
representation.
To make a bridge between your two books I would say that
two essays in particular, “Extradisciplinary Investigations:
Toward a New Critique of Institutions,” from Escape the
Overcode, and “Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Flexible
Personality, Networked Resistance,” from Unleashing the
Collective Phantoms, represent a fairly concise articulation of
your
analysis
of
what
you
call
the
“gallery-magazine-museum” circuit and how to escape or
challenge it. The anarchistic solution that you propose,
self-organization from the outside, is premised, you say, on
lessons learned from the generation of ‘68: the lesson to flee
from the “dialectical” return of the same through the clash of
seeming opposites. This is most fully fleshed out in Escape
the Overcode with its analysis of how to become mobile
within maps of constituted power and extradisciplinary
autonomous experimentation in areas separate from art that
can bypass the processes of overcoding through practices of
resistance, invention and deviance.
I want to ask you, how is it for you that art can figure as class
struggle if you want to operate with an anti-dialectics that
196
leads you, intevitably, to what I would consider a kind of
subjectivization that is premised on the communicative and
affective production of immaterial labour which itself is
premised on an imperialist process of global
proletarianization? Capitalism, as we know, feeds off of
counter-cultural
expression
and
trans-subjective
communications, looking to it for new forms of life and
cultural expression. How would you respond to the assertion
that on some level what you are proposing in your books and
from a schizo-anarchist position – though perhaps less so in
what you have said so far – is the indestructibility of
capitalism and the negation of politics? Is the phrase
“post-politics” one that you accept?
BH: Do we know what’s gonna destroy capitalism? I have to
begin by observing that Marx, the greatest materialist
philosopher, has been completely wrong on that score.
Capitalism definitely survived the industrial worker, first
through the formation of a redistributive Keynesian state, then
through the creation of a middle-manager class by mass
education and most recently through the neoliberal
orchestration of productive relations into fractured spaces and
times where people are rarely together long enough to
conspire – which means to breathe the same air, if you take
words literally. So I’d say the dialectic had better evolve a
little.
All the revolutions that happened in the twentieth century
involved disaffected members of a rising “new class” of
engineers and managers, collaborating with industrial workers
but crucially with peasants too. Now global free trade is
producing not just proletarianization and displaced peasants
but imperialist wars, environmental disasters, tremendous
197
flows of highly individualized migration and dramatically
increasing poverty amidst the very boom of the luxury
economy. What we need is a concept and a practice of
transnational, cross-class collaboration way beyond the old
“intellectuals and workers” model, but manifestly, no one has
it. In that respect, ideology and social hierarchy are
inseparable. On the one hand, most people with an old left or
even a new left orientation have gained niches in the social
and cultural institutions – guaranteed jobs which are
evaporating in the current crisis. On the other, the younger
generations have been fascinated by the possibilities and
caught in the traps of the global communications system –
whose limits are finally beginning to show, also due to the
financial meltdown. We are about to see huge disaffection
among the middle classes, but is there a way for these
disaffected people to engage in new collaborations and
solidarities? Can they break through the existing ideology of
liberal freedoms and speculation on one’s own human
capital? Is there a political alternative to religious
nationalism? These are the key questions of political
philosophy and of engaged artistic practice, and I’ve been
very clear about them since the turning point of 2004, when
the American people went out and willingly elected Bush for
a second term.
My own work is not about positions but pathways. That’s
why I always mix the social sciences with art, in order to put
analysis to the test of experimentation. It’s also why there is a
continuous development of the ideas presented in my essays
and books. I began in Paris in the mid-1990s, demonstrating
with graphic artists and unemployed people while analyzing
financialization. When the counter-globalization movements
showed the way toward broader and more effective
198
mobilizations, obviously I began to participate. The Italian
Autonomists and the French journal Multitudes had the most
to contribute to the self-organization of the movements. Of
course I joined them. We took strong inspiration from people
actually building a productive technology, the free software
hackers, some of whom reached across class divides to
collaborate with movements in Latin America or India. All
that gave rise to what I call a “political generation” that is
defined by a common set of problems and possibilities. It was
a chance to breathe a little, to conspire, to ask real questions.
Now, I don’t think people choose their subjectivity, but they
do work with it and maybe even through it. What you call
“schizo-anarchism” was the experience of hundreds of
thousands of people trying to change their world and
transforming themselves in the process. Among the turmoil it
was not easy to find artistic expressions that could fit into the
established frames of art, but I wrote about them whenever I
could. More importantly, I tried to theorize the experiments
themselves, using avant-garde references and drawing on art
practice to expand life instead of the usual reverse. There was
a lot of concern about cooptation, particularly during the later
phases of the real-estate boom. Check out my text called
“Reverse Imagineering,” which is about resisting exactly that.
But you know, the real problem is that the movements remain
relatively small, and the control capacity of the contemporary
state is tremendous. Ten or fifteen million people marching
against the Iraq war on February 15, 2003, is considered
peanuts in world society!
Today I have moved back from Europe to the United States,
where the social system is under tremendous stress. It’s not an
easy moment but I do want to be part of the next political
generation. In an essay from my recent book called
199
“Recapturing Subversion” I analyze the limits of the
Autonomist position, which risks becoming dogmatic at
exactly the moment when we need new assessments of a very
different economic and political situation. The focus on
production in Autonomous Marxism is liberating, but I agree
with you, it also has blind spots. In the last section of Escape
the Overcode I work through the archaeology of the control
society, which is crucially involved with the computerization
of the military-industrial complex and with the development
of contemporary finance. When I speak of “escaping the
overcode” it’s about denormalizing yourself and breaking the
habitus built up by these institutions, which is a precondition
for any kind of political engagement. Beyond that, what I call
extradisciplinary practice is about coming consciously to
grips with the technical processes that turn ideology into
commodities and infrastructure – processes that employ huge
amounts of people and continuously occupy their minds and
emotions. People read my texts for detailed critical
descriptions of the world they live and work in, but also for
the “outside” perspectives, for reflections on the creation of
value that can help them to orient their lives away from the
dominant functions. The texts are clearly not just about art.
The strategies they present cannot be reduced to pre-cut
notions of class struggle and the whole thing has less and less
to do with the gallery-magazine-museum system. I’m looking
for cultural and political use-values that have to be developed
by individuals and small groups before they can change the
mainstream institutions.
MJL: Just by the way, Keynesianism has never been practiced
in its most radical sense. Throughout the “golden age” of
Western capitalism, Keynesianism was held as the refutation
of Marx’s economic thinking. But it was never used, and
200
instead an arms-based economy and imperialist competition
during the Cold War were associated with booming
economies. Since the 1970s and 80s, however, both
Keynesianism and state-directed socialist economics – which
was also capitalist and became the model for transnational
capitalism – proved unable to overcome the main
contradictions of accumulation, which Marx identified long
ago. Needless to say, this was used by neoliberal capitalists to
assert that there is no alternative, and for Schumpeterians to
say that economic crises and capitalist mayhem in general
may be even a good thing, stimulating new rounds of
productivity. Meanwhile, and despite the claims of
sociologists that we now live in a post-industrial word,
proletarianization proceeds unabated, especially in developing
countries, but without the kinds of revolutionary parties,
solidarity networks and unions it once could claim. Further,
international capital relies as much as ever on state provisions
and protections to strengthen its grip on democratic
institutions.
My last question then comes back to institutions and what
you’ve said already about the art system. Based on your
writings, and I’m thinking here of your contribution to the
Chto Delat panel on artistic avant-gardes, it could be fair to
say that you are ambivalent about the role of today’s
institutions.3 Should institutions evolve, as you say about the
dialectic, or should we learn to live without them?
BH: One of the thinkers to whom I often return is Cornelius
Castoriadis,
the
philosopher,
anthropologist
and
psychoanalyst who wrote about the “imaginary institution of
society.” His use of the word “imaginary” corresponds to
what’s often described as the symbolic order. However, he
201
conceives it somewhat differently, as the magma of culturally
shared ideas and images out of which concrete institutions are
shaped. His concern is to institute a condition of individual
and collective autonomy – i.e. democracy. But of course he
recognizes the heteronomy (or “alien law”) that capitalism
comes to exercise over us. How can we not recognize this in
our own era, when financial capital runs rampant and the
industries of war constantly take over the state? In a text
called “The Speculative Performance,” I quote Castoriadis’
ideas in order to describe the process whereby the capitalist
imaginary has overcome democratic institutions and reshaped
contemporary subjectivity. I also describe some performative
experiments that attempt to institute another way of living in
society.
In fact, the period of Keynesian economic governance has
been of great interest to me. Mind you, I don’t naively
celebrate it and I’m very aware of what, in the U.S., was
called “the welfare-warfare state.” But in texts like “The
Flexible Personality” or in the essay on “Invisible States” in
Escape the Overcode, I recall the ways that a partial
socialization of the economy acted to free up time from the
pressures of the market: the time of child-rearing, education,
health care, leisure, retirement, and of course, the time of
publicly supported cultural production, in which
non-monetary and non-productivist values could be explored
and given form. It seems to me that much of the experimental
culture that flourished in the 1960s and 70s resulted from a
subversion of welfare-state educational and cultural
institutions, that is, from an attempt to radicalize their
potentials and to exceed their limits. Even today, the
extradisciplinary art practices that interest me tend to not
come out of commercial art practice nor even out of
202
underground subcultures, but out of public universities –
which are under attack right now, all over the world.
So to answer your question, yes, I do find today’s neoliberal
institutions unbearably superficial, existing almost entirely in
the electronic fluctuations of the present, articulated only to
the staccato rhythms and the visual fascination of information
flickering on screens. This type of financialized culture has
become the very basis of the state, justifying its relentless
destruction of the formerly public institutions and continually
unleashing violent outbursts whenever its shaky claim to “risk
management” breaks down in moments of crisis. Obviously I
believe these institutions need to be relentlessly criticized,
through the kinds of analysis that I develop in my texts and
also through the social movements and artistic subversions
with which I’m engaged. But the point can only be to found
new institutions, through which we are better able to
recognize each other’s autonomy and its limits, to care for
each other, to educate and transmit knowledge, to overcome
inequalities and to begin undoing the tremendous damage that
the industrial system has done to the ecology. This cannot be
achieved through the rash destruction of what exists. But the
paradox is, evolving toward bearable and viable institutions
requires some kind of break in our current understandings of
what life in society is good for. It can’t just happen in the
realm of ideas, it also has to enter the world of the senses. The
important risk is there. Art in its expanded forms can be a site
of rupture. That’s the role that Castoriadis assigned to the
radical imagination.
203
Notes
204
Introduction:
Hypothesis
The
Avant
Garde
1. Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards
a New Critique of Institutions,” Transversal (January 2007),
available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes.en.
2. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007) 131.
3. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David
Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, [2008] 2010). In
his preamble, Badiou states: “Because is had ended in failure
all over the world, the communist hypothesis is [thought of
as] a criminal utopia that must give way to a culture of
‘human rights’, which combines the cult of freedom... and a
representation in which Good is a victim. Good is never
anything more than the struggle against Evil, which is
tantamount to saying that we must care only for those who
present themselves, or who are exhibited, as the victims of
Evil.” He adds that against the capitalo-parliamentarian form
of democracy, our times is the era of the reformulation of the
communist hypothesis. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis,
2 and 66. See also Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans.
David Fernabch (London: Verso, [2007] 2008).
4. Johanne Lamoureux, “Avant-Garde: A Historiography of a
Critical Concept,” in Amelia Jones, ed. A Contemporary
Companion to Art: Since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
207.
205
5. See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz
Heron (London: Verso, [1992] 2007) 56. For workerist
themes in contemporary art criticism, see for example, Sonja
Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art: An
Interview with Paolo Virno,” Open #17 (2009), available at
http://www.skor.nl/article-4178-en.html; and Gerald Raunig,
Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long
Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), [2005] 2007).
6. For a brief review of this shift from the avant garde quest to
occupy the institutions of power to the post-1968 disabling of
institutions and specialized activity, see Gerald Raunig, “On
the Breach,” Artforum (May 2008) 341-3.
7. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso,
2008) 183.
8. Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations.”
9. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1974]
1984);
Hal
Foster,
“What’s
Neo
about
the
Neo-Avant-Garde?” October #70 (Fall 1994) 5-32; Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh, NeoAvantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays
on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000); Norman Bryson, “The
Post-Ideological Avant-Garde,” in Gao Minglu, ed. New
Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
51-58; and Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,”
Critical Inquiry #31 (Summer 2005) 811-47. A key text in the
lead up to the postmodern critique of the notion of an avant
garde is of course Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the
206
Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1985).
10. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a
Concept from Lukàcs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984) 10.
11. Andrea Fraser, response to the questionnaire “How has art
changed?” Frieze #94 (October 2005), available at
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/how_has_art_changed/.
12. Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, 97-8.
13. See Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism
(London: Routledge, 1989).
14. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to
Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1991).
15. Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005) 247.
16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, [1979] 1984).
207
1.
Andrea
Fraser
Subjectivization
of
Critique
and
the
Institutional
1. Andrea Fraser, “In and Out of Place,” Art in America #73
(June 1985) 122-8.
2. Andrea Fraser, “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,”
October #57 (Summer 1991) 104-22.
3. These essays include: “How to Provide an Artistic Service:
An Introduction,” available at http://adaweb.walkerart.org;
“Services: A Working-Group Exhibition,” Beatrice von
Bismarck, Diether Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Games,
Fights, Collaborations: The Game of Boundary and
Transgression; Art and Cultural Studies in the 90ies
(Stuttgart: Cantz, 1996) 210-213; “What’s Intangible,
Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the
Public Sphere?” October #80 (Spring 1997) 111-16;
“Services: Working-Group Discussions,” October #80
(Spring 1997) 117-48. Additional critical writings include
“Notes on the Museum’s Publicity,” initially published in
Lusitania in 1990 and reprinted in Kynaston McShine, ed.
The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1999) 238-9; “A ‘Sensation’
Chronicle,” Social Text #67 (Summer 2001) 127-56; “‘A
museum is not a business. It is run in a businesslike fashion’,”
in Melanie Townsend, ed. Beyond the Box: Diverging
Curatorial Practices (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 2003)
109-22. Most of these are available in the recent collection of
208
writings, Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of
Andrea Fraser (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005).
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, [1979] 1984).
5. Andrea Fraser, “‘“To quote,” say the Kabyles, “is to bring
back to life”‘,” October #101 (Summer 2002) 9. Bourdieu’s
well-know expression of this is that artists and intellectuals
form a dominated sector of the dominant (bourgeois) class of
society. The opposite of this scholastic group is that of
socialites who replace the prudence of an awareness of limits
with the rightness of self-assurance and arrogant bluff.
6. Fraser, “‘“To quote,”‘,” 10. Reflexivity involves a critique
of the tools of analysis. “To be able to use theory, even
against cultural legitimacy, requires a degree of competence.
However, the exercise of that competence itself tends to
reproduce the very legitimacy one might use it to critique.”
Fraser cited in Yilmaz Dziewior, “Interview with Andrea
Fraser,” in Dziewior, ed. Andrea Fraser: Works: 1984 to 2003
(Köln: DuMont, 2003) 93.
7. This specific role is described by Fraser in “From the
Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,”
Artforum 44:1 (September 2005) 278-83, 332.
8. Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions,” 283.
9. Bourdieu, Distinction, 466.
10. Bourdieu, Distinction, 172.
209
11. For an analysis of Fraser’s conflation of creatitvity and
exploitation, see my essay concerning her project Untitled
(2003): Marc James Léger, “What’s Neo about
Neo-Feminism?,” Etc #84 (Dec 2008-Jan/Feb 2009) 20-2.
12. It should be stated that this need not be the case and is not
always so. The New Museum in New York City, for example,
is recognized for its development of alternative approaches to
museum education and security.
13. Fraser, “‘“To quote,”‘,” 9.
14. Bourdieu, 321-323. Bourdieu distinguishes between false
popularizations of legitimate culture from legitimate,
pedagogical popularizations that acknowledge the effort
involved in the mode of acquisition.
15. See Andrea Fraser, “Dear Stephan,” available online at
www.societyofcontrol.com/akademie/fraser.htm.
16. The proper name of Louise Lawler can therefore be said
to mark a difference of gender within a male genealogy of
institutional critique. On this subject, Miwon Kwon has
emphasized how the maintenance performance works of
Mierle Laderman Ukeles complicated the gendered division
of labour within the museum and also within critical art
practice. See Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific
Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2002) 18-19.
17. Andrea Fraser, “Museum Highlights,” 107.
210
18. Fraser, 107-8. The artist can actually find further grounds
of identification with the leisured disposition of Castleton
inasmuch as the field itself extracts from her the surplus of
her activity.
19. Jean Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” October #28
(1984) 7.
20. “One of the primary impulses behind my first gallery
talk-performance was to try to integrate institutional critique
and what could be called a psychoanalytic feminist critique of
subjectivity. What I came up with – and am still working with
– is something like a psychoanalytic notion of site-specificity
that’s informed by the concept of transference.” Joshua
Decter, “Interview with Andrea Fraser,” Flash Art #155 (Nov/
Dec 1990) 138.
21. See George Baker, “Fraser’s Form,” in Dziewior, ed.
Andrea Fraser: Works: 1984 to 2003, 57-8.
22. Fraser, “Museum Highlights,” 112. These conflicting
interests are elaborated by the script of Museum Highlights
and are based in an archaeology of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art’s history as an institution of early twentieth-century
bourgeois reform and charity.
23. Andrea Fraser in “Feminism & Art: 9 Views,” Artforum
(October 2003) 142.
24. Cited in Decter, 138. Along these lines, Fraser’s
contribution to the 1993 Whitney Bienniale was based on the
separation between the heterogeneity of public desires and the
assumptions of the museum’s professional staff. See Jennifer
211
Fisher, “Speeches of Display,” Parachute #94 (April/May/
June 1999) 25-31.
25. The view that transnational global capital functions
according to the dominant cultural tendencies of the
international petty bourgeoisie is put forward by Bill
Readings in The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996). On this, see also Andrew Ross, No
Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New
York: Basic Books, 2003) and Ross, Nice Work if You Can
Get It: Life and Labour in Precarious Times (New York: New
York University Press, 2009).
26. See Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and
Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, et al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1972] 1994).
27. Inasmuch as within capitalist class relations, cultural
dispossession justifies economic dispossession, an
acknowledgement of transformations within the field of
cultural production should entail a corresponding shift in the
knowledge sector of this same field.
28. Services took place at the Kunstraum de Universität
Lüneburg between January 29 and February 20, 1994. The
exhibition traveled to Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna, Geneva and
Hasselt, Belgium. See Luk Lambrecht, Services (Haaselt:
Provincial Museum, 1995) and Beatrice von Bismarck et al.,
eds. Games, Fights, Collaborations: The Game of Boundary
and Transgression: Art and Cultural Studies (Stuttgart: Cantz,
1996).
212
29. As stated by the organizers: “While curators are
increasingly interested in asking artists to produce work in
response to specific existing or constructed situations, the
labour necessary to respond to those demands is often not
recognized or adequately compensated. Conversely, many
curators committed to project development are frustrated by
finding themselves in the role of producers for commercial
galleries, or a ‘service department’ for artists they find
uninterested in dialogue.” Helmut Draxler/Andrea Fraser,
“Services: A proposal for an exhibition and a topic of
discussion,” in Games, Fights, Collaborations, 196. Among
the participants were the artists and curators Judith Barry,
Ute-Meta Bauer, Ulrich Bischoff, Iwona Blazwick, Buro
Bert, Susan Cahan, Clegg & Guttman, Stefan Dillemuth,
Helmut Draxler, Andrea Fraser, Reneé Green, Christian
Phillipp Muller, Fritz Rahmann and Fred Wilson.
30. Deskilling needs to be understood here not only in terms
of technical skill and ‘dematerialized’ products, but also in
relation to forms of status-based discrimination and social
control.
31. See Andrea Fraser, “Services: A working-group
exhibition,” in Games, Fights, Collaborations, 210. The
institutionalization and academicization of site specificity is
discussed in “Unhinging of Site Specificity,” in Miwon
Kwon’s One Place After Another, 33-55.
32. On this topic, see BAVO, ed. Cultural Activism Today:
The Art of Over-Identification (Rotterdam: Episode
Publishers, 2007).
213
33. See in particular, Fraser, “‘A museum is not a business. It
is run in a businesslike fashion.’”
34. Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An
Introduction,” (1994), available online at http://adaweb.
walkerart.org, 3.
35. Fraser, “What Intangible,” 115-16.
36. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques
Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1991) 64-66. In the language and tactics of labour unions,
Services has the function and dimensions of a strike, that is,
to not only sell one’s labour, but to call into question the
unethical grounds of this exchange.
37. See the contributions of Green and Dillemuth in Games,
Fights, Collaborations, 215-220. Art critic Jean-Baptiste
Bosshard went so far as to credit Fraser with an “abuse of
power” and an arrogation to herself and co-organizer Draxler
of the benefits of signature. The only defense for Fraser in
this instance would be to justify her work by reference to
earlier works, thereby not only making use of the mechanisms
of art critical and historical retrospection, but simultaneously
faulting the same system for providing her with critical
allowance in the first place. Understood in these terms,
Bosshard’s position is unredeemably idealistic.
2. Community Subjects
1. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
214
Empire
2. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon
Pleasance et al. (Dijon: Les presses du réel, [1998] 2002).
3. Most prominent is Claire Bishop’s “Antagonism and
Relational Aesthetics,” October #110 (2004) 51-79.
4. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Good Men from Porto Davos” in
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador,
2008) 15-24.
5. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community +
Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004).
6. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art
and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
7. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
8. See Grant Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative
Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” in Kester, ed. Art,
Activism & Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 103-35.
9. Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism,” in Zizek, The Universal
Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two. edited by Rex
Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006)
151-82.
215
3. In a Way We Are All Hokies:
Polylogue on the Socio-Symbolic
Frameworks of Community Art
1. Patrick Fitzsimons, “Neoliberalism and ‘Social Capital’:
Reinventing Community,” (2000), available at http://www.
amat.org.nz/Neoliberalism.pdf.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New
Myths of Our Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
3. Fitzsimons, “Neoliberalism
Reinventing Community.”
and
‘Social
Capital’:
4. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum, 2004) 90.
5. Nina Möntmann, “Community Service,” Frieze 102
(October 2006), available at http://www.frieze.com/issue/
article/community_service/.
6. The contours of an operative community art practice have
been described by Bruce Barber in numerous essays,
including “Cultural Interventions in the Public Sphere,” in
Performance, [Performance] and Performers, Volume 2:
Essays, ed. Marc James Léger (Toronto: YYZ BOOKS, 2007)
145-55.
7. For the sake of exposition, I am making use of Grant
Kester, “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for
216
Littoral Art,” Variant 2:9 (Winter 2000), available at
http://www.variant.randomstate.org/9texts/
KesterSupplement.html. See Grant Kester, Conversation
Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
8. Kester’s Conversation Pieces and related interviews are
informed by arguments he made in previous writings. See for
example, Grant Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion
and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art,”
Afterimage (January 1995) 5-11; and Grant Kester,
“Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the
Imaginary Public,” in Art, Activism, & Oppositionality:
Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998) 103-135. On the whole, I consider
these earlier essays to be far more satisfactory than the mix of
leftism, liberalism and populism that he works with in
Conversation Pieces as an effort to avoid being associated
with anything that seems like orthodox Marxism. Along these
lines, Conversation Pieces is followed by his essay “Crowds
and Connoisseurs: Art and the Public Sphere in America” in
A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia
Jones (London: Blackwell, 2006) 249-68.
9. On this score, Kester’s criticism comes to resemble the
rather confused writing of Nicolas Bourriaud in his 1998 text
on relational aesthetics. This book, based on essays written in
the early 1990s, is almost entirely dependent in its critique on
the socialism of the historical avant gardes. At the same time,
this political identification is negated and the theory of social
connectivity is limited to a growth model for art production.
Art activity is a game, we are told, in which aesthetic
judgement plays no part. Nor does newness and the
217
Baudelairean idea of the modern act as criteria. Instead,
contemporary practices are about types of behaviour, often
irrational and spontaneous, that are opposed to authoritarian
forces. The ideologies of progress that fueled the
imaginations of the avant gardes, Bourriaud argues, are now
bankrupted by the history of totalitarianism. Today’s avant
garde is reformed on the basis of different cultural and
philosophical presuppositions. Erring on the side of caution,
Bourriaud tells us that today’s participatory avant garde
comes up with models by mixing and borrowing equally and
indiscriminately from Marx and Proudhon, the Dadaists and
Mondrian. There is no presumed historical evolution, no
models for a better future. Instead, contemporary art offers us
possible universes and better ways of living and getting along.
Bourriaud’s idea of the avant garde thus completely dispenses
with Marxist theorization. Although marked by real academic
qualification, his writing is in the end an eclectic theoretical
pastiche that disregards the incompatibility of the historical
references and theories that he cites. Bourriaud fails to
distinguish economics from art, which would then allow us to
consider some of the determinations of his politics. He acts as
an intellectuel désengagé, offering the artworld a foreclosure
of radical politics through interpassive relations, managed
disconnection and gated interactions. See Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance et al. (Paris:
Les presses du réel, [1998] 2002) and Postproduction. Culture
as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine
Herman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).
10. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,”
October #110 (Fall 2004) 51-79.
11. Bishop, 65.
218
12. Bishop, 71.
13. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its
Discontents,” Artforum 44:6 (February 2006) 178-83.
14. Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 179.
15. Grant Kester, “Another Turn,” Artforum 44:9 (May 2006)
22.
16. This perception has been reiterated more than once. I
myself have weighed in on this debate with a book review of
Bishop’s 2006 anthology Participation (MIT Press) in the
pages of Afterimage (September/October 2007) and in an
online discussion on the subject of “Queer Relational” on the
empyre list-serve in July of 2009. The editors of the Journal
of Aesthetics and Protest also single out Bishop in the their
2009 issue for comments she made in “Public Opinion: Scene
and Herd,” Artforum (October 2009), in which she presents
socially engaged art as a genre and argues for its continuity
with 70s artistic gestures. Bishop here reiterates her most
questionable position – the problematization of public
practice as a direction in contemporary art. Available at
http://artforum.com/diary/id=24062.
17. Mick Wilson, “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An
Interview with Grant Kester,” Art Journal (Fall 2007) 106-18.
18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998) 25.
219
19. The thematics for this analysis were first proposed in
Andrew Wernick’s essay “Bataille’s Columbine: The Sacred
Space of Hate,” C Theory (1999), available at
http://www.ctheory.com.
20. Georges Bataille, “Propositions sur le fascisme,”
Acéphale (January 21, 1937), available at http://i.am.free.fr/.
21. See Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community,
trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988).
22. Blanchot, 33.
23. Blanchot, 50.
24. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter
Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991) 3.
25. Nancy, 15.
26. Nancy, 26.
27. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” in Claire
Bishop, ed. Participation (London/Cambridge: Whitechapel/
MIT Press, 2006) 55.
28. Nancy, 56.
29. Nancy, 62-3.
30. Nancy, 62.
220
31. Nancy, 65.
32. “The artist is, to use Lacan’s phrase, ‘the subject
presumed to know,’ bringing the viewer into compliance with
a properly de-essentialized mode of being through some sort
of revelatory encounter. The purism comes through quite
clearly; the viewers must be punished for their reliance on
forms of identification or collectivity that don’t pass
theoretical muster; they must be made to feel ‘discomfort,’
and so on. Of course this sort of S & M co-dependence
between the artist and the viewer has a venerable history,
extending back at least to Courbet’s slap-in-the-face with The
Stonebreakers. Provocation can easily enough slide over into
titillation and one might argue that, at this late stage, art
audiences expect, even anticipate, the shock, dislocation, and
discomfort that avant-garde art delivers.” Kester cited in
Wilson, 116.
33. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London:
Verso, 1989) 76.
34. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London:
Verso, 2002) 142.
35. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and the ‘Death of
Communism’,” in Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the
Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin
Clemens (London: Continuum, 2006) 95.
36. Badiou, 96.
37. Badiou, 97.
221
38. Badiou, 97.
39. Badiou, 98-9.
40. Jacques Rancière, “On Art and Work,” in The Politics of
Aesthetics, 42-5.
41. See the glossary of terms in Rancière, 81.
42. Rancière, 44.
43. Rancière, 45.
4. A Brief Excursus on Avant Garde
and Community Art
1. Krzysztof Wodiczko, “For the De-Incapacitation of the
Avant-Garde,” Parallelogramme 9:4 (1984) 22-5.
2. Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism,” Recodings: Art, Spectacle,
Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985) 23. See also Hal
Foster, “The Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and
Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002) 125.
3. Wodiczko, 25.
4. In numerous publications, BAVO have decried the role of
community art and cultural activism in the context of the
neoliberal dismantling of progressive social policy.
Embedded, or NGO art, as they call it, limits the scope of
cultural agency to “softening the ‘collateral damage’ caused
by [capitalist] restructuring and inventing humanitarian,
222
compensatory measures or ‘ways of dealing with’, as opposed
to radically contesting the neoliberal and neoconservative
measures as such.” Cited in BAVO, “Neoliberalism with
Dutch Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and
the Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism,” in Rosi
Braidotti, Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Citizens
and Subjects: The Netherlands, for Example (Zürich: JRP/
Ringier, 2007) 61. See also, BAVO, ed. Cultural Activism
Today: The Art of Over-Identification (Rotterdam: Episode
Publishers, 2007).
5. Nina Möntmann, “Community Service,” Frieze #102
(October 2006), available at http://www.frieze.com/issue
/article/community_service/.
6. See Oliver Ressler, ed. Alternative Economics, Alternative
Societies (Gdansk: Wyspa Institute of Art, 2007).
7. See for instance, Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and
Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural
Producers,” Transversal (January 2006), available at
http://www.eipcp.net /transversal/0106/lorey.en.
8. As Žižek himself puts it: “Politics proper thus always
involves the tension between the structured social body,
where each part has its place, and the part of no-part, which
unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of
universality... Politics proper thus always involves a kind of
short-circuit between the universal and the particular; it
involves the paradox of a singular that appears as a stand-in
for the universal, destabilizing the ‘natural’ functional order
of relations in the social body. This singulier universel is a
group that, although without any fixed place in the social
223
edifice (or, at best, occupying a subordinate place), not only
demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling
oligarchy... but, even more, presents itself as the immediate
embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the
particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy.” Cited
in Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’,” in The
Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, eds.
Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2006)
183-4.
9. See Gerald Raunig, “Anti-Precariousness, Activism and
May Day Parades,” Republicart (2004) available at
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0604. For more information see
http://www.euromayday.org. See also Adrienne Goehler,
“Basic Income Grant – The Cultural Impulse Needed Now!”
in Free/Slow University, Culture, Not Profit: Readings for
Artworkers (2009), available at http://wuw2009.pl/czytan
kid.php?lang=eng.
10. Angela Mitropoulos, “Precari-Us?” Republicart (2005),
available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0305.
11. Gregory Sholette, “Dark Matter: Activist Art and the
Counter-Public Sphere,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 1:3
(August
2003),
available
at
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/3/sholette.htm.
See also Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in
the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
12. Sholette, “Dark Matter.”
224
13. On the culturalization of politics, see Slavoj Žižek,
“Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” Critical Inquiry #34
(Summer 2008) 660-82.
14. Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Claire Bishop, ed.
Participation (Cambridge/London: MIT Press/Whitechapel,
2006) 194.
15. On this subject, see Pierre Bourdieu’s landmark study of
the field of cultural production, Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
16. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
17. For an analysis of community art’s participation in the
moral economy of capitalism, see Grant Kester’s “Aesthetic
Evangelists,” Artforum (January 1995) 5-11.
18. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans.
Simon Pleasance (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002) and Grant
Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication
in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004).
19. See Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, and Eva M.
Olson, Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture
Chicago curated by Mary Jane Jacob (Seattle: Bay Press,
1995).
225
20. See Komar & Melamid, When Elephants Paint: The Quest
of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand
(New York: Perrenial, 2000).
21. Slavoj Žižek, “Why Are Laibach and Neue Slowenische
Kunst Not Fascists?” in The Universal Exception, 64.
5. Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill
Revolution: On Class Composition in
the Age of Classless Struggle
1. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment” in Terry Eagleton and
Andrew Milne, eds. Marxist Literary Theory (London:
Blackwell, 1996) 187. Adorno’s opening salvo from 1962
finds its dark echo in one of Žižek’s latest books, In Defense
of Lost Causes, which he concludes with the question: “Does,
then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to
reinvent the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror?” See Slavoj
Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 461.
2. Henri Lefebvre, De L’État, Tome I: L’état dans le monde
moderne (Paris: 10/18, 1976) 143-51.
3. Lefebvre, 151.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, [1979], 1984).
5. Bourdieu, 48.
226
6. Peter Bürger distinguishes the nineteenth-century
“bohemian”
avant
gardes
(Impressionists,
Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, Fauves) from the critical,
utopian and future-oriented twentieth-century “historical”
avant
gardes
(Expressionists,
Cubists,
Futurists,
Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists) and
from the postwar “neo” avant gardes (Neo-Dada, Neo
Realism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism) that
recovered the strategies of the former (collage, montage,
readymade, monochrome, construction) despite institutionally
imposed ignorance of critical precedents. It is often held that
seventies pluralism and postmodernism mark the end of
avant-garde praxis. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, [1974], 1984).
7. See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
(New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 220-38.
8. Bürger, xxviii. See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the
Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi
et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
9. In one of the more well-known critiques of Bürger’s thesis,
Hal Foster argues that the neo-avant gardes can be better
understood through the concept of deferred action. Foster’s
work develops from some of the practices that may not and
could not, for historical reasons, have been known to Bürger,
beginning with the institutional critical work of Marcel
Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Michael Asher through to the
discourse analysis of Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser and Renée
227
Green and the abject art of David Hammons and Robert
Gober. However, in relation to more recent practices, Foster
remains silent on the question of how class operates in
relation to the chain of signifiers: class, race, gender and
sexuality. See Foster, “What’s Neo about the
Neo-Avant-Garde?” October #70 (Fall 1994) 5-32.
10. Gerald Raunig, “On the Breach,” Artforum (May 2008)
342. See also Raunig’s Art and Revolution: Transversal
Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
11. See Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of
Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
12. Nicos Poulantzas, Les classes sociales dans le capitalisme
aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974) 195-207.
13. For example, see the very uneven treatment of these
issues in Volume 1 (2009) of the Journal of the Free / Slow
University: Culture, Not Profit: Readings for Artworkers,
available at http://wuw2009.pl/czytankid.php?lang=eng; see
also the special issue on the “Bologna process” of
standardized university education in the e-flux journal Journal
(2010) edited by Irit Rogoff, available at http://e-flux.com/
journal/issue/14. For more rigorous analysis, see the Institute
of Network Cultures’ 2007 publication, edited by Geert
Loving and Ned Rossiter: My Creativity Reader, available at
http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads /32.pdf; and finally,
see also the special issue “University, Failed” of the journal
Ephemera (August 2008) edited by Armin Beverungen et al.,
228
available
at
8-3index.htm.
http://ephemera
web.org/journal/8-3/
14. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) 71. Twenty
years before Mills, Kracauer, following the insights of Emil
Lederer, suggested that office life had become the new space
of social domination and that the struggle for better working
conditions had been replaced by the rationalization of play
and the construal of public life as culture. See Siegfried
Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in
Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso,
[1930] 1998) 32. For an interesting follow-up to The Salaried
Masses, see Kracauer, From Caligary to Hitler: A
Psychological History of the German Film, ed. Leonardo
Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1947]
2004).
15. I have in mind here Nina Möntmann’s assertion that “the
challenge for art is to create a temporary model situation of
community – one that can be experimental, provisional,
informal and maybe prototypical, even Utopian.” Nina
Möntmann, “Community Service,” Frieze #102 (October
2006), available at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/
community_ service/.
16. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996).
17. Readings, 49. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming
Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, [1990], 2007).
229
18. Agamben cited in Readings, 50.
19. Readings’ analysis of a symbolic, managerial class is
supported by numerous studies, including: Alain Touraine,
The Post Industrial Society (New York: Random House,
1971);
Barbara
and
John
Ehrenreich,
“The
Professional-Managerial Class,” in Pat Walker, ed. Between
Labour and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979) 5-45;
Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for
21st Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991); Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
20. Strictly speaking, the contemporary petty bourgeoisie is
unlike the middle class in that it does not own the means of
production and numbers among salaried professionals and
white-collar “post-industrial” workers – referred to by
Andrew Ross as “no-collar” workers. Post-industrial theory
assumes that such workers require more autonomy and
decision-making
power.
Psychologically,
the
new
de-proletarianized petty bourgeois class wishes to be
distinguished from the working poor and from the proletariat.
This reflects the fact that they are less proletarianized and
have more technical training and access to knowledge
production than the industrial proletariat. The relation of the
petty bourgeoisie towards the middle class is similar to that of
the small and medium size business owner vis-à-vis the large
capitalist enterprise. In contrast to the view that class conflict
implies a direct relation between the working class
(socialism) and the middle class (capitalism), Marx argued
that in modern societies, a petty bourgeois class is created,
which fluctuates between the two but renews itself as a
supplementary part of bourgeois society. Another term used
230
by Marx and Engels is that of a bourgeois proletariat,
alienated from its revolutionary role by industrial capitalism.
We can also speak of a “petty bourgeois complex,” a fantasy
of capitalistic affluence that has become a permanent feature
of late capitalism, which includes post-Keynesian palliatives,
structural unemployment or chronic underemployment, third
world debt, war expenditure, commodity fetishism and sales
promotion, inflation, and environmental catastrophe. See
Asok Sen, “Marxism and the Petty-Bourgeois Default,” in
P.C. Josji, ed. Homage to Karl Marx: A Symposium (New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969) 158-62. See also
Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class
Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
In some respects, it could simplify matters to understand
today’s petty bourgeoisie as simply the middle class: it is not
the ruling capitalist class, able to devalue both labour and
professionalism, and it is not the working class, against which
the middle class resentfully guards its symbolic capital
against demands for equal opportunity. Resch argues that the
“middle” class of professional petty bourgeois workers is
divided between a liberal humanist fraction that is based in
the public sector, the media and universities, and a Darwinist
fraction based in the private sector and corporations. This
class as a whole is unable to understand and resist the
restructuring of global capitalism inasmuch as it refuses to
consider the analysis of economic determination as class
struggle. The more blatant the recent effects of economic
determination and class exploitation, he argues, the more the
ideological response of this class is to blame its failures on
the concessions it once gave to Marxism, whether at the level
of the welfare state, state socialism, or at the level of social
theory. See Resch, 11.
231
21. According to Brian Holmes, in his introductory lecture for
the Continental Drift conference at New York City’s 16
Beaver Group, neoconservatism acts as the protective reaction
to neoliberal market capitalism. Holmes mentions in this
regard the current interest in the work of Karl Polanyi and his
1944 publication The Great Transformation. According to
Yahya Madra, Polanyi argued that society would develop
protective responses to market capitalism and warned that
nothing could guarantee that such reflexes would be
democratic. Madra argues that in addition to regulation, the
market needs to be socially embedded. See Yahya M. Madra,
“Karl Polanyi: Freedom in a Complex Society,” Center for
Popular Economics (May 19, 2004): www.fguide.org/?=127;
and Brian Holmes, “Articulating the Cracks in the World of
Power,” (2005), available at http://71.18.85.184/drift/
091505_brian-intro.mov.
22. Sen cites Gramsci’s view that the main task of
progressives in the capitalist West is to win in the area of civil
society and culture. Today, however, authoritarian
governments have learned to recoup the humanitarian efforts
of citizens’ movements. Another aspect of this, on a broader
scale, is the rise of a symbiotic relation between civil society
groups, NGOs and micro-political groups, on one side, and
capitalist institutions. The virtue made by anticapitalist forces
in the form of the post-Marxist multitude and micro-political
struggles that abandon “class essentialism” is that they are
non-linear, that they can assemble and disperse at will, put
pressure on state organizations and intervene tactically and
anonymously. However, this tendency to make a virtue out of
a weakness is only the moral aspect of the fact that the
existence of the movement can be only verified as a virtuality.
For a Marxist critique of Gramsci’s “anarchist” emphasis on
232
civil society, see Henri Lefebvre, De L’État, Tome II: De
Hegel à Mao par Staline (Paris: 10/18, 1976).
23. Holm was also a participant in the demonstrations against
the World Economic Summit in Heiligendamm in June of
2007. See Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen, “Guantánamo
in Germany,” The Guardian (August 21, 2007), available at
http://www.education/guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/.
24. See David Akin, “Conservatives cancel $4.7M arts travel
program,” The Ottawa Citizen (August 8, 2008).
25. Gregory Sholette, “Disciplining the Avant-Garde: The
United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble,” Circa #112
(Summer 2005) 52.
26. Bourdieu, 323.
27. In Lacanian terms, we could draw some simple
correspondences between the petty bourgeois mode of late
capitalist production and the “discourse of the University.”
We could further supplement Lacan’s discourse of the
University with his discourse of the Capitalist: $/S1 [b2right]
S2/a. In this scenario, the rhetoric of stakeholders, the idea of
students as clients, quantitatively measured public opinion,
and market-driven curriculum determine what constitutes
knowledge through a fantasmatic identification with the
prevailing capitalist discourse.
28. The opposite of allodoxic overidentification would be the
critical over-identifications strategies of artists, as described
in BAVO, ed. Cultural Activism Today: The Art of
Over-Identification (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007).
233
29. Holloway argues that the starting point for theoretical
reflection should be an awareness of social realities like the
fact that in 1998, the assets of the 358 richest people were
worth more than the combined wealth of 45 per cent of the
world’s population – more than 2 billion people. John
Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power
(London: Pluto Press, 2002) 1.
30. Bourdieu 318-371. One possible objection that should be
addressed is the view that Bourdieu’s work prevents forms of
analysis that are not based in class analysis. In the section on
“Social Space and Its Transformations,” Bourdieu argues
against the concept of class as a container or property.
Instead, he states that social class is defined by a “structure of
relations” that must also take into account “secondary
characteristics” and determinants. Specific agents cannot be
defined by one set of characteristics only, and in the context
of struggle, secondary principles of division can become
primary principles and therefore no determinants are
necessarily and always primary. See Bourdieu, 99-107.
Secondary determinants, like the unconscious, should not be
viewed as truths revealed, but as indices of the structure of
subjectivity. In this, we should insist that subjects are
incomplete, created and self-created in conditions not of their
making. Within capitalist society, class operates in terms of
ideology, as a fantasy that attaches us to a particular social
formation. As a mode of enjoyment, this ideology, as Jodi
Dean writes in relation to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan,
structures “the practices in which we persist even as we know
better.” Ideology creates a distance that relieves us of
responsibility for what we do, and, moreover from the belief
that I act as an individual. As long as I believe that others act
in ways that are class specific, I can continue believing that
234
my actions are individual and autonomous. In this, I can act
collectively; I can participate in anti-capitalist organizing.
That is why, at this moment of disintegration of the belief in
individualism, liberals argue, allodoxically, that economic
and political inequality can be resisted by “rebuilding” either
the middle class or civil society, which amounts to the same
thing. According to Žižek, this false presupposition leads in
the direction of a greater distance between capitalism and
democracy. See Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
31. Wright, 199.
32. Mina Möntmann, “Art and its Institutions,” in Mina
Möntmann, ed. Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts,
Critique and Collaborations (London: Black Dog Publishing,
2006) 8.
33. It could be argued that this shift is only apparent and that
behind the petty-bourgeois displacement of national
representation lies an unbroken alliance between bourgeoisie
and petty bourgeoisie, as Roland Barthes argued in his 1957
text, Mythologies. What I am suggesting here is the logical
progression of the bourgeoisie’s “ex-nomination,” its passing
into an undifferentiated nature that is not perceived as directly
political.
34. Poulantzas, 277.
35. Möntmann borrows these ideas from Richard Sennett and
his book, The Culture of the New Capitalism. See Möntmann,
9. These same traits are sometimes treated as departure points
for new forms of individuation and networked resistance to
235
corporate capitalism. See also, Brian Holmes, “Unleashing
the Collective Phantoms: Flexible Personality, Networked
Resistance,” in Re/Public (January 2002), available at
http://www.republicart.net.
36. On this, see Max Henning, “Money for Nothing?” in
Turbulence
#1
(June
2007),
available
at
http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/.
37. Bourdieu, 371.
38. Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism,” in Recodings: Art,
Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985) 23.
Foster’s previous book, The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), made an
important distinction between a postmodernism of reaction
and a postmodernism of resistance. The tenuousness of this
distinction, however, became more apparent as the field of
visual studies enlarged the problematic of (psychological)
identification and as the editors of the journal October, among
them Foster and Rosalind Krauss, argued that advanced
culture, including visual studies, is helping to “produce
subjects for the next stage of globalized capitalism.” The
latter phraseology, derived from the “Visual Culture
Questionnaire” is markedly different from Krauss’
phraseology in “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” (both
of these from the Summer 1996 issue of October) where she
states: “advanced culture – far from being contestatory or
resistant – is continually preparing its subjects to inhabit
indeed, the next, more demanding stage in the development of
capital.” (84; my emphasis) In this phrasing, the Lacanian
insights she presents in her essay are skewed in favour a more
Heideggerian reading. If capitalism can operate here as the
pre-ontological dimension, we should bear in mind that we
236
are nevertheless talking about subjects, who, as Žižek argues
in Hegelian terms, always exist in a way that is “out of joint”
with regard to their circumstances. On this see Slavoj Žižek,
“The Night of the World,” in The Ticklish Subject: The
Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999)
9-69.
39. Hal Foster, “The Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” in
Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso,
2002) 125. The relativism that attends culture understood in
terms of art and formal culture of course extends to the idea
of multiculturalism and ethnicity and is part of this same
process of neoliberal engineering. For instance, the 2008
European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, proposed by the
European Commission, was focused on the way that cultural
diversity, identity politics and transnationalism contribute to
economic prosperity.
40. See for example Johanne Lamoureux, “Avant Garde: A
Historiography of a Critical Concept” in Amelia Jones, ed. A
Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006) 191-211.
41. Rochlitz, Subversion et subvention: Art contemporain et
argumentation esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
42. Donald Callen, “The Difficult Middle,” rhizome #10
(Spring 2005), available at http://www.rhizome.net/issue10/
callen.htm.
6.
The
Subject
Supposed
Over-Identify:
BAVO
and
237
to
the
Fundamental Fantasy of a Cultural
Avant Garde
1. Henri Lefebvre, De L’État, Tome II: De Hegel à Mao par
Staline (La théorie “marxiste” de l’état) (Paris: 10:18, 1976)
298.
2. It is agreed that whatever new forms of revolutionary
struggle are practiced, they will never again be those that
characterized the twentieth century. Alain Badiou attempts to
account for this with his idea of the “communist hypothesis.”
Revoutionary egalitarianism, he argues, begins with the
French Revolution and runs through to the Paris Commune.
This sequence represents the popular seizure of power. The
next sequence runs from the Soviet experience through to the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. Its purpose was to organize a
new state and to make it last against its enemies. In this
sequence the problem of working-class power is absorbed by
the party, which has proven unable to make the dialectical
transition towards the withering of the state. The second
sequenc comes to an end around the time of May 68 and
organizes collective action as a new space of politics that is
not reducible to a centralized bureaucracy. Badiou argues that
we cannot restore the second sequence. What we will have
instead will involve “a new relationship between the real
political movement and ideology.” It will be neither the
Trotskyist and Maoist party apparatus, nor an alter-globalist
multitude, yet it will be supported by the Idea of communism
as a philosophical task and a “revolutionizing of the mind.”
See Alain Badiou, “The History of the Communist
Hypothesis and Its Present Moment,” in The Meaning of
Sarkozy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, [2007]
238
2008). See also Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis,
trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso,
[2008] 2010).
3. For a critique of Deleuzian thematics in contemporary
theory, see Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze
and Consequences (New York: Rouledge, 2004) and Alain
Badiou, Theoretical Writings, edited and trans. Ray Brassier
and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2006).
4. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.
Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
[1974] 1984).
5. For a treatment of transversal activism, see Gerald Raunig,
Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the New
Century,
trans.
Aileen
Derieg
(Los
Angeles:
Semiotext(e),[2005] 2007).
6. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2006) 296.
7. See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse
Core of Christianity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003). On
this, Žižek argues that there is an analogy between the
Marxist theory of surplus-value and Lacan’s theory of surplus
enjoyment (jouissance as the correlate of the plus de jouir). In
contrast to the view that capitalism blocks the relational field
of affect and that this same relationality challenges capitalist
homogenization, Žižek argues that surplus value is what
propels affective productivity, and further, that we should
renounce this activity inasmuch as it operates as the support
of revolutionary activity.
239
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 6.
9. Žižek, The Parallax View, 318. For an example of the
theory that the “disappearance” of the distinction between art
and life will and can take place by prolonging existing
post-ideological conditions, see Grant Kester, “Crowds and
Connoisseurs: Art and the Public Sphere in America,” in
Amelia Jones, ed. A Companion to Contemporary Art, Since
1945 (London: Blackwell, 2006) 249-267. One of the
consequences of the art of over-identification would thus be
the resumption of avant-garde challenge.
10. Gregory Sholette, “Untitled Draft for Re:(Image)ining
Resistance,” unpublished manuscript, 2008; see also Sholette,
“Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere,” in
Andrew Hemingway et al., eds. As Radical as Reality Itself
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) 429-57.
11. Adam Arvidsson, “Creative Class or Administrative
Class? On Advertising and the ‘Underground’,” Ephemera:
Theory and Politics in Organization 7:1 (February 2007),
http://ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/
available
at
7-1arvidsson.pdf.
12. Pierre Bourdieu’s insight into the economy of culture is
that it lacks official criteria of selection. Art succeeds by
imitating the effects of exclusivity, a striving that is
constrained in its relation to larger assemblages like
institutional canons and collections, and more immediate
obstacles like taste cultures or art movements. The
administration of the cultural economy operates through
executive, technocratic gatekeepers who seek to win the
240
acquiescence of the excluded and impose norms of
enlightened conservatism. See Bourdieu, Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1979] 1984).
13. Sholette, “Untitled Draft for Re:(Image)ining Resistance.”
Some of the artists’ collectives mentioned are The Yes Men,
Center for Tactical Magic, Yomango, Howling Mob Society,
Reverend Billy, Critical Art Ensemble, Gran Fury, Knit for
Peace, ATSA, CSpace, NeMe, AREA, Change You Want to
See, City Beautification Ensemble, WochenKlausur, Les
panthères roses, Temporary Services, N55 and the Biotic
Baking Brigade.
14. No wonder then that arts administrators routinely insist on
the utopian nature of cultural production, detached from all
determinations and necessities, and more to the point,
detached from an open acknowledgement of the class
determinations of cultural production. Indeed, the
fundamental fantasy of the cultural producer is the impossible
subjectivization of class, caught as it is in the dialectic of
desire. Here we encounter the hidden logic of what we might
consider a utopian realism: there is no proper proletarian
aesthetic. For this reason, we should knowingly assert that the
avant-garde artist is the artist “doomed to castration.” See
Lacan’s Séminaire XIV, “La logique du fantasme,” available
at www.lacan.com/seminars1c.htm.
15. This is one of the reasons why much of today’s museum
art and biennial fodder is a symptom of the way the art field
operates as an adjunct to state and capitalist demands, even
and especially where it is allowed to experiment.
241
16. BAVO, “The Spectre of the Avant-Garde: Contemporary
Reassertions of the Programme of Subversion in Cultural
Production,” Andere Sinema #176 (2006) 27-8.
17. BAVO, “The Spectre of the Avant-Garde,” 31-2.
18. BAVO, “The Spectre of the Avant-Garde,” 35.
19. BAVO, “The Spectre of the Avant-Garde,” 37-9.
20. BAVO, Cultural Activism Today: The Art of
Over-Identification (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007).
21. What is at stake here, according to Žižek, is nothing less
than the rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. The idea of
an excess of identification serves to explain the social nature
of the process of politicization and cultural production. On
this, see Žižek’s The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2006).
22. Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux: Propos pour servir à la
résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale (Paris: Éditions
RAISONS D’AGIR, 1998) 119.
23. On this see BAVO, “Neoliberalism with Dutch
Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the
Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism,” in Rosi Braidotti,
Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Citizens and
Subjects: The Netherlands, for Example (Zürich: JRP Ringier,
2007) 51-63.
24. See Žižek, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,”
Critical Inquiry #34 (Summer 2008) 660-82.
242
25. BAVO, Cultural Activism Today, 19.
26. Class struggle is the concrete universal that overrides
cultural difference and the series of antagonisms that structure
today’s social processes. However, Žižek argues, that “does
not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and
horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class
struggle is the structuring principle which allows us to
account for the very ‘inconsistent’ plurality of ways in which
other antagonisms can be articulated into ‘chains of
equivalences’ [as argued by Laclau and Mouffe].” In Žižek,
The Parallax View, 361-2. See also, Žižek, “Class Struggle or
Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” in Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) 90-135.
27. BAVO, Cultural Activism Today, 7.
28. The Yes Men, “End of the WTO,” available at www.
theyesmen.org/hijinks/sydney.
29. See Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001).
30. Thanks to Aras Ozgun for pointing out to me the fact that
the Yes Men do not consider their work to be art. My
response is that a distinctly cultural or aesthetic approach to
avant-gardism avoids the issue concerning whether or not the
objective conditions are appropriate for radical art to be
effective. As BAVO recognizes, cultural activism may, in the
end, and if the social structure endures, remain merely
cultural. The avant garde wager, in the absence of a situation
where the exercise of power is held by the working masses, is
243
that the organization of political activity nevertheless can take
place. The radical artist becomes, as Debord once stated, a
party unto themselves. Thanks too to BAVO for clarifying
that they hold to this view as well.
31. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” in Žižek, The
Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, edited
by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum,
2006) 67-93.
32. Mark Bracher makes an interesting argument for Lacan’s
Discourse of the Analyst as an effective mode of cultural
criticism. One key distinction between his and Žižek’s
approach is Žižek’s development of a theory of practice,
which he refers to as an “authentic act” that supplants the
“way of the superego.” See Mark Bracher, Lacan, Discourse
and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
33. In addition to Žižek’s “The Fetish of the Party,” my
thoughts on the relation of Lacan’s Four Discourses to
avant-garde practice has been greatly influenced by chapter 2,
“Fascism and Stalinism” in Jodi Dean’s Žižek’s Politics (New
York: Routledge, 2006) 47-93.
34. On this topic, see Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with
Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005). See also Slavoj
Žižek, “Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough in
Practice, but Not in Theory,” In Defense of Lost Causes
(London: Verso, 2008) 264-333.
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35. See Slavoj Žižek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections
on Urban Violence in Paris and New Orleans and Related
Matters,” in BAVO, eds. Urban Politics Now (Rotterdam:
NAi Publishers, 2007) 12-29.
36. On this, see Grant Kester’s “Aesthetic Evangelists:
Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community
Art,” Afterimage (January 1995) 5-11.
7. The Revolution Will (Not) Be
Aestheticized
1. The discussion group Markets included Anton Vidokle, J.
Morgan Puett, Surasi Kusolwong, Superflex, and Julia
Bryan-Wilson; Food included Amy Franceschini, Agnes
Denes, InCUBATE, F.E.A.S.T and Claire Pentecost; Schools
involved Jakob Jakobsen, The Bruce High Quality
Foundation, Learning Site, and Saskia Bos; Governments
included Laura Kurgan, Chen Chien-Jen, Oliver Ressler,
PLATFORM and Aaron Levy; Institutions was comprised of
Thomas Keenan, Danielle Abrams, Otabenga Jones &
Associates, W.A.G.E. and Andrea Fraser; Plausible Art
Worlds included Chto Delat, Eating in Public, The
International Errorist, Scott Rigby and Stephen Wright. This
conference also include presentations by Anne Pasternak,
Gridthiya Gaweewong, Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy, Rick
Lowe, Trevor Paglen, Shaun Gladwell, Dinh Q. Lê, Regina
Tosé Galindo, Phil Collins, Eyal Weizman, Laurie Jo
Reynolds, Chris Martinez, Claire Doherty, Bisi Silva,
Kickstarter, Basekamp, Stephen Wright, Tidad Zolghadr, and
keynote speaker Wendell Pierce. The majority of these 8 to
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15 and 20 minute presentations are available online at:
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/
swf.html.
2. Nato Thompson, “Curatorial Statement: Preaching to the
Choir that Has Yet to Exist,” 2010 Creative Time Summit;
available at: http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/
summit/WP/curatorial-statement/.
3. This theme of ambivalence and indeterminacy is a hallmark
of difference politics. In many respects it has less to do with
an “uncertainty principle” as a constituent of knowledge than
a political pluralism. Consider for example Chantal Mouffe’s
essay “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art &
Research
1:2
(Summer
2007),
available
at
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html. For a
critique of postmodern political relativism, see Slavoj Žižek,
“Postmodernism or Class Struggle? Yes Please!” in Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left (London: Verso, 2000) 90-135.
4. Bret Schneider, “Petrified Unrest: A Review of the
Creative Time Summit,” Platypus Review #29 (November
2010): available at: http://platypus1917.org/2010/11/06/
petrified-unrest-a-review-of-the-creative-time-summit.
Thanks to Marc Herbst for bringing this review to my
attention.
5. In their introduction to a well-known reader in Marxist
cultural theory, Grossberg and Nelson write: “Yet this
dismissal [of economism] is itself overly reductive, for the
theoretical orientation did yield powerful insights and did
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place the political and social significance of cultural
production on the agenda of interpretive theory, successfully
challenging the unthinking idealization of high art. Moreover,
even the most notoriously reductive elements of traditional
Marxism are difficult to dismiss easily. In fact, one might
argue that reflection theories, however qualified and
problematized, play a necessary and constitutive role, not
only for all later and more sophisticated Marxisms, but also in
all historically and politically grounded interpretation.
Finally, the established canon of Marxist criticism provided
the tradition against which an alternative tradition of Marxist
cultural theorizing could be defined – not only, however, by
way of correction, amplification, revision, or outright
rejection, but also by way of an uneasy relation or derivation,
potential return, and perhaps even occasional nostalgia for the
security of its political interpretations. ‘Vulgar Marxism,’ that
overdetermined and mythically hypostatized category,
remains the anxiously regarded double of contemporary
Marxist writing.” Cited in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary
Nelson, “Introduction: The Territory of Marxism,” in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988) 3.
6. See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans.
David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010)
242-5.
7. See Steve Kurtz in Konrad Becker and Jim Fleming, eds.
Critical Strategies: Perspectives on New Cultural Practices
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2010) 25-6.
8. Conrad Becker cited in Becker and Fleming, 168-9.
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9. On this, see Slavoj Žižek, “The Return to Hegel,” Lecture
presented at the European Graduate School, March 1, 2010;
available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR3vfHu
0W38.
10. In his presentation of an anti-capitalist political program,
David Harvey agues for the necessity of a dialectical
unfolding of seven moments within the body politic of
capitalism. These are: 1) technological and organizational
forms of production, exchange and consumption, 2) relations
to nature, 3) social relations, 4) mental conceptions of the
world, culture and beliefs, 5) labour processes, services and
affects, 6) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements,
7) the conduct of daily life. A serious activist art should
perhaps in some ways be able to account for all of these
moments. See David Harvey, “Organizing for the
Anti-Capitalist Transition,” Lecture presented at the World
Social Forum, 2010, available at http://davidharvey.org/2009/
12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/#more-376.
11. See Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise
Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010) 57.
12. Gregory Sholette, “Art as Social Practice: The Good, the
Bad, and the Yet to be Born,” (October 10, 2010); available at
http://www.facebook.com/
topic.php?uid=35516651321&topic=13782.
13. Jodi Dean, “The Communist Horizon,” Lecture delivered
at the Second FORMER WEST Research Congress on
Horizons: “Art and Political Imagination,” November 5,
2010;
available
at:
http://www.formerwest.org/
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VideoRecordings. FORMER WEST describes itself as “a
long-term international research, education, publishing, and
exhibition project (2008-2014), which from within the field of
contemporary art and theory: (1) reflects upon the changes
introduced to the world by the political, cultural, artistic and
economic events of 1989; (2) engages in rethinking the global
histories of the last two decades in dialogue with
post-communist and postcolonial thought; and (3) speculates
about a “post-bloc” future that recognizes differences yet
evolves through the political imperative of equality and the
notion of “one world.”
14. See Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on
Lenin, the 1917 Writings (London: Verso, 2002) 273.
15. See BAVO, “Neoliberalism with Dutch Characteristics:
The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the Practice of
Embedded Cultural Activism,” in Rosi Braidotti, Charles
Esche and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Citizens and Subjects: The
Netherlands, for example (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007) 51-63.
16. BAVO, “How Much Politics Can Art Take?” (2009);
available at: http://www.bavo.biz/texts/view/210.
17.
“About
Creative
Time”
http://creativetime.org /about/index.html.
available
at:
18. Alain Badiou, “Does the Notion of Activist Art Still Have
Meaning?” Lecture delivered at the Miguel Abreu Gallery,
New York City, October 13, 2010, in collaboration with
Lacanian
Ink;
available
at:
http://himanshudamle.
blogspot.com/2010/11/alain-badiou-does-notion-of...
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19. Henri Lefebvre, Alfred de Musset: Dramaturge (Paris:
L’Arche, 1955) 37. See Marc James Léger, “Henri Lefebvre
and the Moment of the Aesthetic,” in Andrew Hemingway,
ed. Marxist Art History: From William Morris to the New
Left (London: Pluto Press, 2006) 143-60.
20. Henri Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol.2 (Paris:
Editions NEF, 1959) 68.
21. Henri Lefebvre, Contribution à l’esthétique (Paris:
Éditions Sociales, 1953) 34.
22. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New
York: The Noonday Press, [1957] 1972) 149.
23. Lowe tried to take some distance from the prize by
emphasizing social justice rather than social change.
Regardless of the merits of his ongoing Project Row Houses,
his language of “social sculpture” tended to avoid any
suggestion of how labour and wealth is distributed in the U.S.
The emphasis was rather on dignity, participation, education
and creativity – a rather innocent, even if socially minded,
notion of social improvement.
24. Barthes, 146-7.
25. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and
Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1972] 1993).
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8. From Activism to Geocritique: A
Few Questions for Brian Holmes
1. Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays
in Reverse Imagineering (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008);
Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control
Society (Zagreb and Eindhoven: WHW/Van Abbemuseum,
2009).
2. Alan Minsky, “Radio Interview with Brian Holmes,” on
Beneath the Surface, KPFK radio, March 19, 2010, available
on the Occupy Everything website, available at
http://occupyeverything.com/news/brian-holmes-on-kpfk.
The interview was conducted in the context of Holmes’
involvement with student protests at the University of
California on March 4, 2010.
3. See Brian Holmes, “Risk of the New Vanguards?,” Issue
#17 of Chto Delat, Debates on the Avant-Garde, available at
http://www.chtodelat.org/images/pdfs/17_vanguard.pdf.
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